Scoreboard Media Group, Internet Audience Development

I mentioned the concept of “defensible traffic” in an earlier post and a few people asked, “WTF is defensible traffic?”  I had completely forgotten about getting back to that, but then Todd discussed it a bit the other day.

So, what is defensible traffic?  Well, JazzcatSEO does a pretty good job of describing it:

Anybody with a basic knowledge of PPC and a bank account can buy traffic for their website. And if their account is big enough, they can steal your PPC traffic by paying more per click. Therefore, the only way you can defend that traffic is to pay more per click and cut into your ROI. Furthermore, if you’re using PPC for arbitrage, shifts in the PPC algorithms (meant to combat arbitrage) can completely destroy your ROI, thus eliminating your traffic’s usefulness completely.

On the other hand, a well-optimized site with carefully developed content, quality backlinks, good domain age, etc. that ranks well in the SERPs has a huge advantage over newer contenders in the same space. It’s much easier to maintain traffic from such a site, because anybody who want to compete with you in that space will have to develop a site with more relevant backlinks or better content, which is a lot more difficult than simply upping the bid on their PPC dashboard.

Actually, that’s a really good definition.

If you ever have to go raise money from investors, one of the first questions they will ask you is going to be about the defensibility of your revenue/brand/traffic/etc.  In the Lead Generation world, companies like Adteractive and Quinstreet generate a lot of leads from arbitraging search, email, and tapping into affiliates.  But none of that is really defensible. 

Each of those traffic acquisition sources is out of their control.  How much does it suck to be those guys when Google turns the knobs on Adwords Quality Scoring?  Or their top affiilates underperform…maybe because they found a more attractive offer from a competitor?  Or email laws change?

If you want to endure in the Widget Market, you have to treat it like war.  You can’t arbitrage battle for very long.  At the end of the day, you’re still losing blood.  In the history of warfare, the only way the winner has ever held that claim is by having boots on the ground.  You don’t own a people…or a market…with smart bombs.  You need lots of your combat boots on their dirt.

That’s defensible.  I don’t care how blackhat or whitehat you are in your methods to build that asset, just make sure it’s defensible.  Taking that thought up another notch, if your site is truly defensible, you could exist if search engines went out of business tomorrow.

In about twenty seconds, all the arbitragers are going to lose their minds.  But guess what?  You can host arbitraging on a defensible web property, too.  Guys like Intel and Nortel do it all the time (I’ll let you guys go do that discovery).  It’s not rocket science.

So, what are you doing to make your revenue defensible?