our cloudways web growth Summit 2024 uh it’s been a lot of fun jaming with you all in chat what an amazing session with Carolyn and Shelby kicking off today lots of conversation on SEO and traffic and what it’s going to take to grow your business online and so we’re going to keep that value coming with this next panel discussion we’re going to be talking about things Beyond search how to leverage some new traffic avenues for for your website uh your website traffic uh your business traffic and we’ve got two amazing panelists joining me on stage here I’d love to introduce first uh vaselina vinova she’s a digital marketing strategist um she’s founder of venova domme she helps Brands build relationships in scale through digital channels specializing in content marketing brand messaging and copyrighting she also organizes science events with ratio and has trained over 2,000 students sharing her expertise across Europe vaselina welcome to the program hey Brent happy to be here great to have you as well and our second panelist for this discussion is Jerry Broadway Jerry is a digital marketing expert a music producer and DJ he is an experienced producer DJ content creator and he has demonstrated an amazing ability at creating viral content on Tik Tok and YouTube Jerry welcome to the program hey thanks for having me I’m happy to be here yeah well great to have you here you’re in the studio you got the the Creator Vibe already so loving loving that very cool thank you thank you I I gotta give credit to my my fiance she pretty much designed it all she she took away the responsibility from you she said yeah Jerry you’re not gonna do it I’m gonna take care of this part right so yeah if I did this myself it would just end up looking like a like a frat house well obviously Tik Tok and YouTube how how you look and how you present yourself I’ve heard it matters a little bit obviously you’re probably an amazingly talented musician and producer as well so that that probably does not hurt so uh so all good panel discussions we’ve got a handful of questions we’re gonna be working through over the next uh the next bit in this session to start things off let’s talk about uh AI tools like chat GPT and Google bard um so I’d love to hear from each of you on this one but how are AI tools like chat GPT and Bard uh in influencing user search behavior and what does this mean for your traffic strategies and vassie maybe we will go to you first on this question sure thing um yeah I need to preface everything I say with the fact that when it comes to AI I feel that if me or anyone else watching this uh had all the answers we would be uh much richer and probably wouldn’t be spending time here so I feel that with AI it’s um a really Dynamic situation currently the context is changing every day so what I say now and what I say if you ask me the same question in two weeks time May differ quite a lot uh but currently my mind is at a sort of this dis position no matter how user Behavior changes specifically meaning if we’ll be you know conversing and asking questions that way if we’ll be looking at the there there haven’t been really 10 Blue Links for a really long while now on Google search results but anyway um no matter what the format of Engagement will be I feel that the great opportunity when it comes to creating content and driving traffic from uh search would lie with having really detailed uh experience based opinions on things and sort of paradoxically Designing our content more around sharability around real human interaction and really being able to express an opinion that’s different compared to what we’re currently seeing which is more of this semantic search approach where we are essentially all of us running the same race where we’re looking at the results page and trying to outsmart the competition and regurgitate the same stuff in a little bit of a better manner than than our competitors out there um so just to sort of sum it up I think the big opportunity lies with expressing your personal opinion as an expert in a topic and really sharing your expertise and your experience to back this up so just not just like throwing in content that sounds like everything else I mean you got to pick a position you have to have that unique expertise to be able to stand out right now which I think is is a good message in general uh Jerry what are your thoughts on AI tools like chat gbt influencing user search behavior and what does this mean for our traffic strategies so personally I love uh using AI tools uh not just like chat GPT which I use probably the most but I also like using some of the more creative AI tools like stable diffusion for creating images and uh there’s a lot of AI tools that are coming up in content creation like in D Vinci resolve that’s been super useful um personally in the affiliate funnels I’ve been involved in I have seen AI content rank pretty well and that’s like kind of the big question is going forward how receptive is Google and search engines going to be to AI content because um especially with tools like chat GPT especially if you’re hooked up with like an API of some sort it’s really easy to just like you know Farm out content right and that makes me wonder if like if you are somebody who’s just farming out content with like various different scripts and like like a a backend uh that you’ve built out like is that going to get flagged is that going to get penalized so that’s kind of a big question question for me that I’ve been thinking about um but I I do think that chat GPT stuff like that is going to it what’s nice is you can get answers right on the Fly and I I guess for me it’s I’m I’m kind of in the position where I’m asking questions and I’m trying to like navigate how this is going to go because if you have something like chat gbt or like Bard that’s indexed the internet and you know and you’re getting uh content like on the Fly uh answers on the Fly I yeah it’s it’s I I just wonder how that’s going to play out but from my experience I have seen AI content rank uh it’s a big question on whether or not that’s going to be moved towards spam or if it’s going to be kind of like anything’s up for grabs if that makes sense yeah I feel like sometimes when I’m like browsing the web now or looking for products and services I’ll be