631: How to Get Traffic to Your Website Without Relying on Google

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1:15What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. It's the business podcast you can actually apply. Now, the last 12 months have been challenging, to say the least, for individual content creators, people making money from their websites. But does that mean online publishing is dead? Is the niche site era officially over? Well, don't throw in the towel just yet because while my guest today has definitely been through the ringer when it comes to losing traffic from Google Updates, he's also proved his resiliency as an entrepreneur and tapped into new traffic sources that you can too.

1:46I'm excited to welcome John Dykstra from fatstacksblog.com back to the show. It's been far too long, eight plus years. John, welcome back. Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Nick. Yeah, it's been a long time, eight years. I was surprised. I remember doing it too. I distinctly remember talking to you. So this is great to be back. We may have still been recording in the corner of the living room at that point. It's a different era. Times have changed, but one thing remains constant, and that's, well, how do you make money on the internet? That's what we're diving into today. Stick around. We're talking creative ways to build traffic and revenue to your website from email, from Facebook, from Pinterest, from other sources that don't rely on the whims of SEO algorithms so you can still build that viable online income.

2:32After that, John's got a business idea to donate to you, something you might be able to take action on right away. And then we've got round three, the triple threat and marketing tactics that's working today, a new tool that John is loving right now, and his favorite book from the last 12 months. So the basic business model, as it has stood for the last decade, is my understanding, right? Publish helpful content, I'm going to monetize with display ads and affiliate relationships, and I'm going to pull in traffic from Google for people searching for these informational and maybe transactional type of keywords.

3:01Is that still the game that has changed a little bit? It's changed a ton for many of us. We've all sort of experienced Google losses at different phases since September 2023. I took it on the chin in the first one. And I think maybe that was a good thing because that forced me sooner to adapt, which I have. So, I mean, when we're talking like 90, 95%, you know, basically for a lot of people I know drops in Google traffic and most of us, that was the lion's share. So brutal. Yeah, it was scramble time. It was like figure out. Now, fortunately, I kind of had built up some side traffic sources and web assets over the years for my largest site project.

3:41And so I had kind of something to get rolling with, but I really had to dive in. And, you know, if I was going to recover at least even a portion of what I had lost. So that's what I've been working on. And we're coming up to a year now. And what's been the most effective so far? Email without question. Now, I say that with a caveat. Okay, email late fall after a few months, I decided, okay, I got to make the email work because I get the most control of that. There's lots of platforms that can drive lots of traffic. But again, you're reliant on a platform and they all make changes. And I didn't want to go through that again.

4:15And so, and I should say, you know, I don't have one regret about doing the Google thing because for 10 years, it was awesome. Sure. It's been so good. It was such a great business. It was a fun business. So I don't regret it. It's just a big change. It was a sudden change. I'd say that it was like out of the blue overnight. That was a big surprise. So yeah, it's a fantastic buy. If you can make it work, create a piece of content once and have it pay you for years. It's a beautiful model. It really is. It was great. It was a good ride. It was like a golden era of long tail SEO. But a few months after that, I made the decision.

4:51It's like, I got to make email work somehow. I, you know, I've had some email success with Fat Stacks, but that's a totally different type of project than my main, I call it a B2C type website. It's in a home and garden space. I won't specify which one, but it serves that audience. And so I was like, I got to make email work. Now, I never really had the pressure to really make it work back when the SEO was working. So I didn't try that hard. So I didn't really do it. You know, but I decided I'm like, I got to make this work. And I met and became friends with a guy named Scott DeLong, who founded Viral Nova many, many years ago.

5:26And since then has gone to launch some really big sites. And all his sites focused on email, which I didn't even know about. And he was saying, I've just been an email guy like for a long time. And, you know, so I talked to him and I'm like, all right, I got to do what Scott has done all these years. So that's what I did. And I have made it work. And that's been the focus now since I would say just before Christmas 2023. Okay. I think the challenging part is I need traffic to get people on to my email list so then I can email them to get traffic to like this weird chicken versus the egg thing here.

