So I’ve been thinking about other sources of traffic besides SEO. If you guys did not know, a site like thelinkback.com originally had all it’s traffic from forums, probably around 3 that we were active in. Anyway, while I still think”only” SEO can work I don’t think you want to mass produce links nowadays to your main site (however, for now, tier 2 links can work. If you don’t know what I mean, refer to my previous post on tiered link building). However, I also think tiered linking will eventually stop working because currently almost everyone is saying to do it, and if I learned any valuable SEO lesson in the past 3 years is that anytime most people say something works and it’s low effort enough that everyone now does it, it stops being as effective sooner or later. Profile links, forum links, bookmarking, blog networks all went there.
Alright, so currently I’m working on 3 ways to promote my new blogs and I’ll show you an example of a new site (with URL) I’m doing which will have traffic from SEO (as usual) mixed with PPC & Social traffic.
Over the years since I’ve been able to have a lot of free time on my hands thanks to working when I want, I really got into nutrition/general health stuff and was keeping large notes that I wrote myself on my computer.. I figured why not make it into a blog, I might meet like minded folks like how this website helped me meet other IMs. So I created my nutrition/health blog at peakmodernliving.com.
Below is how I plan to use all these traffic sources for this particular site over time, and how I already am using it. Not sure if that blog will make sizable $$ one day but I already write a lot on my computer about this topic so why not. It’s an interesting experiment for me and honestly, if I can use it as a portal to meet other nutrition/fitness nerds that enjoy doing stuff like getting massively drunk with minimal hangovers or take ice cold showers (look at all the likes for a new site – NOT fake. explained below) so I can go outside with minimal clothing during the winter… Why not? 😉
PS: Reduced the size of this image that I made from 80kb to ~40kb using riot from my last post on image resizing 😉
SEO
I still think SEO can work but definitely only guest posts are safe in the long term (and maybe your OWN PRIVATE network with relevant content). I’m not even 100% sure yet I can rank websites only using postrunner but I’m giving it a try on a few of my new niche sites, slowly. Either way, I use guest posts from postrunner for now and eventually I’ll be hiring a VA to search for websites in my niche that I can do guest posts on. I’ll most likely be writing those myself for my nutrition site, but hire ppl for the other sites that I care less about.
Honestly I think SEO is more about short term vision or long term currently.
Do you want to rank a website fast but most likely get owned in the next update or build something long term? The short term vision is worth it for me in a few niches that when I reach #1 I was making $200-1000/month for THAT keyword alone, but definitely not for this health site that I intend to work on for many years, nor would it make enough money in 1-3 months for the time investment I put into it already considering I write all the articles and they take me 1hour + because I like to make sure I link to references and other useful sites for those wanting more information on topics I don’t want to elaborate on personally.
PPC
Alright so, I’m doing a lot of PPC currently as I think it’s something important to learn for me at this point now that I have money but limited time. I may or may not make posts on my strategies on this in the future… Let me know if you are interested in the comments.
While I was promoting offers I found out how I could use PPC traffic to help my own blogs. Instead of direct linking to other affiliates, what if you link to a squeeze page and build an email list and link them to your blog for more information on the topic? You can not only offer more value to the list this way but they might become blog readers. ALSO, while promoting the product to your list, if you find the conversion rates are good you can then make your own product on that topic and promote it directly for PPC traffic & to your usual visitors on your blog. Basically I would send an auto responder series about the product, try to sell it and then future emails would be about my blog with perhaps a few more “soft” sales of the initial product.
Social Media
So, everyone is all about social. But how do you do it? Obviously making a Facebook/Twitter/Youtube account is the basics but I think linking out and building relationships with other people in your niche IS A MUST! For example, look at this page on my new blog on cold showers that I mentioned before. One of the people I linked out in this post who was part of the inspiration that lead me to trying this tweeted out my link and I got about 500+ visitors within a day on my blog which resulted in those 50+ likes instantly! Some other people re tweeted the link too! I was debating for a while to write about my health experiments instead of only my knowledge on nutrition and it turned out to be a good idea… Eventually, once I have more free time after getting a better idea of PPC and a few profitable campaigns, I hope to travel again and between going to marketing conferences for affiliates I want to go to health conferences and meet interesting people there. Most likely some of them have blogs and we can link to each other when relevant.
Here are other ways I am planning on expanding my traffic from social places:
- Other social sites: Beyond this, I’m gonna eventually post some of my articles on sites like reddit and stumbleupon.
- Guest Blogging: This is also why guest blogging on REAL sites with traffic would be useful and why I want to make sure I write those articles myself and make them 100% unique & awesome.
- Forums: Finally, be involved in forums in your niche! As I mentioned at the top, the LB was built on forum traffic. I go visit TONS of health forums weekly, I’ll definitely share my links when relevant.
So hopefully this post sparks some ideas for you guys to use on your own site. I’m personally currently focusing 70% on PPC, 10% on this blog, 10% on my new health site and 10% on my other SEO only niche sites currently. Hopefully I have more time to put on my health site soon and share results of how I did it with you guys, but it’s probably going to take a few months to a year to really flesh it out because PPC is consuming a lot of my time and where I envision I will make my $$$ in 2013, unlike my health site which is more of a “sharing my passion” site for now that I will use my marketing skills on in the future to make an alternate income stream.
Back to re-submitting my denied advertisements on facebook I go 😉 (PS: FU facebook advertisement team, stop denying my ads while allowing competitors to have them wtf!)
Hey really cool post.
Having relied heavily on Google traffic for the past decade, for the first time ever im trying to diversify out of it. It’s no long a safe traffic source, i mean you can get traffic quite easily, you just never know when Google is going to remove the rug from under you.