reading something and you you used to be able to tell like what bad content was or what like poorly written content was but then there’s like the AI kind of like mistakes right which always flag a little bit interesting as user you’re kind of like reading something or maybe you’re looking at a picture of a kitchen remodel and you’re like oh this is a beautiful kitchen wonderful colors and then you just start seeing things that really like don’t add up as a user and I’m just I’m curious how the algorithms kind of figure that stuff out like is it easy to to to flag is this AI content or is it just poorly written human content but yeah seems like we’re in a very transition stage right now no I I completely agree and uh what I’ve heard is that as long as it’s helpful as long as it’s helping people come to conclusions and people are like getting helpful information from it I think that’s going to be one of the primary factors of you know whether or not this is good content you know because I I don’t think AI makes content inherently bad but you can use it for nefarious purposes like spam or just basically making content engagement Farms which isn’t actually providing any sort of value you’re just kind of farming people’s attention or farming for whatever it might be and I think that would probably over time that algorithms May shift to be able to determine what content is actually harmful uh uh with AI yeah have either of you seen people um be penalized in terms of traffic for overusing AI or using it in a way that wasn’t effective for for their business yeah there was um there was recently this um example out there of of some SEO expert or other who essentially went online and bragged about uh the fact that they had basically reverse engineered their biggest competitors website and made uh AI write up the same type of post just paraphrasing the copy and essentially created a dup of of their website more or less uh and they had initially they had pretty decent uh traffic numbers getting traffic from uh organic search I’m obviously blanking on the name of the guy but I’ll sort of research that and come back to the chat after the session to to give you guys the link uh and initially the results were pretty amazing but then what happened is that as soon as and I think this is something that Google’s been very open about addressing with all the uh the newer versions of the helpful content updates they’re essentially trying to to flag that address that and make sure that it’s not you know just the same type of content just in a different in in a different phrasing so what they what ended up happening was that their website lost rankings very very quickly and they are currently left standing on the sidelines and trying to figure out what to do next h i mean obviously like if they’re copying their competitor’s site and using AI to to do that I mean I guess good riddance with that but um you know I wonder if it was the bragging of the success that maybe got them caught or it was the actual semantics of the content itself um yeah let’s go to our second question here we’ll come back to you on this one vassie to start uh besides search engines what specific platforms should we consider for diversifying traffic Source how what do you think about LinkedIn podcasts video platforms Etc how do those fit into the mix oh man that’s uh that’s a very good question and I’m going to use one phrase that I know gets people I rate quite a lot but it really depends on who you’re trying to Target um so the first the first rule of thumb is obviously get back to your audience and figure out where they’re spending most of their time and and try to create content that way I think from uh my if I put my content creator had on um there’s this um sort of really useful framework that I use especially when I’m working with customers who may have a bit of an issue with expanding their current content operations because they have just limitations of human resources or other types of resources so what we usually try to do is um focus on one uh we call that Discovery platform and relationship platform after a framework that uh jcla created and essentially the idea is your Discovery platform is the way the place where you’re auditioning for attention from a larger audience and this can be search but it can very well be um any form of social media platform be it LinkedIn be it Tik Tok or Instagram uh so on I’m not personally using these as much but I feel like Jerry is Gonna Fill In These gaps pretty quickly for us um and then on the other hand side you have a relationship platform which may have uh fewer uh may have less reach fewer people who are actually consuming that content but the engagement with these people is of much higher quality and these would usually be long for videos or podcasts or newsletters some place where people need to actively um make another step to consume your content be by subscribing or by following your podcast on Spotify or something like that but they are that much more engaged with the content um so this is for me a nice a nice balance between going for reach and for wider awareness and then uh going after the people who are most engaged to forge these relationship that are at the end of the day GNA bring in the revenue and if you can uh I don’t know if while we’re hearing from Jerry if you could link to that framework I I love that I think just giving people that Clarity of having a a traffic Discovery kind of Channel where you’re getting big reach but maybe you’re not going as deep with people and then having that place that you really go deep with your user base or your fans or your customers um I love that that’s genius um Jerry what do you think in terms of platforms we should consider Beyond search for diversifying traffic Source what’s kind of your uh traffic drug of choice outside of search so um first I want to say I definitely agree with vaselina uh uh in that it really depends on what your Niche is you know and I know that’s kind of just like a cliche but it it really does depend like where your audience is spending the most time uh now in my personal experience of course like I’m biased I really like Tik Tok and I really like YouTube and uh the reason why I like video platforms is because you know you you’ve heard of the phrase like