What to Do When Traffic to Your Online Business drops

You may find that everything has been going well for your business. Google and the other search engines have been sending you traffic and you've been making money selling or referring products or though advertising.

Then one day, it happens, Google changed their algorithm and your flow of traffic has become a trickle and you're making a fraction of what you were before.

What are you doing to compensate for when this happens to you?

Possible solutions

Send people to your landing pages with PPC campaigns

Start PPC campaigns to send people to your landing pages. While I abhor this option many people go this route.  PPC, or Pay Per Click advertising, is where you place advertising on other sites. When someone clicks on the advertisement, they're taken to your "landing" or presales page and you pay a fee for that click which is usually between a couple cents and a dollar depending on the keyword and the advertising network used.

I don't recommend this option because this is very intensive and it requires plenty of work to have a positive ROI (return on investment).

Write articles for Article sites, Squidoo, Hubpages, related blogs, etc.

A good writer could get quality traffic to his or her website by writing articles and submitting them to the most popular article sites.  Some visitors to the e-zine sites would click on your website link in the article or in the author credit.   The few website authors who use those articles and include your link as required would also give you good backlinks which search engines often consider when determining search engine result page placement.  Squidoo, Hubpages and Blogger (Blogspot) also allow you to make some money through ad revenue share. Write guest blog posts or guest articles for other websites that are related to your own.
All the extra backlinks from quality websites should improve your rankings and increase traffic.

E-mail past visitors

If you don't have a list of visitor e-mail addresses, it is time to start one! If you sell products you can ask for the e-mail address when you get shipping information. If you have an informational or affiliate site, start a newsletter.    While it is tempting to spam people with your list (I just got a spam this morning from an ex-employer), it is much better and if you live in the USA, more legal to only send e-mails to those visitors who have given you approval to do so.  A simple checkbox allowing e-mails will work for most merchants. The rest of us can have sign up forms.  To be extra safe, you should validate any submitted e-mail addresses with a confirmation e-mail which requires a click.  This is called double-opt-in.  They opted in when they gave permission and the opt-in was doubled when they clicked on the link.  That is also nice because you get rid of mistyped e-mail addresses with this process. The bad side is that many people will never activate their subscription.

Social bookmarking

Make sure visitors have a way to easily add your articles to social bookmarking websites.

Make your website stickier

Give your visitors a reason to come back, by adding social features, regular new content, and fun activities like contests (with prizes).

Start a Blog and make constructive comments on related blogs

Start a blog related to your business and share links to your blog posts on Twitter and on your Facebook Page. Link to your main website in the blog. Interact with those who leave comments on the Blog and your contact form.