5:58Oh, absolutely. Right. You can't just say I'm going to do email and there's traffic. So there's two things you have to figure out with email. First, like you say, you got to get subscribers. That's super important. The second is how you're going to monetize it. In a nutshell, I focus on Facebook for a lot of traffic, a combination of organic and paid. I also do a lot of Pinterest. Pinterest works for my niche. It's a visual niche. It works quite well. And I'm moving into some push notifications, which is kind of working. Now, here's the thing. As your email list grows, it's now one of my largest traffic sources.

6:35And that's the whole point. Okay, so I monetize the email by sending readers back to my website where I have Mediavine ads. And that's the model that I love. I love monetizing with Mediavine ads. It's very passive on the revenue side. Okay, rather than selling sponsorships directly in the email or doing affiliate promos directly to the email. Yes, absolutely. I'm not opposed to that, 100%. I've tried affiliate, didn't really work with my readership. I'm not opposed to sponsorships, but that takes legwork. My favorite is throw in a bunch of links with, you know, little teasers and article titles and so forth and link back to my website and just get readers to go back every day, every day, every day.

7:14And that's where I get the traffic now for the ad revenue. Okay, got it. And then those subscribers are coming through initially Facebook traffic, Pinterest traffic. Let's dive into the Facebook side of things for what that looks like. So Facebook's fickle. So I have my ups and downs. It's not something I would 100 % rely on. In terms of the subscribers, Facebook ads for leads is quite good if you can get the cost down because that's like instant subscriber to your email list. And then I even basically will run like boosted posts to my content on my site, which I'm paying for clicks. And the ad revenue will sort of balance out and I'm getting free subscribers from like the various email signup forms.

7:56And that's a bit of a tricky operation because you can lose money very quickly. So if I break even, I count myself lucky. I even sometimes make a small profit. But I'm basically sort of supplementing the traffic on Facebook with some paid ads. It's a real mix. And that's how I like it. Got it. Where do you like to see the cost per subscriber when you're running these lead ads? Ideally, under 50 cents is good. I'm not always hitting that. Sometimes they creep up higher. I'm in Canadian currency. So I always have to do quick conversions in my head. So, yeah, if you can get something around 50 cents, that's pretty good.

8:33But it's really important if you're going to get started with this and make sure you're tagging your new subscribers properly. And the reason for that is you want to be able to track how well they're performing as email readers. You want to see that in a month, a good chunk of them are still opening and reading. Otherwise, you're throwing your money away, right? You're not going to make money from subscribers with this model of people basically unsubscribing after a week. Right. The real hope is here. They stick around for a few months or a year and they're regular readers. Yeah. How many times do they have to click over to make your four or five cents worth of Mediavine?

9:07Do you think about it in those terms of what's my breakeven point on this? Yes and no. I mean, I did for the first, I would say five, six months. I've kind of got it down to a system now. It's just kind of works on its own. I really do focus now more on just growing the traffic side of it. The numbers work for me, so I don't really have to. But yeah, at first I I was like obsessed with the numbers and for every subscriber source and looking at performance and revenue and click-through rates and all of this stuff. But I pretty much got it dialed in now. So I don't really pay too much attention to that because it is working and the revenue slowly grows.

9:42This is not a fast growth model, but I like it because it's fairly sustainable. Like I can count on it like clockwork. Do you have a sense of what the lifetime value of an email subscriber is for you? No, not yet. Yeah, it's too soon, I would say. But it's over 50 cents. Yes. Yeah, I imagine there's an 80-20 to all of it, like where the 20 % of the most engaged subscribers are the ones clicking on everything. They're making tons of money. And you're like, well, shoot, I would gladly pay two or$3 for each one of these. But for every one of those, there's four others that click on two things and then unsubscribe.