a picture is worth a thousand words well you know like a VI a video is worth a million words in my opinion because you really get to engage with your audience they can uh put a face to the content and uh so for me Tik Tok and YouTube just any sort of video platform like Instagram where you can put out content uh um is is absolutely phenomenal and I I would say that when creating content go at it from the perspective of trying to like provide value and actually help out your audience um sometimes I encounter content creators that that function more like Gatekeepers to information and I think that that kind of just leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths and uh it doesn’t allow you to actually build an audience like you want to provide value and then the thing that you’re selling or the thing that you’re promoting is an an addition in addition to um uh to yeah it’s basically in addition you know so using using Tik Tok and YouTube and video platforms to create like a um a broad uh range of information regarding your product uh so that people can come to your channel really get immersed into your content they see who you are they can really get a feel for your personality and see that you know what you’re talking about and that uh you have high quality information you know and then you have the stuff on the addition uh in addition that people can subscribe to if they would like to get more information whether that be like a newsletter whether that be like on your Twitter where you’re posting more content whether that be a Blog um but I once again it really depends on like who your target market is you know because if you’re targeting people like for example and more the niches I’m involved in which is probably like uh males you know 20-year-old like teenagers that are making music you know and they’re looking for maybe uh sound design tips or how to produce a specific sound you know that’s going to be a lot different for from you know someone who is trying to set up a a server or build their own website and they’re using like uh cloudways and other they’re working with Lin Linux and they’re trying to navigate uh the back end you know so um yeah yeah I guess I’m kind of rambling but that’s no I I think the the headline there I mean is is providing as much value as you can and and look at the competition out there I mean I think in terms of content like at least what I see personally as a consumer and a Creator is there’s just so much really amazing high quality content with lots of high value free information out there and I think if you are getting into the space as a Creator wanting to compete with that and get that traffic you know you do have to probably offer some of your best stuff for free or some uh snippet of your best stuff right being able to come out there and any insight Jerry for you in terms of what platform has been better and I know it depends but for you specifically between like you know insta Tik Tok YouTube from that framework that Bassie was talking about like what what platforms have given you the biggest audience versus maybe the best relationships and monetization so I I in terms of like uh funnels like affiliate related funnels I would say YouTube because you can really post that long form content and you can really build out that web of content um I I think I I really like long form content even personally when I’m searching for things I I tend to actually stay away from short form content because I know the good stuff is going to be in those videos that are over 20 minutes right especially if I’m trying to learn something um but in terms of audience and reach I would say definitely Tik Tok you know Instagram because with those videos you have the potential to reach literally a millions of people uh with a with a good viral video you know and then making sure that you’ve done the the work to Interlink your your accounts together you know so when you do have a video that goes viral they can actually find your other content and they can get immersed in that content that you’ve created on you know whether it be uh YouTube whether it be a podcast whether it be um whatever medium you choose to do yeah I love that so having that using those platforms as they maybe being more strategic about it not just being all in on Tik Tok but having that kind of strategy where you can actually monetize and grow from there oh sorry one one last thing I I can speak from personal experience on Tik Tok you know because you can’t really put links in the video content what I would do is I would create a video with the intention that it may or may not go viral but in the event that it does go viral I would make sure to make a comment and then pin that comment so like hey if you want to find my song or if you want to find uh if you want to find more information you can search this information into YouTube and I would that would be my call to action essentially like search this phrase in YouTube and then you can and then my video would be first and that was in relation to promoting my own music yeah and and I find that like like at least for me personally when I’m talk I’m immersed in like a channel like once I once I’ve gotten a hold of somebody’s content I’m learning from them and then I follow them on YouTube and then I’m consuming like hours and hours of their content I mean obviously at that point right you’re much more likely to take recommendations through affiliate links buy a course or a program uh and take some type of monetization action so very cool uh another question here on our panel discussion on leveraging new avenues for traffic for smbs so small to medium businesses on a tight budget because hey you know it’s 2024 everybody’s got to watch their money what are the most costeffective strategies or platforms for driving High Roi traffic in I think we’ve touched on this a little bit but vassie what what’s kind of your opinion on high Roi traffic what are the most costeffective ways to make that happen right now yeah um well this is this is a pretty pretty good question I think we’re all wondering around about that uh I think that when it comes to one strategy that I want to highlight it would definitely be repurposing content and I think uh Jerry sort of uh hinted at that when he was saying you know if