Fantastic traffic sources (other than Google)

If the recent Google updates have taught us anything, it’s that traffic diversification is vital if you want to stay in business.

For example, Anne Moss (who makes six figures PER MONTH from blogging), saw the writing on the wall before the September HCU, and started focusing on Facebook for traffic.

When her sites were hit by the HCU, her business remained profitable.

That wouldn’t have been the case if she fully relied on Google for traffic.

I’ve been looking into alternative traffic sources for awhile now, and in today’s email, I’ll share the best ones I know.

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#1: Flipboard

I put Flipboard first because it’s actually blogger-friendly. And, not many people are talking about it yet so it’s still a wide open playing field.

Flipboard is built specifically to help people find interesting articles to read.

It’s a content discovery platform that actually wants to send you traffic. Can’t get more blogger-friendly than that!

I recently listened to this Niche Pursuits podcast with guest Michael Dinich, who gets 1 million visitors/month to his site from Flipboard. He shares a ton of Flipboard strategies and even shares his site!

You should 100% give that episode a listen. It’s one of my all-time favorites.

#2: Pinterest

I’ve seen people share some crazy traffic numbers from Pinterest recently. Like Mike Futia, who was getting 2,000 visitors per day on a site he started in September 2023.

Last I heard, that site now gets over 1 million visitors/month.

He chose a niche that does well on Pinterest, and mentioned that he pins 20-40 times per day.

Another guy publicly killing it on Pinterest right now is Tony Hill. He recently tweeted about a Pinterest account he started less than 30 days ago that’s already driving nearly 100 visitors/day to his site.

Both Mike and Tony publish AI content (last I read!) which seems to do very well on Pinterest (and social media in general) at the moment.

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#3: Facebook

I mentioned Anne Moss at the beginning of this email. You should definitely follow her for Facebook growth advice.

Hasib and NicheSiteLady also share lots of good advice around Facebook, and both do some insane numbers.

Just check this out:

#4: Email

This is one of my favorite traffic sources because it’s far more resilient than the others I mentioned. You own your list. You’re not at the mercy of the algorithm.

It’s not 100% risk-free (landing in the spam folder, deliverability, etc), but it’s the closest you’ll get.

Email has so many monetization options. Of course, you can send people to your site to earn ad revenue, but you can also monetize through sponsors and affiliate links in every email you send. Email lists can be incredibly lucrative.

For email/newsletter advice, I recommend following Scott DeLong, Matt McGarry, and Jon Dykstra. Read everything you can from them.

Those are the hottest traffic sources I know of for blogs right now.

Of course, there are plenty of others that when mastered, can send ridiculous amounts of traffic to your site.

• Youtube

• Instagram

• TikTok

• Reddit

• Basically ANY social platform with millions of users

Another traffic source that’s kinda overlooked right now is…

Bing. And DuckDuckGo.

Most sites that were hit by a Google update are still ranking just fine on other search engines. Even sites that mass published one-click AI articles.

When you have enough content, Bing traffic alone can provide a full-time income. Vaibhav was making $15K/mo from Bing back in December:

One of my sites that I completely ignored after it got slapped by Google now gets more traffic from Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo than it ever did from Google. Pretty crazy, maybe I should put some work into it again. 🤔 

I hope this email was inspiring in some way.

I’d love to hear about your experience and any successes you’ve had with non-Google traffic sources. Feel free to hit reply.

And, if you want to join a group of fellow website builders, I’d love for you to join Website Growth Mastermind!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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