Let’s not beat around the bush: Google dominates the search market. Naturally, you want to rank well in Google for targeted keywords. But if that’s the entirety of your search marketing strategy, you need some major rethinking.

“What? Why?,” you ask. Case-in-point: even John Chow gets dumped by Google sometimes. John says his site was down when Googlebot came through last (thanks to an overzealous plugin). He had 193 unreachable URLs according to Webmaster Central.

Apparently, he had far to fall. He went from being #1 to being buried on page 6 for one of his most used keywords “make money online.”

But John’s not so worried–in part because he’s confident his rankings will improve once his site is crawled again, but also in part because Google isn’t his only traffic source. As he says:

Patrick Sexton of SEOish asked several top Internet marketers how they’d get an online business off the ground for $100-$500 dollars. He received responses from the likes of Lee Odden, CK Chung/Kid Disco, Neil Patel, Todd Malicoat, Aaron Wall, Andy Hagans and our own Andy Beal.

Recurring themes among their responses—

• Get a domain
• Use WordPress
• Get good, reliable hosting
• Write well or hire someone to write well for you
• SEO, SEO, SEO, including keyword research, copywriting and appealing to social media sites
• Do most or all of the work yourself—and work hard
• Network like crazy, especially through conferences

Other tips included building up your personal authority within your niche, affiliate marketing, and even more reading up on SEO (several mentioned purchasing an SEOmoz premium membership).

There is a powerful process at work in internet retailing that I call normalization. By this, I am referring to the tendency of markets to gravitate to a state where the profits go to the companies that deserve them while inferior companies fail.

This is not a popular subject and most of the online “gurus” deny this phenomenon. After all, they have to sell their marketing courses to people that believe they can start a website and get wealthy overnight.

I am asked constantly by friends what they can sell on the Internet. I always want to ask them why they think that I would share potential goldmines. My company has a software platform and system that can launch a sophisticated retail website within a few days. If I think of a good product to sell, I can be selling it by next week. The fact is that it is not so easy to come up with new products to retail online these days.