you want to watch some something worth your time you need to watch something that’s long form and that for sure is true but when you’re trying to reach a new audience these short formats are going to drive that initial initial interest and initial awareness and what I found most helpful is to design my content with repurposing in mind from the get-go so that when we have let’s say a a long form podcast episode with a guest or a live webinar like this one you can then create and the technology is so far ahead of its time nowadays it’s so easy to create short outtakes of that content and then share them as YouTube shorts or um short form reals or any any other format that makes sense for your content but sort of the the way I would approach this is to focus heavily on repurposing content and there are a lot of different ways you can do that I’m going to include in the chat a link to a blog post where I try to sort of structure these different repurposing methods in six different categories so people maybe can get some ideas out of that but the biggest highlight there is to think about repurposing from the get-go because it’s very hard to repurpose content if you weren’t mindful about that opportunity from the start and you didn’t design your content in a way where it’s easy enough to create short uh formats to reformat that content to create outtakes and so on and or just having somebody like kind of always filming right I mean just making sure that while you’re producing content having like a side camera or something that kind of crabs that more impromptu moments um Jerry how how I guess you can start are do you have a repurposing content strategy does that play into uh how you drive more high value Roi traffic to your businesses so I I would definitely agree uh with vaselina in that yes repurpose your content and the the way that you would go about doing that is I I would start with creating something that’s long form so that’d be recording for probably you know four five hours six hours however long that you need to record for and then once you and also this involves leveraging yourself in your own creativity and your own ability to you know do and learn because if you’re on a tight budget obviously you can’t be spending like thousands of dollars on an agency to be taking care of the stuff so you really have to rely on yourself and uh take the time to utilize all the amazing tools that are available right um and I mean YouTube is an amazing resource in this regards and that you know you can learn how to video edit you can learn how to do captions you can learn how to do a lot of this stuff that may seem very difficult at first but it’s it’s really not that hard if you’re just willing to spend the time to learn and um like that’s the big thing but anyways to get back to the uh original method on how you repurpose content so you start by recording for a long period of time and then from there you would cut you would bring that into your video editing program and then you’d cut it up into sections um you would you would have the long form content that the cut would be basically an hour two hours long maybe 30 minutes however long that needs to be and then that is the long form that you would post either to like YouTube um you could post that as a podcast to maybe SoundCloud or Spotify Apple podcast whatever that channel is and then from there then you would take the little bits and pieces you’d cut it up into even shorter form uh content the kind of like the highlights of that um and then that’s the content that you would do the captions for and then put it on Instagram Tik Tok maybe LinkedIn um and then from that because you have all that content that you’ve been recording for a couple hours you could probably even write a blog post to that or something that goes on LinkedIn so it’s like that’s that kind that’s kind of the process of repurposing that stuff like you do you spend like a day recording content and then you basically um uh chop it up into uh sections that is compatible for each platform that you want to post to and then once you actually go through the process of doing that yourself and you get really good at it um then as your business grows then you can start start Outsourcing that process you know because and because you’ve done it uh yourself you you have that intimate knowledge of okay this is what it needs to look like and then you’ll know how to hire appropriately because you’ve done it yourself right so you just need someone to basically replace this process you know and then if you want to get really technical you can even interface with different apis in order to like automate some of that process because a lot of repurposing content is like you know filling in descriptions you know making sure you’re reposting it to this and it’s like very monotonous work that can be done by like a python script you know um but yeah that’s those are my two sents yeah it’s it’s cool to watch like people that have grown up probably like yourself Jerry who are like native content creators like you you’ve you’ve been like introduced to like mobile content creation and I think a lot of brands in particular or businesses that have you know leadership that’s been around for a little bit longer right they’re still creating content I think on some old paradigms where like you know they’re they’re trying to create really polished stuff and when I go on Instagram when I go on Tik Tok it’s like stuff that’s getting widely shared is rarely the stuff that’s you know highly polished really expensive looking content it’s like the behind the scenes stuff it’s the offthe Cuff Stuff it’s the you know the real more authentic kind of raw stuff and I think that from a video perspective that probably comes out of you know producing content yourself with your phone camera whatever and capturing those really like candid moments um that end up going kind of viral the video platforms I know we’ve talked about those a little bit are you either of you using like some alternative platforms like Reddit or Kora I know with AI like those platforms had definitely gotten a lot more um interest just because they’s such you know question answer type of platforms discussion authentic content it’s not like you know Reddit if you’re going on there and pumping