Promoting Your Blog Without Search Engines

This is a guest post by Vishal Sanjay of  DumbLittleBlogger.

I guess all of you were there at the time when the internet had no search engines, I was also there at that time, but too small to use the web. I still remember my mother having a list of excel sheets which were filled with web pages filed under particular categories, she would get those sheets from her friends and give it to some other of her friends.

One sheet would have up to 200 web pages and within a year a good quality directory would make it to 1000’s of netizens and the 200 web pages there would get some good targeted traffic for free. Well, that was back then when no one ever thought of a search engine, today search engines have revolutionized the web and we cant imagine a day with Google or Yahoo.

That is for a normal netizen, but what about we bloggers? I guess almost 35-45% of your traffic comes from Google and if some day Google just goes down or something happens to it’s algorithms, it could mean huge loses to all bloggers and internet marketers. Search engines are a great source of traffic and revenue, but today due to the intense competition, penetrating through its barriers could take months and sometimes even years.

None of my sites ever rank well on search engines, I never block search engines but I never optimize sites for it, but still my site gets good targeted traffic and also generates some sales. I never optimize my sites for search engines, I optimize it for users.

In the past few years search engine rankings have become the biggest assets for bloggers, but let me make it clear that users are your biggest assets, currently there are about 3 billion netizens, 120 million blogs (active blogs) and 200 well running search engines, so this makes it clear that your users are your assets. So, I would advise you to design your blog for your users and create user friendly content.
Without search engines people usually do the traditional and the best working way, that is ‘the word of mouth‘. Great sites like Facebook, Youtube started of with the word of mouth. First from their creators and then from their users and don’t forget there were hardly any search engines when Google started off.

There are many sites and social communities which can generate huge amount of traffic. These sites can generate such high traffic due to low competition. I would say go to places where large number of people gather, not large amount of bloggers. Always note one thing that if something is famous before you get there, then you don’t stand a chance. Recently, I heard about the high traffic potential of StumbleUpon, I tried it and things were great, but my traffic slowly declined as StumbleUpon popularity rose. Similarly, Twitter also have a great traffic potential, but it died out before I started to use due to it’s superb success, but I did succeed in gaining some followers, which many are struggling to do these days using proper ways.

The users from these sites see a lot more than your title, keywords, meta-description, link popularity and page rank. They see you, your contributions and your history. They spread your content to a new group of users and thus, increasing your reader base.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve already got a great source of search traffic, all I wanted to tell you is to create as many alternative sources of traffic as possible.

Just promote your blog thinking that search engines never existed.

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37 thoughts on “Promoting Your Blog Without Search Engines”

  1. Very informative post and meaningful post..Of course we will loss some traffic without search engine but our blog or sites never die without search engine. 🙂

  2. very much right on this :- we cant just imagine a day without Google or Yahoo.

    But i would agree to optimize our blogs by keeping visitors frdly in mind and not optimized highly for search engines.
    very good Post Vishal, will be visiting your blog as well for more such stuff

  3. Totally agree with you. People are so preoccupied with SEO that they don’t bother producing any useful content. The whole point of a blog is to share ideas and express your self and generate interest; if you can make money at it, great! However, trying to post garbage and have it move up the search engines is not sustainable – give people something pf value and they’ll keep coming back.
    .-= Alan @ Basin Glass Co.´s last blog ..“Just another Brand of Beer” =-.

  5. You are so right… but it is really hard to get any other traffic nowadays. Most of mine are search engines that with time slowly changes to bookmarkers. I have some social media traffic as well but really not too much. I am still searching more sources of traffic… but have not found anything better yet.
    .-= KreCi´s last blog ..Be warned: WordPress update crash (2.8.4 to 2.8.5) =-.

  6. I somehow disagree with your point that you say traffic from SU. I also busy on SU when my blog was not popular at search engine. Bouncing rate is high when traffic comes from SU. Because people come from SU by stumbling and if they do not like the webpage they click on STUMBLE button at once.

    So I do not think that traffic from SU can help you.
    .-= chandan@work at home´s last blog ..Ultimate link building tips that should be follow [Digg] =-.

  10. I’m start my internet life on 2003-2004, so i never feel how if there is no SE since on that time, it’s already excist. Well, i’m agree that word of mouth, it’s effective and sometime the traffic is more worth than the one who comes from search engine. Beside word of mouth, there is many technique to do promoting our blog without search engine, for example is all offline marketing technique.

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