I woke up one day to find that Google had pretty much dropped one of my sites like it was a hot potato. Actually, I’m being a little dramatic, they didn’t drop my site, it’s just that the pages that used to place number one on their search engine were no longer placing number one. They weren’t placing at all as far as I could tell.

After I grabbed my heart and recovered from the horrible sinking feeling that my work at home internet career was over, I realized that this was a very painful lesson. I quickly learned that I had put all my eggs in one basket and was suffering the consequences. Everything happens for a reason.

I had been so intent on writing articles, formatting them, finding the right images to accent the article for the website that I did a poor job of marketing my articles. Yeah, I did submit them to Digg and Reddit, but that wasn’t enough. Once Google picked up my new articles, I thought I had successfully marketed them adequately.

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Don’t fall into the same trap I fell into. When Google dropped my site in the wastebasket I had to quickly figure out another way to generate traffic to my web pages. I then started instituting the practices as outlined in Seven Tips on How to Market Your Website as if Google Didn’t Exist.

Web writing and web hosting can be a solitary sport. Without Google, I found I had to actually start to communicate and network with other people. I joined a few forums commented on a few blogs and realized that they were a great place to share information. I learned a lot and hopefully contributed useful information that helped others. It became a win-win situation. And I realized that the piece of the internet puzzle that I was missing was that I had to develop relationships with people (aka network).

Do I miss Google? Yes I do. I’m no fool, a dollar is a dollar and I’d rather it be in my pocket than sitting in Google’s pocket. However, since they forced me out of my cocoon in order to network, I guess that’s just what I had to do.

The long and the short of it is that the back links generated from forum posting and blog comments won’t be taken away as the result of an algorithm change. So I decided to concentrate on building traffic outside of Google. Anything that Google sends my way will be gravy, no longer my bread and butter.

Do yourself a favor and don’t get caught up in the trap of putting all of your efforts in one basket. Google is a wonderful establishment when they are sending traffic your way. But, they can cripple your business if you don’t spend some time building other sources of traffic. Learn from my mistake.

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