How people are pivoting post-HCU

There are tons of great options...

Author

Ian H
May 16, 2024

In my last email, I asked people whether they’ve diversified traffic sources, and if so, how it’s going.

I got a bunch of responses that I wanted to share with y’all to hopefully inspire you if you don’t know which direction to take, now that the traditional Google-reliant niche site model is basically dead.

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Here are some of the responses:

“I'm in a particular niche that does well on Pinterest so have been concentrating more time on that and so far seeing great results. I have just in excess of 300 posts so plenty of content to share on the platform.”

Pinterest is a very popular choice right now. I know of multiple cases where someone pivoted from SEO to Pinterest (or started a site specifically for Pinterest traffic, ignoring SEO altogether) and saw incredible success.

I’m talking 1,000,000 monthly visitors in less than a year-type success. Ridiculous.

The only issue with Pinterest is that it doesn’t work well for non-visual niches. Like if you have a site about “plumbing”, it probably won’t do well. On the other hand, a site about bathroom inspiration (design, decor, etc) could do super well.

If Pinterest does’t work well for your site, there are plenty of alternative traffic sources.

Try several different ones, like this commenter:

“Pinterest - growth is glacial
YouTube - up and down, but generally heading in the right direction
Email - working on it”

And maybe social media won’t work for your site at all. If that’s the case, it’s worth revamping your site to match what Google wants to show. For an affiliate site being outranked by ecommerce stores, that would mean implementing ecommerce functionality.

That’s exactly what this commenter is doing:

“We are moving from a pure affiliate-focused site to a more product first approach with a product database and price comparison function. It will be expensive to make the shift, but it's the only path left after seeing our traffic go from 1.8m a month to 300k, with a team of 8 people. Unfortunately, reviews, informational content, best of are almost dead for us. As an authority in our space we can't even outrank any shop for informational terms or best of terms for which we used to rank first for in a matter of days with new content. Most of these shops have AI written content or really thin content. We have highly researched pieces of content written by experts with graphics etc., but it seems by not being shop gives us no hope. Is it possible to perhaps "fake" being a shop or actually become a shop and turn our fortunes? Would make for an interesting case study. The age of the niche affiliate site seems to be dying. We are hoping that by becoming more like a shop and providing more value to users google will reward that, but its not a certainty. Social media is almost impossible for us to drive any traffic in our niche, so making this transition is our last hope. Thanks for the great newsletters, always nice to see some positive things amongst all the doom and gloom! Cheers Ian. ”

No one knows whether the “affiliate site to shop” strategy will work. So far there have been zero documented HCU recoveries, so it’s anyone’s guess.

But if you look at what’s ranking for affiliate queries right now, you’ll see lots more ecommerce than before. Since Google evidently likes ecom stores better than affiliate sites, why not make the switch? Time will tell whether it’ll pay off, but if it does, it would be well worth it.

One more comment:

“Building an email list first and foremost”

I personally think this is the best strategy if you want to avoid algorithmic fluctuations, which happen on all platforms.

Email is different. You own your list. No one can take it away from you. Yes, you can end up in spam, but that’s easy to avoid. Today’s sponsor is an email course that includes info on how to stay out of the spam folder, so definitely check it out.

The cool thing about email lists (AKA newsletters) is that they can be monetized in many different ways. I also like that there’s no growth ceiling. You can continue growing your list and the bigger it gets, the more revenue it can generate.

Some popular monetization methods are sponsorships (like you see in this email), affiliate marketing, and selling your own products. I use all these methods, and can tell you they work great.

Another interesting monetization method (which you can do in addition to the above) is to send people to your site and make money from ads. Jon Dykstra does this and has seen good success (and a positive ROI).

The play is to aggressively grow your list (running paid ads is the easiest way). Then, send daily (or even twice daily) newsletters, directing people to an interesting article on your ad-monetized site. A certain % of people will click through, and if your list is large enough, you can make a huge profit.

It costs $ to gain subscribers in the first place, but once they’re on your list, they may click through to your site multiple times and you can easily make back what you spent to acquire them - and then some.

It’s all a numbers game. The more subscribers you have, the better. List growth is also covered in the course from today’s sponsor.

Anyway, hope this email was inspiring and gave you some new ideas to chew on.

Oh and, a faint glimmer of hope for HCU-affected sites:

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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