10:13So it balances out. 100%. A pleasant surprise I had with this was the ad RPMs that I earned with Mediavine are double what Google ever paid. And that was unexpected. And that has really helped the model. So with Mediavine, you can get certain links that work with some email service providers. There's these tracking links. I think they call them email connect. And so you get these links for every link or URL to your website. And if email readers click those, the RPMs for me are about double than what they would be from Google. So I don't even have to send a whole ton of visitors daily to generate some really good ad rep.

10:53And by double, I mean like 100, anywhere from 120, I've even had over 150 ad RPMs per thousand sessions from email with Mediavine ads. That's why I'm such a big Mediavine fan, because those are ridiculously high numbers for ads. Yeah, that's probably double or triple what I'm seeing from just Google traffic. And it's because now they have kind of some identifier of who that person is, like it said, more targeted stuff or show more targeted stuff. Yeah, it's exactly it. And so it really helps make the model financially viable. And it's really good. That's a job. I'll try to figure out a way how to disable BDavide for email traffic.

11:31It's like, hey, you're already subscribed. Like, I don't need to be showing you a bunch of ads when you click on this stuff. It's like, oh, wait, well, maybe shoot, I could triple this. That's really interesting. And then the emails that you're sending out are like, here's what we published this week. Like, how often are you sending? Like what and the content? I send three a day. Three emails a day? Yep. Who's writing all this stuff? I have a team. Okay. We've got to iron down. I've been so zeroed in on this model for a long time and we're training my team. I had a good team in place. That was a huge advantage.

12:00So it was just a matter of training them. But yeah, we're cranking out the content as fast as we can. Yeah. If you're relying on that as a traffic source, I guess you got to push send. I started out a few times a week and I built it up to one a day. Now I monitor my complaint rate very carefully. Yeah. Okay. Postmaster Google, postmaster.google, if anyone cares, you can track your spam and complaint rate in Gmail there. And those are very important numbers. Anything higher than 0.3%, ConvertKit's not going to be happy and they may do, I don't know what they would do, maybe kick you out. I don't know.

12:34I haven't come close to that, fortunately, but I do pay attention to that. So anytime I make a big change with my email, I will monitor that for a week or two just to make sure that my complaint rate's down. So I went up to two per day. Complaint rate didn't change. My revenue went up. Went to three a day. Same thing. Now, I think four would, I think I've hit a diminishing returns. But I'll tell you, you know, here's what got me on to trying that is I'm a regular Quora reader. I know a lot of people hate Quora. I like Quora. And same with I check out real estate websites regularly just kind of for fun.

13:05these websites will send you if you subscribe and they track everything you do like quora sends me five emails a day and i don't not only do i not mind i actually like it it's sort of like oh it's interesting they're not selling me stuff i don't sell my readers anything i'm just sending them interesting information that they've showed an interest in and it's the type of information that it's just ongoing there's never really like it's not like you've you know you've you've it's sort to like celebrity entertainment news. We just keep reading it. Right. So they don't mind. Is it through like an automated sequence or I got to come up with three new things to send every day, 15 times a week.

13:43It's like a link to one article. It's a roundup. Like what's, what's in the content of the messages? Most of it's all going to different articles on the website. I do, I do a variety of stuff and then I always test new stuff. And because you've been publishing this for a decade, right? You have this huge, huge library of content that you can point people back to? I do. I have 15 ,000 articles. Okay. You can recycle like every six or 12 months. I know Scott DeLong, who's the guy who I've learned so much from. I mean, he said, yeah, I would have no problem recycling every six months because realistically, you've got new subs, you've got a lot of subs that have left.

14:16I mean, they're going to forget, whatever. So yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, yeah. And I do recycle at this point. So, you know, it gets easier and easier. How many email subscribers are on that list now? 155 ,000. 155K, and that's through ConvertKit? Yes, which is expensive, but it pays. But the ROI is there. Here's, if you want to get all sort of technical on the email side of the thing, I still don't know what the answer is. I used to be very diligent in scrubbing weekly. If you didn't open for 90 days, you were removed. And then I've done a lot of reading about it. Now, the most damaging type of thing that can happen with your email list is a complaint or spam rating or spam complaint.

14:57That's based on your total number of subscribers. So if you have 100 subscribers and two people complain, you have a 2 % complaint rate. If you have 2 ,000 subscribers and two people complain, you have, I'm not going to toot the math because I'm terrible, but a far less smaller percent. And it's a percent as far as I know is that what matters. So it sounds like I have a huge list, but I haven't been scrubbing. And the reason I don't scrub is I want to keep that complaint rate really low. And that's why it's so low. Yeah. So you'll see a lower open rate because subscribers go stale. But if they're not opening, they're not complaining either.

15:32Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And can I tell you that this is the right way to manage my list? I actually don't know. I think there's a lot of different theories on the best approach. But for me right now, the complaint rate to keep it low is really important. So this is what I'm doing. So it sounds like I have a really big list, but my open rates sort of get lower and lower. But that's okay. The revenue just keeps going up. So that's all that really matters to me at the end of the day. Right. It's not necessarily open rate. It's raw number of people who are seeing this message. Yes. I've been back and forth on this.

16:04Well, do you remove people who are unsubscribed? Do you try and re-engage them? Do you delete the ones? and I historically have deleted those people after maybe six months, but it's painful, especially if you're paying for subscribers, like in this case, but I don't know. And then you see like a temporary spike in open rate and maybe that sends some positive signal to the inboxes. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's all individualized, personalized based on how you reacted for messages from the sender in the past. But that's fascinating. I had no idea that you're sending that volume. I know the Fatstacks blog newsletter is really interesting to read And that's a very prolific writer there, sending multiple times a week on the online business side of things.

16:42But you've been cranking out more content on the actual B2C site. What else is getting people in the door at the top of the funnel to join the email list to get traffic initially anyways? What's working in the Pinterest world these days? Pinterest is good. I think a lot of people have hopped on Pinterest. And so I used to get really high amounts of traffic from Pinterest. It's gone down. It's still high. It's still good. And in fact, I'm doubling down big time on Pinterest. I am working with a service just to scale up faster. I was doing a whole bunch of stuff and then I stopped just because I just didn't have, I had to deploy team members to the email and it just sort of took away from Pinterest.

17:22But now we've got the email humming, I'm working Pinterest really hard again. So Pinterest is good. Pinterest is really good traffic source if you're in the right niche for it. And Pinterest is publisher friendly. That's what I like about it. It's relatively stable. And, you know, they have had their algo shifts over the years. But I would say for most publishers, it's been a relatively stable traffic source, which is nice because you can count on it. You can invest time and money into growing on the platform. If you're in the home and garden space, it could be, you know, 15 ideas to redo your backyard or, you know, the top 10 paint colors that are hot this season.

17:57It seems like it lends itself well to Pinterest versus, I don't know, I was having a hard time in the personal finance space. Let's say you're in the SEO niche or personal finance. It's not great to be on Pinterest. Your time and money is much better spent elsewhere. Okay. So you got to create these special graphics. Probably last we spoke, eight plus years ago, group boards were all the thing. Is there anything that goes into the, I mean, it's kind of an SEO content platform too, where people can use that search bar to find what they're looking for. And if your content can rank well there, it could be a consistent traffic source.

18:30But like, do you need to be constantly feeding that machine by repinning and refreshing the images and creating multiple images and split testing? Like there's a whole Pinterest economy that is a black box to me right now. Yeah, you pretty much hit it there. Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of it. I mean, Pinterest is a search engine. It's an image search engine. But it's also got a social aspect. I think the social in terms of pins being distributed to your followers is less important now than the search aspect. So I think learning how to find keywords and topics, and then of course, trending pin designs that work is really what you want to do and find those topics that are going to work for you that are within your niche or what your whole website's about.

