When you read up on marketing your website, getting good rankings on Google is always a big topic of conversation, and no wonder. Google drives a ton of traffic for many websites, and many online businesses would wither and die without that traffic. But does that mean good Google rankings are the only thing that matter to a successful online business?

Not at all. There are other ways to bring lots of traffic to your website. Some will also help with your ranking on Google, while others will have more limited benefits that are still very much so worth the effort.

Run Your Own Newsletter

Running your own newsletter can be wonderful for bringing traffic to your website. A nice size, well engaged list will pay attention to what you have to say, allowing you to generate traffic on your terms.

You are best off going with a paid newsletter option such as AWeber or Get Response. There are scripts you can buy to run your newsletter off your website server, but these can be very limited, and a spam complaint has the potential to shut your site down. Paid services handle spam complaints for you, keeping track of who signed up and when.

Your newsletter should give subscribers the information they expect from you. If you’re purely a store, send information about specials and new products, things like that. If your website is more information based, be careful about how promotional you get. Provide the information people want from you, and sell as appropriate, rather than just for money’s sake. Your list will trust you more, which should give you more chances to make sales. Recommending a poor quality product just because you wanted a commission is a great way to lose the trust of your subscribers.

Article Syndication

I’ve posted a bit lately about getting your articles published on other websites, newsletters and ezines. It can be a very worthwhile effort to make.

You want to syndicate your articles to places that already have the attention of the audience you want. This can be far, far better than what Google and other search engines send most sites.

You do not necessarily need to write a unique article for publication on other sites. Some do require it, and in such cases you will have to decide if the particular site is worth it. Sometimes they are. Be sure to note whether you will ever be allowed to publish the article elsewhere. Some only need to have it be unique for a month or so.

Other times you can syndicate something you’ve already written for your own site. This is much easier, and no, you do not need to spin the article to avoid a duplicate content penalty.

Get Mentioned in News Articles

When Home with the Kids was mentioned in an article that made the front page of Yahoo Finance and Bankrate, there was so much traffic that my server couldn’t handle it and I had to move to a dedicated server for a time. This was an article which didn’t even link to my site – that is, people had to type in or search for my domain name. I still get traffic I’m pretty sure is from that article. It’s hard to be certain as the traffic isn’t direct.

That article wasn’t one I had written. I had been interviewed for it months before. In fact, I had given up on ever seeing anything from it when my site was suddenly clobbered with traffic.

You can write press releases and post them to press release sites. This has been a pretty popular search engine optimization tactic, but it’s better if you think in terms of who you really want to attract with a press release, and it’s really not the search engines. You’ll get more and better benefits if your press release is deemed worthwhile for a news source to pick up or to include you in an article or interview.

Sign up for the Help a Reporter Out (HARO) if you want to keep an eye out for reporters looking for information on your topic. You won’t find a reporter looking for people like you every day, but it can be very much worthwhile. And free if you choose that level, although you may find a paid level to be worth your while. Check it out first to be sure.

Advertise

Many websites and newsletters accept advertising, and of course there are always options such as AdWords. It’s going to cost you money, but an ad in the right place will make up for that. Just beware the learning curve and don’t go overboard.

When you advertise, it’s extremely important that you keep track of which ads are doing well and which aren’t paying for themselves. Keep track of where your traffic is coming from and especially where your income is coming from. Ads that drive the most traffic don’t always bring in the most income. The Definitive Guide to AdWords is a good place to learn about AdWords advertising.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing won’t necessarily bring you tons of traffic, but a presence on a small number of social media websites can be a very good thing. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself trying to keep up with your social sites at the expense of the rest of your business.

It takes time to build up a good social media following, and shortcuts are often not worthwhile. There are plenty of sites that will allow you to buy friends or followers for the different social sites, but an untargeted following isn’t going to do you much good at all. You really want those targeted followers who chose to follow you because what you say is interesting to them.

Make sure it’s easy to find your social media accounts through your website. Yes, if they’ve been to your website they already know about you, but some people prefer to keep up on such things through social sites these days, and it’s better to go with their preferences than to not capture them as followers any other way.

As you can see, none of these rely strictly on Google or any other search engine. There’s still a lot of work for you to do to get these kinds of traffic, but once you know how to do a particular sort of marketing or advertising, the traffic should be there when you want it. It’s a lot of work, but it can be very much worth it.

I’ve posted in the past about the Google Money and related scams. Now I’m reading on Marketing Pilgrim that they’re finally suing the scammers for using the Google name.

It’s a kind of interesting situation since they don’t yet have the names for all of the defendants. That’s one of the challenges of the internet, of course. Scams thrive because they can be done anonymously.

Google’s doing what they can. They’re permanently disabling associated AdWords accounts in general that provide a poor user experience. But it’s challenging because it’s so easy to pop up under a new name when you’re online.

These are the names Google says to be aware of now:

Names to be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.

They know quite well that more names will appear; that’s the nature of this kind of scum.

It’s kind of a pity to see the name Google Cash up there, as there was also a legitimate product by that name, made by Chris Carpenter. But now the scammers have used it too.

As always, remember that no product can guarantee you riches or any degree of success. If they’re making wild promises, just don’t believe it.

