
I don't know if you have read my article of this past Monday, where I recounted the stress and apparent resolution of a major problem affecting the flow of web visitors to this very site. Starting last Friday in fact, all of the stats reporting to me the number of visitors to Master New Media crumbled to 1/4 or more of their normal level. Visitors went from about 15,000/day to 3-4,000/day. Even worst was the deeper slash in daily revenues which saw an analogous drop.
As I wrote in that article, this can prove to be one of the most difficult situations that an independent publisher may find itself in. Not only, but the bigger you have become, especially in terms of collaborators and staff, without the help of external financiers or other partners, the larger and more difficult to manage the consequent problems.
Fact is, that while on Monday I posted an apparently victorious article explaining the trouble I had run into and what I thought at the time to have been its cause and resolution, reality has settled in again with quite a different face.
The new discoveries I made afterwards with Drazen, my old-time trusted and untiring webmaster, left me really without words, as our whole micro publishing enterprise had fallen into a situation we had never planned for.
For some reason, yet unknown to us, Google has actually penalized all of my web pages, to the point that they could not be found anymore for any of the terms for which they were so highly ranked until a few days ago. This is not only disaster from a standard web publisher viewpoint, but it is triple tragedy because the very visitors coming from Google, and not out of their own bookmarks or of a friend recommending them, are the very ones that make my site sustainable.
Master New Media is based on a contextual advertising business model, in which text-based ads carrying advertising info for products and services that relate to the very content appearing in our articles. The moment you eliminate the majority of the visitors coming from search engines, you are wiping out your greatest potential to monetize your content via advertising. Read on and I will explain you why.
By looking at this often not immediately visible but very critical aspects of an independent publisher life, you can learn a lot more about the obstacles and challenges awaiting you ahead on this path.
This is why, like many other times before, I have chosen to fully share my experiences, errors and lost battles. To further help and support my very mission: helping the small guy grow smarter, bigger and more sustainable (that is = independent).
How? By being a new media explorer and an online experimenter ahead of those wanting to walk this same path, as well as by being an honest reporter who shares and reports his discoveries and errors all along the way.
This is why I do it. READ ALL