19:13There's this really great new tool. It's going to be the new tool I'll talk about, but I might as well mention it now. It's PinClicks. Just came out, not even, I think about a month ago. It's the only thing. It's a SaaS cloud software. It will actually do Pinterest keyword research for you. It will track the keywords you're gunning for on Pinterest. It will show you the top trending pin designs for particular keywords. It's basically Ahrefs for Pinterest in a nutshell. And I've been using that and it's awesome. And it's a lot of people are loving it because it's just Pinterest used to be a lot of guesswork.

19:46Like you had mentioned, you try to find keywords by doing auto complete in the Pinterest search. We all did that, right? You don't have to do that anymore. That's tedious and it works, but it's tedious. And you're going to get a lot more ideas with PinClick. So finally, there's a tool out there for us. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of the whole Pinterest. But the downside with it, there's a lot more people on Pinterest now because, let's face it, a lot of us were focused on Google before. And now, you know, we have to switch to Pinterest. Yeah, we got to go someplace else. Using Tailwind or anything else to schedule stuff out?

20:17Or is it best to have somebody post this manually? I post manually, actually. I've used Buffer. I like Buffer because I can do all my social media in one place and their Pinterest posting is actually, it worked for me. It's good. But I think most of what I'm doing right now is direct through Pinterest scheduler. I'm also, as I mentioned, working with a new service that's taking over a lot of it. And they're not only like pinning, they're actually doing the keyword research with pin clicks. They're creating the content on my site and then creating all the picks. I know like A to Z for me, just because it was either that or I had to hire a couple of people.

20:50And a lot of times I prefer to just contract out. It's easier for me. Okay. And so Pinterest drives traffic that generates Mediavine page views that generates hopefully some email signups. People see the opt-in on the site and they say, sure, send me emails about home and garden decor or whatever, you know. And so they join the email list that way. Well, yeah, exactly. That's the point. And Pinterest traffic is high quality traffic. You should look at time on site and the page views per visitor and the ad revenue. It earns typically more than Google traffic. So it's an engaged audience and they're good email readers.

21:27That's it. It's so niche dependent. My experience was like the exact opposite. It was like super low engagement, you know, really low time on site. Never clicked on anything. It was like, this is before I had any ads on the site. And so I was like, we're spending all this time and effort and energy trying to get this traffic and it doesn't even do anything once we do get it. I was like, oh, forget it. And then, you know, to the point about, you know, playing in somebody else's sandbox, somebody else came in and claimed that we had like ripped off one of their pins. And it was like a competing account.

21:54You know, it was a baseless claim. And then you try to file this appeal and they're like, your account is suspended. It was not even worth fighting it because, you know, the cost to hire a service or have a VA manage this was less than what the traffic was bringing in. Like, forget it. So my account has been banned for years. I don't think you're missing out given the niche that you're in. You know, 201 Creative, which is my Pinterest service, they're helping out big time to scale. I like to keep a really lean team in terms of they just deal with a certain type of content. And then the other thing you mentioned was push notifications.

22:29This is like when the little browser thing pops up and says, this site wants to send you notifications and people click yes or no. Yeah, that's okay. You know, I've done it three different times over the course of 10 years, use push. and I'm always optimistic. But the same thing always seems to happen. I get to a certain amount of subscribers and no matter how many push notifications I send, no matter how good I think they are, I sort of hit this plateau of how much traffic I can send. And it seems I've hit it again. And it's not really enough traffic to warrant continuing. But I am going to stick with it for a little bit.

22:58I'll, you know, pretty inexpensive. I'm definitely making like 10 times what it costs every month. It's just, I don't know if I can like scale it really, really high. I don't know. It's one of those things. I don't know. I've heard, I've talked to people where some publishers have really good success with push. I'm just sort of mediocre right now. And of course, you got to have visitors to your site initially before they can even opt in to a push notification. So it's kind of like a second tier. Like, how do I get, how do I turn one visitor into two? How do I make sure people come back? You know, obviously I'd love to capture their email.