In episode #663, Eric and Neil discuss why your traffic is going to tank. Tune in to hear how you should deal with this problem.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: Your Traffic Is Going to Tank and You Won’t be Able to Fix It
- [00:52] A lot of paid advertisers change their algorithms, so you can’t control your output.
- [01:13] There will inevitably be a time in your business when traffic declines.
- [01:20] Not everything is in your control. Just accept it and diversify your traffic sources.
- [01:45] An omnichannel approach will help you maintain your traffic.
- [02:00] The easiest channels to go after are: content marketing, paid ads, social sharing, link building, and building an email list.
- [03:00] There are a ton of channels. Experiment and see what works.
- [03:30] Eric’s team uses Northstar from Growth Hackers.
- [03:39] It’s a project management tool that helps you be more methodical.
- [04:22] CROss-posting video content is helpful and gets you organic traffic.
- [04:45] Remember to re-target people.
- [04:55] Webinars are another great option for driving new traffic to your site.
- [05:05] That’s it for today!
- [05:10] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post Your Traffic Is Going to Tank and You Won’t be Able to Fix It | Ep. #663 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.
Eric: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric: And today, we're going to talk about why your traffic is going to tank and, well, you won't be able to fix. So, Neil, what are your general thoughts around this and why people won't be able to fix it?
Neil: With your marketing, you're relying on many different channels. There's Google AdWords, there's Facebook Ads, there's Google SEO, there's social media marketing like getting on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram all organically, and a lot of these players change their algorithm consistently because they're trying to improve the user experience.
Many cases, you'll be able to grow your traffic. Some cases, you won't. For example, you could be in a space and Google just says, "Hey, we're no longer allowing advertising for this." Can't do much there. It's okay. You're going to have a time in your business where your traffic declines. Yes, other channels may increase, but there's going to be points where traffic's going to decline and you can't do much to fix it, because not everything is in your control.
One, we learn to accept and two, you need to learn to diversify your traffic sources so you're not relying on one, because when your business takes a dip if you're relying only on one, or technically if you're relying on one and your business takes a dip, so you're pretty much shit out of luck. But if you diversify your strategy and you take an omnichannel approach, you're much more likely to stay afloat and succeed in the long-run.
Eric: Neil, I think it might be helpful for us to give some templates on how we're diversifying right now and maybe where you're diversifying. Maybe even before that, if somebody's starting out, what should they do first before they diversify?
Neil: Yeah, so the easiest channels to after first are content marketing - well, technically, if you have money, the easiest channels to go after first are paid ads: Google and Facebook. They work. Yes, there's [Being 00:02:11] and there's other sites, but Google and Facebook are the big drivers. They're also the biggest players.
Then I would look into content marketing, right. Create blog posts, promote it on Facebook, Twitter, all the other social channels, like LinkedIn. If you don't have a following, that's okay. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to see who shares your competition's posts and just hit them up and ask them to share your content.
Then you can do things like link-building, right, SEO higher rankings, and the way you want to do that is you can use tools like [inaudible 00:02:38] to see who links to your competition, look at the back-links, hit each of those sites up, and get them to start linking back to you.
You can also do things like collecting email addresses from people who visit your site. Eric and I do that all the time. There's a lot of tools for that, from Sumo to OptinMonster to Hello Bar. You can also do things like affiliate marketing, where other people drive you sales and you only pay them for commission, but there's a ton of channels and Eric and I look at it as experimentation and spaghetti. You throw it against the wall, you try five or six marketing experiments, the ones that start working the best, you do those first, and after you've put as much time and effort and they start slowing down in growth, then you just start diversifying and focusing on other channels.
Eric: Yeah, so I think it's not completely hopeless. I mean, your traffic's going to go down no matter what. It's what are you going to do about, how are you going to react to it, so one thing we do as a team is we use a Growth Hacker's tool called NorthStar. So Growth Hackers, NorthStar, you can Google it. It's free for up to 20 people - not affiliated at all - and it's a project management tool that shows you methodically how you can continue to run experiments because a lot of people ...
For example, Neil and I, we always have these different ideas all the time, but how do you consolidate the ideas? How do you be more methodical, more scientific about testing these? That way you're actually looking at your learnings and seeing how good your assumptions are and you can have a leaderboard too. You can even gameify it a little bit. Give rewards to people who have land the most exciting tests or got the most successful tests. That's one way you can go about testing solutions to fixing your traffic and then also figuring out how you might want to go about diversifying.
So a little bit on the playbook that I have is, well, Neil and I are doing a podcast right now, but we're also doing videos at the same time where Neil has his YouTube channel, I have my YouTube channel. And then we're also publishing these videos to LinkedIn for example, because the organic reach on LinkedIn is great and also because Neil gets a lot of organic traffic. I get decent organic traffic, he's probably 10x plus more, but I will take that traffic. I'll take the people that are visiting the middle funnel pages, like services pages or maybe they're on my email list, and I'm going to go ahead and re-target those people on these other ad platforms, such as YouTube or AdWords for example, to try to drive more conversions.
