Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
As we all know, the Internet Marketing landscape is constantly evolving. Overnight a traffic source can become obsolete and ultimately ruin your business if you rely on it too heavily.
Right now more so than ever, you need to diversify your traffic sources. Back in the day, Google Adwords was the “big thing” everyone was using. It was like the only known traffic source to man. That was back in the arbitrage days.
Where people would literally buy traffic for $0.30 and “sell it” for $0.40.
It didn’t last for long, there was the infamous Google Slap which destroyed affiliate marketers and other IM’ers. Since then people have been moving into other traffic sources, and all of a sudden everyone and their grandma is becoming an SEO expert.
SEO is cool, I like SEO and have done it for years now. The problem is Google is constantly changing, more so than any other traffic source. I recommended SEO as a primary traffic generation strategy not too long ago.
But over the past few months with all the Google Panda updates and the last Penguin update; it’s a different ball game. It’s not as simple as it used to be. Some of us got lucky and managed to build authority sites using outdated methods that no longer work.
Many of us got wiped out, while others slipped under the radar. Few have benefited from the updates, so that’s that…
Besides SEO, a lot of marketers have been doing article marketing and Facebook PPC. Both of which have taken a knocking. You get the picture, it’s time to diversify. So here’s a short list of alternative traffic sources.
Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay per click marketing is an excellent way of driving highly targeted traffic to your website. It’s not always cheap because you do pay for every click you receive – but it can be the ultimate traffic source. Most people think PPC is extremely difficult when in actual fact; it’s dead simple.
Once you learn the basics, you’re good to go. You can learn the advanced stuff along the way. To get started with PPC, you need several hundred bucks at a minimum. You simply need to pick a bunch of keywords, create a few ad groups, write a few ads, enter your maximum bid for each keyword and set a daily budget.
- Google Adwords (works, checked as of 2024)
- Facebook PPC (works, checked as of 2024)
- 7Search (works, checked as of 2024)
- Miva (works, checked as of 2024)
Comments
Jack123
This article is incredibly helpful! I’ve been looking for ways to diversify my traffic sources, and this guide gives a lot of great alternatives. Thanks, David!
MarketingGuru
I’m not sure about the effectiveness of Facebook PPC nowadays. Does anyone have any data on recent conversion rates?
ElizaK
I absolutely loved this post! It really simplifies alternative traffic sources for marketers. Thank you for the insights!
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
DanielP
Is there any evidence that shows Facebook PPC performs better than Google Adwords these days? I find it hard to believe it can still be as effective as the article suggests.
MarketingExpert34
Could you explain more about 7Search and its effectiveness? I’ve heard mixed reviews but haven’t tried it myself. How would you compare it to Microsoft Adcenter?
PaulB
While I found the article useful, I think it downplays the complexity of setting up PPC campaigns. It’s not as simple as just setting a budget and letting it run. Proper research and constant monitoring are required.
LindaH
This article reminded me of the old days when Google Adwords was the dominant traffic source. Glad to see you’re suggesting other alternatives now. By the way, how have you been, David? Let’s catch up soon!
MariaG
I actually had a similar experience with the Google Slap back in the day. It really forced me to rethink my traffic strategies. Reading this post was like a trip down memory lane.
SeoMaster75
Another tool worth mentioning is Taboola for native advertising. It’s been a great addition to my marketing strategy and works well alongside Facebook PPC and Google Adwords. I highly recommend giving it a try.
AnnaM
This post gave me a fresh perspective on diversifying my traffic sources. I learned so much, especially about Microsoft Adcenter, which I hadn’t considered before.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Worth stating the median plainly here. Most people who got hit by the Google Slap tried two or three of these alternatives and quietly stopped when nothing outperformed what they’d lost. Not impossible to beat, just the rare case, not the default one.
How many keywords and what daily budget before you’d call a campaign a real test rather than noise?
From the company side, one thing worth adding: the reason Google Adwords was ‘the only known traffic source’ for so long isn’t only that people hadn’t found alternatives. It’s that alternatives take longer to show a clean number back to you. PPC gives you a cost per click same day. Referral traffic and community-building, mentioned in the guide’s own follow-up post, take months to show whether they worked at all. That lag is why people default back to paid search even after getting burned by it, not stubbornness.
Tomas, that failure point is exactly my failure point, except mine happens before I ever spend the money. I’ve rebuilt the same PPC account four times without turning it on, because I keep finding one more thing to configure first. Reading your flowchart, I think my actual problem isn’t the ad groups, it’s that I never let the sample size get small enough to fail cheaply. Small failures are apparently supposed to be the point and I keep protecting myself from having any.
Read this as a flowchart rather than a list and it’s actually clean: input is a few hundred dollars, throughput is keywords into ad groups into bids, output is clicks. The failure point nobody draws is what happens when the daily budget runs out before the ad has enough impressions to judge anything. That’s where most first campaigns die, not in the strategy, in the sample size.