Every online business, blog and video platform needs traffic…hey that’s the name of my game ha!
Now, what people generally think is, that if they latch on to one specific source of traffic, they are all good and their search is over..
Soooorrry! Not so!
You see it (visitor traffic and the ways of “harvesting” it) are in constant flux.
Let’s say, for instance, you have a blog, perhaps a blog with a moderate amount of monetisation, could be Google Adsense. Now you found that by sharing that blog and its new posts, each time you do one, with a Facebook Profile or Page…seems to do quite well and has done for 6 months. You are making a few dollars a month just for writing a new post every now and again and a handful of new subscribers every month…all good?
Well….NOPE! And the reason why is fairly complicated, but firstly if we say “all of your eggs in one basket”, pretty sure you will grasp that concept.
The thing is what you have to appreciate is that every social media platform wants traffic just the same as you…and you kindly share your content there, which means they will reciprocate…yes? Errrmm…well only a tiny bit, the reason being is that they prefer it if you send money to ride on the back of their traffic.
What they do, in a similar way all search engines do, is create an “algorithm”…basically a set of rules that may run something like this:
USER – Been on platform 6 years
USER ACTIVITY – Daily for approx 20mins, they post a lot of images and join certain niche groups, they often publish content from 2 or 3 of the same sources.
ALGORITHM – Hmmmm they may be using free advertising tactics.
ALGORITHM – Therefore whilst normally we would put their content in front of a large percentage of their friends and followers, we will throttle that down to say 5%.
The strategy behind this is that should you feel you really aren’t getting anywhere with your free content, they will push a few automatic recommended PAID advertising options your way. If you take the bait they are pretty sure, whether you are skilled in marketing ad creation or not, they will a) make some revenue before you realise you are spending more than you reaping b) they hope you feel you get some benefit…though in honesty the price of getting social media eyeballs your offer are getting more expensive every day, if you think you are doing the right thing and want to throw enough money at them…they may give you a piece of the action.
OK….so what is to be done?
Well, its a little like spread betting, you really need to be active within several different traffic streams, whether that be in social media platforms or other traffic systems.
The legacy of this “syndication” (sending your content to more than one platform and in various ways) is, if you are doing this manually, TIME….it is going to soak up your time immensely.
Of course, there are people out there that will offer you a Syndication Course perhaps a syndication software…and that will not be cheap and naturally it will take you a deal of time to learn the ropes.
SO….is all lost?
Well in an ever shifting sea of methods, systems and software’s, the reality is that you need someone that is “amongst it” all the time. I personally have been in the traffic game since Netscape (google it lol)…and no I do not profess to know everything, but I am part of several well informed groups that share intelligence (sounds well sneaky eh? lol) of what is and what isn’t working. We also start looking at the impacts of new algorithms before they are actually initiated (that’s not industrial espionage by the way, the big boys give advanced warning to certain groups of what their new “tweaks” are going to be).
The one thing you have to know is that, there are several methods, called evergreen methods, that always seen traffic returns and when you know these methods and can utilise them working to the correct guidelines, you know you will always get a level of niche specific visitors.
Don’t get me wrong, the traffic will always fluctuate, and this can be due to anything from the time of day, the type of weather, a global event or major outages in the internet system (yes it does happen but subject of another article).
The main thing to focus on is quality not necessarily quantity….I would be more than happy with 5 to 10 new business leads a day that are actually pretty much card/cash in hand, than 500 visitors that don’t even know what the website or service is.
Here are a couple of articles that may help with gaining some relatively cost free traffic:
And, of course, if you need any advice or assistance with all things traffic….you know where I am here:
