Dr. Schmidt, CEO of Google announced that Google is no more as of Friday, February 22nd! The stunning announcement came shortly after noon today. There was a media frenzy when the news broke. Of course the first question was “what the heck happened?” Is this another Enron? It seems that the CEO, along with the entire board of directors have decided to give up all their worldly goods and are now moving into a commune in southern California, which is home to a little known cult who worship the mango root. Google is no more!

OK, as you have probably guessed by now, I made this whole story up. Why would I do that? To get you reading? No, actually to get you thinking. Suppose Google disappeared over night. How would this affect your business? Do you depend on Google for all your PPC advertising? Is a high ranking in Google the sole reason for your traffic? If so, you really need to rethink your business strategy. Putting all your eggs in one basket is pretty risky business.

By reading my previous posts, you’ve heard me say in the past how it makes much more sense to have multiple streams of income (products, affiliates, etc) as opposed to just one (J.O.B.). The same applies to your traffic. Traffic to your websites are the life blood of your online business. Just like brick & mortar businesses, if no one knows you’re there, it’s pretty tough to make an income. People with affiliate sites will often depend solely on PPC to monetize their sites. Some will focus on optimizing their websites for one specific search engine.

But suppose that you suddenly lose your ranking for your keyword because of an algorithm change, or your PPC costs triple because the Google mafia decided that they don’t like you anymore? Now what? Go back to working for the man for a living? Or do you have other traffic sources that will continue to keep your business running smoothly?

You will find that if you work into your system other avenues of traffic, then not only will your income increase, but so will your security. Maybe today a lot of people aren’t searching for your blue widgets, but a stumbler (StumbleUpon) happens to be promoting a blue widget convention in Toledo, sending extra traffic your way.

Never underestimate the power of diversity. Promoting yourself using “Web 2.0” methods such as StumbleUpon, Squidoo & the like is one way to gain exposure. Internet business blogging is one of the best. Contributing worthwhile posts to blog carnivals will get you traffic and back links. Building your list! The larger your list, the more valuable it becomes. Forums are another way to promote yourself. But don’t spam, contribute to the community, or you will do more harm than good to your long term business. I’m not a forum fan, but depending on your business, it can be a good thing to work into your own routine or procedure for your interns. Oh, did I mention article marketing? This is probably one of the most effective and will generate traffic and back links very quickly.

The trick to article marketing is how you do it. James Brausch has a product called Artemis. This is an excellent product that allows you to change your article in to a few different variations. Artemis will then randomly shuffle the corresponding versions of each paragraph creating literally thousands of different variations of the same article. This way you will beat any duplicate content issues with Google, plus you will be submitting to real article publishers. I say “real” because most article submission sites are just junk repositories that are only read by other article submitters and scraped by content generator bots for the junk MFA (made for adsense) sites. You can customize your own Ezine and article list in Artemis for thousands of submissions honed for each article subject matter.

Google may not be going anywhere soon, but let the first paragraph be a wake up call. If you are depending on one source to monetize your traffic, you need to be working other techniques into your system as well. Don’t be a victim of a black Monday someday. When others are sinking without a life preserver, you can stay high & dry because your ship has the safety backups to kick in and keep it sailing smoothly.