SEO 2.0 Reality Check: What’s True What Not?

CC: Reality Check by ScubaBear68.

After 1.5 years of writing for this blog and popularizing SEO 2.0 it's time to review some of my theories and predictions. I have promised you a new era. Did it really arrive? Did SEO 2.0 turn out the way I imagined it? Yes and no. It's time for a SEO 2.0 reality check: What's true, what not?

So let's look at some of my most important assumptions:

1. A blog can thrive without Google traffic: Well, it can but it'll be much smaller than a blog relying on Google traffic. So combine conevntional SEO 1.0 with social media focused SEO 2.0 methods.
2. A blog is a must have and the most important SEO and marketing tool in SEO 2.0, yes it is. No blog, no online success anymore.
3. You can make blogs profitable and live off them. Yes you can. There are plenty of methods. I know people who started with me and blogging pays their bills. It does pay mine too, combined with classic SEO and blogging for clients. The make money online blogging thing isn't just about selling affiliate crap.
4. Social browsing like StumbleUpon overtakes the Web: Well, StumbleUpon is still strong, we have lots of new and old social browsing services like Browzmi but social browsing hasn't taken over yet. It remains just a niche, a big one but a niche. Search still reigns supreme.
5. Google is a dangerous monopoly and you have to find ways to get traffic from elsewhere. Yes you do. Just a few days ago Google threatened the whole analytics industry.
6. Mixx surpasses Digg. Mixx is still better than Digg and it's traffic is rising and rising but it's still no comparison to Digg especially as the people get scattered all over the site and popular stories are not popular in the sense of having many visitors .
7. SEO 2.0 is main stream. Yes it is. While not all people refer to it as SEO 2.0, digital asset optimization it all over. Similar holistic concepts have appeared: Findability or web design for ROI.
8. You can rank high without reading Google spam specialist Matt Cutts' blog. I outranked him for SEO blog by now, twice, once with SEO 2.0 once with SEOptimise.
9. You don't need 50k visitors from Digg to become successful. You don't! I've grown this blog without Digg, Reddit and all the other anti-social sites that ban SEO related topics. Your 1000 true fans (and blog subscribers) are much more important.
10. Dofollow works to get plenty of comments. My SEO blog has approx. 4k of them now. the long term participation of users is gained by other means though. i can clearly differentiate between the dofollow commenters and the real ones. Only some of them cross over. By now the "manual spam" has forced me to use another plugin offering real links to only those really participating.

Some things have turned even better though and also things have apperaed that I haven't foreseen at all.

• Twitter is huge. The success of Twitter and the usefulness of this simple app have blown my mind. It even brings traffic like hell when use correctly. I got more than 500 targeted visitors from Twitter for my last post thanks to a few people tweeting it. Thanks to just a few tweets and a few more viral retweets by @remarkablogger, @styletime, @KariRippetoe and their followers.
• Trust can be build in the cyberspace. I have gotten big contract through and by people I've "met" only virtually through my blogging and social media participation. People who I never met trust my expertise and recommend me to other people. My name is not only known but also renowned and I don't even have to visit all the search marketing conferences.
• You don't have to be a big wig from the start. Even an outsider can succeed. I'm a Pole living in Germany wearing a sombrero. Would you belevie me 1.5 years ago that I'd be on TopRank Online Marketing Blog's most popular SEO blogs list ?

What more do you need to know about the reality of SEO 2.0? This is a no-bullshit SEO 2.0 blog. So ask tough questions in the comments.