Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

Darren Rouse of ProBlogger just did a piece on the effect that Google search ranking can have on web traffic. It's worth a read if you're trying to drive traffic to a traditional site. I've had a similar experience by taking advantage of using Google in other ways. Technical people out there could use the same techniques and have a similar experience.

My experience is based on using Google Homepage modules to drive traffic. On January 19th, I reported the initial increase in traffic. I followed up on January 20th and January 26th.

After that, I continued to develop some additional Google Homepage modules and created some other tools such as EZFlickr to provide additional traffic through my site. I've seen a nearly constant increase in traffic since January. This month my average number of hits per day is about 1,000,000 with an average number of pageviews per day being about 330,000. 90% of my traffic comes from Google.

The crazy thing is that I don't really have any type of monetary conversion on my site. That's okay for now because I'm really just trying to sell my book and increase my book readership for now, but I do have a mechanism in place to reach a lot of people very quickly. Other software developers could use this same technique now that mashups and gadgets are used in so many places (Google Homepage, Google Desktop, Windows Live, Pageflakes, etc.). The key is to provide a link in the gadget that brings users back to your primary site. If you have a service or product web site that can be gadgetized, this is a great emerging opportunity.

Note: I'll continue to write on this subject over the course of the next few weeks to give greater detail on how Google Homepage modules can be used and also describe some ideas for other mechanisms to use recent Google offerings to drive traffic to your site. Subscribe to this feed to stay in the loop.