So, we have a lot of different options here. We can just continue the list, but we're not going to do that. The final one I'll give you right now is do your webinars and if you don't have an audience, you know, figuring out how you can barter, do some partner webinars with other people, and try to get the leads from them, and then you could start to build something. But start with something first, and then start to fan out.
Neil: Cool. I think that's pretty much it for this.
Eric: Yup, that's it for today. So, if you want to check out marketing tools, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review, so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible.
We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
Eric: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric: And today, we're going to talk about why your traffic is going to tank and, well, you won't be able to fix. So, Neil, what are your general thoughts around this and why people won't be able to fix it?
Neil: With your marketing, you're relying on many different channels. There's Google AdWords, there's Facebook Ads, there's Google SEO, there's social media marketing like getting on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram all organically, and a lot of these players change their algorithm consistently because they're trying to improve the user experience.
Many cases, you'll be able to grow your traffic. Some cases, you won't. For example, you could be in a space and Google just says, "Hey, we're no longer allowing advertising for this." Can't do much there. It's okay. You're going to have a time in your business where your traffic declines. Yes, other channels may increase, but there's going to be points where traffic's going to decline and you can't do much to fix it, because not everything is in your control.
One, we learn to accept and two, you need to learn to diversify your traffic sources so you're not relying on one, because when your business takes a dip if you're relying only on one, or technically if you're relying on one and your business takes a dip, so you're pretty much shit out of luck. But if you diversify your strategy and you take an omnichannel approach, you're much more likely to stay afloat and succeed in the long-run.
Eric: Neil, I think it might be helpful for us to give some templates on how we're diversifying right now and maybe where you're diversifying. Maybe even before that, if somebody's starting out, what should they do first before they diversify?
Neil: Yeah, so the easiest channels to after first are content marketing - well, technically, if you have money, the easiest channels to go after first are paid ads: Google and Facebook. They work. Yes, there's [Being 00:02:11] and there's other sites, but Google and Facebook are the big drivers. They're also the biggest players.
Then I would look into content marketing, right. Create blog posts, promote it on Facebook, Twitter, all the other social channels, like LinkedIn. If you don't have a following, that's okay. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to see who shares your competition's posts and just hit them up and ask them to share your content.
Then you can do things like link-building, right, SEO higher rankings, and the way you want to do that is you can use tools like [inaudible 00:02:38] to see who links to your competition, look at the back-links, hit each of those sites up, and get them to start linking back to you.
You can also do things like collecting email addresses from people who visit your site. Eric and I do that all the time. There's a lot of tools for that, from Sumo to OptinMonster to Hello Bar. You can also do things like affiliate marketing, where other people drive you sales and you only pay them for commission, but there's a ton of channels and Eric and I look at it as experimentation and spaghetti. You throw it against the wall, you try five or six marketing experiments, the ones that start working the best, you do those first, and after you've put as much time and effort and they start slowing down in growth, then you just start diversifying and focusing on other channels.
Eric: Yeah, so I think it's not completely hopeless. I mean, your traffic's going to go down no matter what. It's what are you going to do about, how are you going to react to it, so one thing we do as a team is we use a Growth Hacker's tool called NorthStar. So Growth Hackers, NorthStar, you can Google it. It's free for up to 20 people - not affiliated at all - and it's a project management tool that shows you methodically how you can continue to run experiments because a lot of people ...
For example, Neil and I, we always have these different ideas all the time, but how do you consolidate the ideas? How do you be more methodical, more scientific about testing these? That way you're actually looking at your learnings and seeing how good your assumptions are and you can have a leaderboard too. You can even gameify it a little bit. Give rewards to people who have land the most exciting tests or got the most successful tests. That's one way you can go about testing solutions to fixing your traffic and then also figuring out how you might want to go about diversifying.
So a little bit on the playbook that I have is, well, Neil and I are doing a podcast right now, but we're also doing videos at the same time where Neil has his YouTube channel, I have my YouTube channel. And then we're also publishing these videos to LinkedIn for example, because the organic reach on LinkedIn is great and also because Neil gets a lot of organic traffic. I get decent organic traffic, he's probably 10x plus more, but I will take that traffic. I'll take the people that are visiting the middle funnel pages, like services pages or maybe they're on my email list, and I'm going to go ahead and re-target those people on these other ad platforms, such as YouTube or AdWords for example, to try to drive more conversions.
So, we have a lot of different options here. We can just continue the list, but we're not going to do that. The final one I'll give you right now is do your webinars and if you don't have an audience, you know, figuring out how you can barter, do some partner webinars with other people, and try to get the leads from them, and then you could start to build something. But start with something first, and then start to fan out.
Neil: Cool. I think that's pretty much it for this.
Eric: Yup, that's it for today. So, if you want to check out marketing tools, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review, so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible.
We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