I am taking a similar approach. Ive started doing some video marketing as well. Forum marketing is doing decent. I am still getting most of my traffic from SEO but i am working much harder on retention. Either getting people to return or sign-up to my list.
Anyway, not sure what i’m getting at. Just wanted to say i enjoyed this post and you gave me a couple of good ideas. All the best.
– Andy
Video marketing is definitely worthwhile. Some videos I did got 4k+ views just from youtube searches and it brought them to this blog. I also think SEO is ok but you DEFINITELY have to diversify. Even if you do pure white hat SEO you have a high chance of getting affected within a year. I saw major “white hat” sites losing a lot of traffic so ya, definitely mixing it now. I knew I had to do this a year ago when I saw panda happening even if I was not affected but I was too busy making iphone apps/learning other money online methods (stocks).
Hi there,
nice post.
I’d like to hear more about the PPC strategies you’re using.
I know many guys that haven’t been able to make a cent out of ppc, so I was wondering how you’ve been doing so far?
Vheers,
mike
I’ll post more about it in time, right now I’m trying too many things to write a focused/detailed post on what to share. I’m currently doing dating advertisements on POF (a friend of mine makes a few hundred profit a day doing this but stopped)
I’ve also tried some different offers on Bing and facebook. I love bing Adcenter so much more than facebook/google, I just wish I could find a good offer and angle to promote on it because out of all the major self serve networks it’s easily my favorite… I never get into trouble and they approve my stuff fast.
Anyway, so far while I’m getting close to break even I haven’t really had a big profit day of $100+ on POF, in time.. I’m at month 2 or so of doing “serious” PPC (while still doing SEO a bit), still quite early. I also want to integrate PPC more into an overall business system instead of doing affiliate marketing, something close to what I’ve been discussing in this post.
Alex,
This is really an awesome post. I’ve realized that Google can really ‘pull the rug under you’ and it is very unpredictable. I am not a long timer, but in my short experience, it happened to me and I am worried about making my traffic consistent.
Your post is very helpful. Thank you.
-Kumar
I should have seen it coming, everyone was always saying to not just depend on Google. It was a good lesson for me :). Honestly I was working on a few side projects outside of IM (iPhone apps & Forex) and by the time the penguin update came out it was too late for my old sites to collect email lists/work on building other traffic sources.
It’s honestly still amazing to me though that these old sites are still generating a good $350 a month from only adsense using bing & yahoo traffic! I can’t say I regret making these, even if they used to make so much more.
Hi Alex,
I’m just wondering, have you tried any guest blogging services for link building?
I think guest blogging is quickly becoming one of the only legitimate and safe link building methods, and i’ve noticed quite a few websites offering these services (not cheaply either). So i was wondering if you have any experience with these?
I’m building 1 large authority site, and i want to start doing some guest blogging as my only source of backlinking, because i want to stay safe after google killed my old niche sites that were making me $30 per day 🙁
Ya, I do only guestblogging currently on a few sites. Results are quite slow… I’m using a service like postrunner from TKA that I used to use a lot 2 years ago but article networks were much better for the time investment. Anyway, to be more safe ya I mostly only do guestblogging now on a few of my sites. I think for some sites though I will just go back to using networks and if they get penalized by google so be it… They aren’t worth the time and $$ to do guestblogging.Ya I do
Hi Alex, What would you suggest for our new website in terms of SEO, We are running a SEO champaign and its not seem to be working for us.
Well, “running a SEO campaign” is very broad and does not mean much. Nowadays for websites I want to rank for the long term I only do guestposts. For quick chrun and burn sites I still use blog networks.
hi there,
I know that it’s important to diversify your traffic sources, but i still think that seo will be the No1 traffic source that converts really well. Facebook changes their rules every day and you can target ONLY certain niches. That’s why i started building my own private blog network. I have approximately 25 blogs right now and most of them have PR4 and a few of them PR5 or PR3. If someone builds 50 or 100 of them, then it would be easy to target effectively various keywords. I also allow other people to post in my sites, in order to make it look natural to google. I don’t promote anything in google.com as i find it very competitive. What i do, is targeting other european countries. The competition is pretty low there.
Regarding social media, i think that stumbleupon and pinterest might be the best investment right now. I’ve been receiving large portions of traffic towards my blogs, which is cool, as i don’t spend much time in them. I simply post the articles and bang i receive traffic. You might want to give these two social networks a try. They certainly worth your time.
SEO is definitely awesome when done well. I’m making good daily money off some videos I ranked on youtube that I was doing PPC to but it was not profitable. I then did SEO and boom a $10+ daily income. I would do it more but right now I’m scaling faster with PPC. SEO is more long term though (even though Google piss me off on this a lot since Penguin). Stumbleupon is interesting, I tried it a few times but I have a hard time turning it into a profit or to drive enough traffic to make recurring blog readers. I tried to format my posts to make them very interesting and “boom in your face” content but it was a so so result.. I’m gonna have to try again.
Good job not doing things on google.com, definitely a smart move.
Hey Alex,
How is everything going? Are you finding much success with PPC? (Facebook?)
Ever planning on doing an update post?
Would love to read it.
Dan
Yep I have a lot of success right now with FB and PPC. I could do an update post soon. I’m just kinda out of inspiration on what new blog posts I could do. I pretty much stopped doing SEO even if I still make a $500 a month form it for the past 2 years thanks to my rankings never dropping in Bing (but being destroyed in Google due to Penguin)
Hi Alex,
With facebook ads are to using the retargeting method or just the ppc method and same question with Google, I hear more people getting success with the Google display network over Adwords text ads?
Cheers
Stuart
I just use the PPC method right now as I mostly went into affiliate mkt and pushed back building my own authority site.