The decline of organic reach

I've been listening to a lot of marketing podcasts recently and one of the things I've been hearing about is the so-called decline in organic reach. What this is chimes very much with my own experience over the years I've dabbled in the Internet and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was really easy to get lots of traffic just by putting quality stuff on the Internet. The search engines and indexes noted you and sent traffic to you without any effort.

However things have changed. Though they look the same , things are very different. I've been puzzling about this sitting in my room and then what I was hearing from the podcasts reinforced my own experience. It seems the engines like Google and Facebook and other big big companies have finally decided to come more commercial in outlook. Once upon a time they gave traffic away, but now it seems that they are only going to send you traffic if you pay them.

The other problem with the Web is there is just so much noise out there now. Once upon a time there were only five quality websites for providing information and say on haunted hotels. That was my area. And now I find that there are thousands of pagess and so we don't scroll down more than one or two pages on Google so if you are down the page of that, no matter how good your website it is you just aren't going to get seen.

I've even written a little blog about Cumbrian place names which is a pretty specialist area. If I say so myself it brings a lot of learning and scholarship and research to it and I put up tens of high quality posts that will provide lots of information for people looking for that. But if I search for that website, I simply don't find it on on Google. So does that mean there are now a lot of websites about the subject? I don't think so. It's just stuff is harder to find.

So I think your days of putting stuff up and just hoping and actually succeeding are gone. There's so much noise out there that even if your product is top quality unless you promoted it using money and probably more clever marketing techniques, you won't get seen.

So that leads me onto my new endeavour – finding clever marketing techniques!