If your websites tanked after Google Penguin then you might want to think about doing some local lead generation to make some money. No one knows how this update is going to play out in the future, so you’re best bet is to look for another revenue stream instead of waiting for a miracle.

I mentioned in my last post how the penguin likely hit local business owners hard. I’m sure there are plenty of them that hired SEO companies who blasted their websites with profile links and spun articles. If they got hit like I did then we’re both getting desperate for cash. This creates a good opportunity for each side.

Why You Can Succeed
If you think about most local service businesses, the demand exists no matter what. Just about everything in the home repair niche (HVAC, roofing, landscape, windows, etc) has an endless cycle of demand. Homeowners are going to pay for these services regardless of the economy. You can’t exactly ignore that hole in your roof – right? This takes out much of the work for us as marketing agents because we don’t have to sell the need.

The other key element built into local leads is their limited experience with online marketing. These guys are being pitched every day by the yellow pages, PPC management companies and SEO firms from India. I think most owners get that they need an online presence, but when hundreds of companies call with a different pitch it makes it hard to understand what really works. This is where we can sort out the bullshit for them.

How I Approach Lead Generation
The biggest roadblock I see in this space is TRUST. You aren’t going to have much success coming in off the street and asking for $2000 to build a new website, setup Facebook pages and PPC campaigns. Put yourself in their shoes for a minute. If you were a roofing contractor with a couple grand set aside for marketing… would you hand it all to a guy you just met who claims to be an internet guru? Of course not, which is why I’ll be using a different approach.

A couple years ago I created a simple landscape website to collect leads for a guy who did some work for me. I took a chance and said I would do the work in exchange for 10% of revenues that originated from the site. This meant no risk for him, and since I owned everything (website, hosting, and domain) it gave me an easy out if things didn’t go well. At the time I was making good money from my other online properties so I never optimized the site as well as I could have. Now it looks like this old experiment is going to be a much larger part of my revenue going forward.

How Can You Start?
If are an affiliate marketer than you already have the website and SEO skills to make this work. Really all you need to do is identify what market you want to target. I recommend home services only because there is no shortage of companies to work with. Focus on a niche where the work can easily escalate into thousands of dollars. Roofing and windows are good ones.

Next you need to call some business owners. Don’t waste your time with the big boys at first. For starters you’ll spend more time meeting with them than you will making money. Shoot for independent businesses that have a good track record on the Better Business Bureau. Call them up and tell them you’ll send in leads for a percentage of sales those leads generate. A roofing or window job could easily cost $5000 or more, so 10% of that is $500! Not bad money if you can drive the traffic, and local traffic is the cheapest around… especially if you think outside the box.

I’ll expand more on this as I experiment with it over the next few months. In my mind it offers the best opportunity for fast cash in the wake of the recent Google disaster.

A lot of things have changed for guys like me who relied so heavily on Google SEO traffic prior to 2012. Building niche websites and pushing them up the search engine rankings has quickly become a very unstable business model.

But just like in the real business world, old opportunities fade and new ones appear. That is the the theme of this blog post. I still haven’t committed to a direction after the Google penguin update as I am still in the process of weighing my options. Here are what I consider to the best options for making money online in 2012…

Local Lead Generation
As the SEO landscape continues to change, more and more business owners are going to get frustrated with Google. I’ve already read dozens of horror stories about small businesses losing their rankings due to the penguin update. Many of these folks do not have the time to fiddle with online marketing all day. They want to focus on running their business and making sales. If you can find a legitimate means to provide quality leads to them they will be happy to pay.

I experimented with this strategy a couple years ago in the landscaping niche. I created a local site that gathered leads and I promoted it through SEO. It actually made a couple thousands dollars that year, but I let it rot because of other opportunities I had on the table. Now that I need the money it looks I will be resurrecting that idea… possibly across more local verticals!

PPC Affiliate Marketing
Just last week I jumped into testing the strategy of purchasing traffic through pay per click ads and sending it to affiliate offers. Unfortunately I lost about $500 on my experiment. However, I learned quite a bit and I can tell you this model is very much alive and well. Ad platforms like Plenty of Fish and Bing are significantly less stringent on what you can submit compared to Google. The key is finding an offer that converts and targeting the right buyers. I definitely see myself doing more of this in 2012 once my income streams stabilize.

Hobby Blogging
What I mean by hobby blogging is sharing your personal experiences inside a particular niche. A lot of affiliate marketers like myself used to enter niches we had no connection to simply because it was easy to rank high in the search engines. The problem with this now is of course the search game is unreliable, and if you can’t offer any value through your site then no one is going to come back. That creates a dead end where the visitor either purchases what you are promoting or they leave forever. Either way you lose if Google stops sending you traffic.

The better strategy for 2012 is to actually know what the hell you are blogging about! This should be easy enough if you stop and think about your interests. There are so many options out there. Like working outside? Start a landscape blog. Do you collect old bottle caps? Take some pics and talk about your finds. Look around the web and you’ll find mommy bloggers, sports bloggers and pet bloggers. The only thing you need is a unique voice on your chosen subject. What do you know that nobody else does?

Social Marketing
This is something I have never really done but the obvious potential is there. Facebook, Pintrest and Linkedin all have millions of users just waiting to be entertained and intrigued. I recommend spending a lot of time on these sites to build up a power profile. Once you have followers you can drop affiliate links or push your own products to them. The social revolution is happening now. While I’m not sure it is the platform for me, there is no doubt you can make some money by becoming popular on these sites.

