Most online marketers believe that SEO is the most effective way you can get traffic to your website. That may have been true once, but I don’t believe that it is true today.
You can’t deny that search engine optimization is a critical component to your long term online marketing strategy, it is no longer the “holy grail” of internet marketing. We have discovered that in today’s online economy, you will get traffic from a multitude of sources, not just from Google.
This is exciting if you have an online business, because it means you don’t have to be on the first page of Google to succeed. You simply need to find where your prospects congregate online and then position yourself within these online locations.
Internet marketing guru, David Frey, once gave me this advice: “If you want to succeed online, be where the people are.” Another way of saying this is, when you stand amongst a crowd; some of the group will stumble onto you. If you are only part of a small crowd of people, very few will stumble upon you and your income will be severely limited.
Five years ago, Google was the only game in town. If you wanted to get free traffic, you had to rank on the first two pages of Google. Today more people search social websites than they do Google.
Don’t misunderstand me, Google is a great source of free traffic if you are on the first two pages, but most online businesses can get more traffic using Web 2.0 sites like YouTube and Facebook.
Jeff Johnson, a recognized internet marketing guru, best described this online marketing strategy at a seminar I attended. He coined this strategy ‘Breadcrumb Marketing’. This strategy is to market throughout the internet where people in your niche market congregate, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to your website.
Marketers are discovering that they can drive huge amounts of traffic to their website using this strategy. In today’s online world, people congregate and search on Web 2.0 websites like MySpace, YouTube, and Technorati.
Let me repeat what I said in the beginning of this article: this is exciting if you have an internet marketing business, because Google no longer controls your success, you do. The next step is for you to define and execute an internet marketing strategy that takes advantage of these new trends brought on by Web 2.0 sites.