There are products that can help you along the path to building a real business, but there are still a lot of factors that may keep you from succeeding, allow you to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, just let you earn a little extra spending cash or anything in between. It’s mostly up to you. The information just helps.

I got an email from Google AdSense informing me that now they will be allowing other ad networks to advertise in AdSense spaces. You can see it on the AdSense blog too.

The idea is to allow even more bidders to compete for the space you’re offering through AdSense. Sites should be able to earn more money that way.

And it’s not just and ad networks allowed in. Google certifies them for adherence to user privacy, ad quality, and speed. You can also block any networks you don’t want on your site.

Personally, I’d like to see samples from the networks to have a notion of who’s advertising what. It’s going to take some research if I suddenly see ads I don’t like. Who do they belong to? I don’t know how easy it will be to tell.

They have only about 9 networks listed right now, with more expected in coming months. It should be interesting to see how this all works out.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HyJPOVLd3I]

I’ve posted a bit about the Google Money and similar scams. Today I saw that Google has also posted their take on these scams.

It’s some good tips, although as usual the people who most need to read it will probably never see it. But they do go over the legitimate ways you can earn money from Google (AdSense and the Google Affiliate Network), plus some of the symptoms of these and other scams people try using Google’s name.

I particularly liked this section:

Some sales pitches use the word “Google” or other trademarks right in their name with targeted phrases like “cash,” “pay day,” “money,” “secrets,” “home business,” etc. If you can’t find it on our list of Google products or on the business solutions page, don’t trust it.

A great point for anyone facing any product making big claims while using some other company’s name.

I earn some pretty decent money from home most months (well, except last month, which was pathetic, ouch!). A fair bit of it comes from Google AdSense, which can be a pretty good program or a really lousy earner, depending on a lot of factors. That’s why all these ads proclaiming “Google Pays Me $(large amount of money) Per Day/Week/Whatever” drive me nuts.

I know it’s not that simple. But I had to look at the program’s page, just to see what’s going on with it.

Nope, not going to buy it. I really don’t like the looks of it.

First of all, make sure you look at lots of these ads and the sites they lead to. Yes, sites, plural, as each ad will lead to a different site. They’re all the same, just with different names and your city automatically entered into it by a script. Sometimes you’ll even see the same photos appear under different names. There are hundreds of these sites out there, apparently.

Some details they have flat wrong. They’re talking about checks from Google, then they say pay is weekly. Wrong. Google pays monthly. Then they even say the first check should be on its way within 48 hours. Someone is seriously mixed up here.

Google isn’t paying you as such for the links you post either. You’re getting paid when people click on those links, and you’d better not expect $5-$30 per click. Individual ads may eventually add up to that, but getting paid that high on a single click is quite rare.

They’re promoting two programs. Nope, not going to link them. Both are what are called forced continuity programs.

They may offer their products on either a free trial basis or for a small fee, say $3. However, you have 7 days from the time you order to cancel, or you get hit with a larger fee, which recurs monthly. They do have this listed in the Terms and Conditions, which is why it always pays to read these things. They’re sending a physical product by mail in this case, so 7 days after you place your order is hardly any time at all.

Their sites also mention being talked about on various news sources.

Know what? I never trust that if you haven’t linked to the story about your business so I can read it for myself. If a major news site referenced my business in a positive way, you’d better believe I’d be linking.

The “blog” pages promoting this have a variety of comments at the end, but if you take a look at least some of the comments will be the same. Comments are disabled due to spam. I guess the poor folks never heard of Akismet.

They also show all these wonderful pictures and tell a great story of rapid progress to amazing earnings.

I don’t care if it’s the best system on the planet. Most people will not be able to achieve such earnings. Doubly so in such a short time. It’s an ugly truth that most home businesses fail. Some people will do amazingly well, more will do adequately, but for a wide range of reasons many people just won’t succeed at all.

Not to mention, most are nearly impossible to cancel. They don’t want you to be able to cancel easily, after all.

These sites that call themselves “Google (something or other)” are almost exclusively scams. It takes time to take them down, but almost nothing to put one up, which is why they will likely continue to pop up under a variety of names.

Yes, they will give you some information on how to start a home business earning money through AdSense. But with the quality of information on the sales page, I have a lot of doubts as to the quality of the rest of it.

These sites are so common right now that Google has even seen fit to comment on it in the AdSense blog, noting that they aren’t associated and you don’t have to pay anyone to join AdSense.

There’s a fascinating and very long thread on Scam.com about a very, very similar offer. Make sure you read the last few pages as well as the early parts. Things were good for a while, with an employee making sure people got their refunds and then… kaBOOM!

All this is just a part of why you should never assume that because an opportunity uses Google’s name or any other big company’s name that it is in any way legitimate or associated with that company. It’s easy to get a domain name with some other company’s name in it. Doesn’t mean anything, other than that the company is willing to risk having their domain taken for trademark infringement.

These are also the kinds of “opportunities” that the FTC is most likely to be watching out for. Fake blogs, hugely exaggerated earnings… they’re practically begging for trouble. Nothing of what their sites say is remotely likely for the usual buyer, no matter how hard they try.