Diversify Your Traffic!

In today's post, I want to highlight one of the dangers about relying too much on a single source of traffic. This is the Google Analytics dashboard for one of my sites.

As you can see in the pie chart, I get 88.4% of my traffic from Google Search. My site ranks number 1 for a couple of keywords and I make my affiliate earnings off them. So why is this a problem?

Algorithm Changes

Here's the traffic breakdown from yesterday. 61 users from Google Search. Not too bad. But this is less than half of what it was a couple of months ago.

Back then, 99% of my traffic was from Google. I was clearly too dependent on big G!

Getting Back Up

To begin with, I'm going to leverage social media channels like Pinterest and Twitter to promote my site and generate some traffic. Ideally, i'd like only half my traffic to come via Search.

Ultimately, my favorite source of traffic would be Direct. Then, my site has the brand recognition with readers that they come back looking for more on their own. It's kind of tough on an affiliate marketing site but possible if you look at how the wirecutter has done.