The Best Marketing Channels? My 3 Fav Online Traffic Sources

The very 1st episode of my podcast!

As a business owner you probably noticed that there are literally 100s of traffic sources you could be focusing on…

There’s Facebook, Blogging/Google SEO, Instagram, Podcasting, Snapchat, Paid Facebook Ads, Youtube, Adwords, Pinterest, and the list goes on and on…

There’s only so much time in the day… So chances are you will not do a great job on any of these marketing channels if you try to go after more than a handful of them.

My recommendation for beginners is to start with only 1-2 traffic channels and then expand to a total of 3-5 later on (if it makes sense).

So Leon, where should I focus my energy?

I’ll reveal my favorite 3 marketing channels in just a moment, but the short answer is “wherever your audience is…”

Keep in mind, while I think that at least 1-2 of my favorite traffic sources (below) will be appropriate for 80% of the businesses out there, depending on your specific niche you may very well need to pursue different channels altogether.

See the best traffic channels are the ones where you can get the most exposure from your specific target market.

For example, if you knit and know that there are tons of people on youtube searching for knitting videos, that’s where you need to be. Also, knitting is visual so video format may be best.

Or let’s say you interview experts in the field of neurosciences (just an example), then maybe podcasting will work best. The reason is because audio may be the best format for listening to interviews.

These are just a few examples to get you to start thinking about where you need to focus your time and energy.

They are: Google SEO, Youtube, and Pinterest (All organic).

They may change over time, but right now I believe these are the most “high leverage” traffic sources – that fit MOST industries. And the main reason for me liking them is because they are “Search based”.

What does search based mean? It means that once I’ve created a piece of content and uploaded it on one of these online channels, people can find these pieces of content by SEARCHING for them. And the best part is that the content lives on for a very long time…

It means that if I created something once in 2018, let’s say an article on “the good days of rock and roll music” and assuming that it’s a good piece of content (and people like it/share it, etc…), if 2 years from now someone searched for a keyword related to rock and roll music, my article could float up and people would end up on my website.

In fact, on my own sites (Got 4 others besides this one) I have pieces of content that are almost 10 years old and still bring me traffic every day!

How’s that for high leverage marketing?

Now, think of your organic facebook posts reach.

Once you publish a post, you’ll be lucky to reach 5-10% of your facebook audience (unless you pay)… The reach might be higher if it gets likes, and comments, and shares, etc… But still this content will eventually die out and never see the light of day again (or not much) – unless you repost it another time.

At least at this moment Facebook hasn’t really made their platform “super search based”. But who knows that might change sometime in the future.

The same thing applies to other social media sites.

No I’m not saying that. I still use facebook/Instagram for branding purposes and once you get a good following, 5-10% engagement may still be a high reach number.

What I’m saying is that I wouldn’t use social media (or low leverage platforms) as my MAIN/ONLY strategy. Posting your latest posts/videos on facebook may be appropriate but I wouldn’t spend so much time on it.

Instead spend your time where you can get the most leverage.

Right now, for me those channels are: Google, Youtube and Pinterest.

What are they for you? Leave a comment.