Freelance Services
If you’ve never made a dollar online then freelancing is the best place to begin. Services like writing, graphic design, and video creation are always in high demand. This is all some people do to make a full-time income online! You can advertise your specialties on freelance sites like odesk, elance and other internet marketing forums. Build a client list quickly with cheap rates. Once you build a reputation for quality you can increase your rates and earn more repeat business.

So these are my “best bets” for making money online in 2012. Obviously there are dozens more ways out there… this just represents the things that I am familiar with. The important takeaway here is that when one door closes another opens. Don’t give up on your dream of financial independence because an event like Google penguin ruins your business. Pick up the pieces and move on to the next challenge… this is what entrepreneurship is all about!

When will the carnage end? After watching Google’s pandas methodically cut huge chunks of my search engine traffic I finally got knocked out by their latest penguin update.

A year ago I received about 1500 visitors per day to my small collection of websites. By January of this year I was struggling to reach 900 per day. After this recent penguin attack I am now lucky to get 400. I am literally falling off the face of Google earth here!

The data I have from my sites suggests that Google is devaluing or deindexing most of the links to my sites. So spending the last five years building different types of links was basically a waste of time. Truth be told, not every method I used was “white hat” so perhaps I deserve this. My biggest concern is whether or not the results are reversible by building new links to each property.

For now I am going to try to save the forsaken sites. I am following my new traffic strategy in hopes of seeing some improvement over the next 30 days. While all this is going on I’m also trying to build content and links to 2 new websites I started. As a final act of desperation I’m experimenting with affiliate marketing through PPC. That my friends is a busy schedule.

So basically I have 3 post-penguin business plans going on all at one time…
1. Trying to resurrect my old, proven earners.
2. Launching 2 new, unproven websites that will hopefully make some money.
3. Attempting to make some money through affiliate/ppc marketing.

The future is not real bright right now, but there are too many opportunities on the internet to give up!

Let me begin this post by saying that of all the traffic sources out there for your blog or website, nothing is as addicting as search engine traffic. It is targeted, free, and it can flood your site with visitors.

I just want to get that out of the way because I am about to discuss some of my new targets for traffic after losing most of my search engine rankings. For me the show must go on… even without the help of the Google Gods. In reality this is a great opportunity for me to expand my skills at traffic generation. Here’s my game-plan…

Personalize My Websites
This is a major shift in direction for me. All of my sites were previously formatted like article directories. No author name, no individual commentary, no real visitor feedback. The goal was to suck in search engine visitors with keyword content. I used popular words and phrases people searched for in my articles, which in turn led to being ranked for those phrases in the search engines.

Now I am working more to give my sites a unique voice. I am creating an author identity for each site and using more of a conversation tone on my content. The goal here is to develop a greater trust with my visitors and hopefully generate a larger percentage of repeat readers. I have a background in most of the niches I write about so I am also sharing that on each site.

Blog Comments
For as long as I’ve been operating as a webmaster/marketer it is amazing how few comments I have left on other blogs. I never saw much value in it beyond the SEO benefits. Normally I would outsource this work but now I am taking ownership of my blog comments. I use Google Blog Search to find topically related sites to comment on. I don’t worry about their pagerank but I do look for signs of popularity (hint: mommy blogs). The long term goal is to develop traffic by slowly expanding my footprint across the web. Every time I make a new post on one of my sites I follow it up with 3 comments on other blogs. We’ll see how it goes.

Facebook
Nothing new here for online marketers. The difference for me is that I am trying to better connect with the fans on my pages. Instead of auto posting links to my older articles I am sharing content manually. My primary niche websites each have their own facebook page. I’m starting to see this as the next evolution of email lists. For that reason I only gain new fans naturally. I offer help guides and other “secrets” to get people to like my page. Surprisingly I am even getting a few comments on the FB posts I make!

This is just the beginning of my alternative traffic strategies. The real key here is instead of churning and burning through obvious marketing destinations, I am focusing on making an impact at each one. This should generate new followers and spawn more word-of-mouth traffic… if I succeed.

The success rate of online businesses is much higher than a traditional brick and mortar operation. This is because most online businesses can be started with very little investment.

When I launched my first website back in 2003 it was to satisfy my curiosity. The site featured sports commentary articles written by me and my friends. I think it lasted about 6 months before the drain of content deadlines ruined the fun. The site never earned me a penny, but I only lost a couple hundred dollars from the investment. In the end I realized I am too attracted to money to dedicate myself to a “passion project.”

Fast forward to 2006 when I discovered affiliate marketing. The concept here is to create a website for the purpose of earning money through advertising and product referrals. Now this was something I could get excited about! I read about people making thousands of dollars from simple websites that ultimately steered visitors to products that paid a commission on each sale.

While learning about affiliate marketing I was also learning about SEO. Together the two became the perfect business model for me. I worked to get my websites ranked highly in Google for “help keywords” which are what people use to find answers to their problems. When visitors arrived on my sites I would offer some helpful tips and direct them to an authority resource that paid me a commission.

The best part about this model is that the search engine traffic was free. Now I had to work hard to get my sites ranked, but often times they would remain in good position for months after I earned top rankings. From there it was off to the next project and soon I had a nice little collection of steady earners.

Over time I learned new tricks and strategies to increase search engine traffic and optimize revenue from my sites. Continuing education is a must in this game and I realize after the latest Google Panda updates that I failed to implement enough new tactics to keep the party rockin’.

Today almost all of my websites have lost their top positions in the search engines. It is time for me to make major adjustments to the business plan. You cannot win in online business unless you have traffic. My challenge is to generate traffic in new ways, and enough of it to replace the income I have lost. I am nervous…but not giving up!