affiliate links and stuff like that you get dumped pretty quickly whereas I think in the search landscape you can get by with a little bit more but are you seeing other alternative platforms being a good source right now for traffic oh is this a question for me uh either I you know I was just curious I hadn’t heard like Reddit come up yet in the discussion and so I didn’t know if either of you had success on that platform or other Alternatives um I can I can maybe maybe talk about redit a bit and I have to say it’s really funny to be watching this face because I have by now something like more than uh probably like 15 years of experence experience in content creation and marketing in digital platforms so it’s fun to see it’s almost like the fashion space where every 10 years you see a trend from your childhood come up again and with Reddit I feel it’s sort of the same thing because like five or six years ago everyone was super bullish on Reddit and quora as ways to drive traffic now Reddit is resurging in popularity and people are again trying to find ways to leverage that and I feel that with platforms like that as marketers we need to shift our attention and perspective a little bit from what’s going to drive traffic to what’s going to drive uh you know the right people to be introduced to your brand uh and I can I can give you a sort of an example of what I mean by that um like five or six years ago I was working for this company called in hensive which is a Resume Builder app so our whole shtick when it came to creating content was to um create different examples of resumés for celebrities popular characters and so on just to Showcase how the product was actually working in real life and to add some some additional element of of interaction with with new audiences that didn’t necessarily need to use the tool at the moment uh one of my favorite campaigns that I got to work on was when the last season of GRA Game of Thrones was airing we created the CVS of the top contenders for the iron throne and then we posted them on Reddit with the uh imagined feedback of vestos HR so um we first off just on on a content creator level if you you’re working on something that you’re really passionate about I feel that it shows and people get excited about that just because you’re excited about it so this is this is a top uh a top uh piece of advice from me as well what ended up happening was that uh we shared these images on Reddit itself we linked back to our original blog post with all the examples in the comments but our goal wasn’t necessarily to bring people back to the blog on the spot but just to get them interested enough in this resume example so that they would remember the format and what ended up happening was that we uh popped up on the first page of the subredit freefolk which was the the top subreddit for Game of Thrones Puffs at the time and uh we got quite a lot of views of that individual piece I don’t remember anymore by how how much it was but the interesting thing was that we were doing customer interviews about a year later with new people who had just signed up to the platform and more people than I would have ever expected came back and said that they first saw our platform on Reddit with this example and when it the time was right for them to actually look for a Resume Builder when they needed to change jobs they started Googling and looking for that specific tool that they had seen uh in real life back then I’m sorry for the long expose here but I promise I have a point my point being that traffic isn’t the only metric of success we may be looking at what now become popular as zero click content where we don’t necessarily get the traffic back to our platform but we are getting the eyeballs and we are getting the attention and this is valuable in end of itself I think that’s so you know it’s I love that first of all amazing creative Direction idea I can just imagine when I’m watching like the season finale of Game of Thrones you know how entertaining that would have been to see um all of the major characters resumés and you know like just how they would have done you know applying for jobs or whatever but I think as as like a marketing leader sometimes it’s hard to like sign off on ideas that are amazing like that because you’re like man the ROI who a who knows who this Roi is ever going to be who knows if this is ever going to go viral and then even what you just said right it took a year before you started to get some like soft feedback that you know clearly that made a huge mark on customers but you know that’s the stuff that’s going to really get you that Viral reach and that’s going to grow um I’ve always thought it’s really hard to have a strategy of like create viral content because it’s like you know it’d be like it’s like gambling in some ways right it’s like you never know what exactly is is going to go viral but um I love that that takeaway um Jerry are you doing any other like platforms outside of the core you’ve already talked about like Reddit or other social platforms um in terms of some success stories yeah yeah I love using reddits um Reddit is I think personally I’m I’m biased I think Reddit was a lot better uh so I started using I’ve I have had a Reddit account for about 11 years now I started using it in high school and um personally I thought Reddit was a lot better even before the redesign because it felt like the the platform had a lot more soul and a lot more Community um with the redesign it’s become very kind of corporate and everything is kind of the same like each subreddit that you go to uh it just feels all the same where before in the past um each subreddit had its own soul because you could customize the CSS and Reddit allowed a lot more indivi individuality and personality and that’s something that I really miss about Reddit I I do still use Reddit for like smaller communities um and I have had success uh using Reddit for I guess like marketing campaigns um so one of my I’m going to link to this channel but one of my first channels that I started a YouTube channel um was actually uh here I put the link in the in the in the stage chat but I actually started this Channel Through Reddit as kind of like a side art project as you would say okay and and I promoted it through Reddit by posting to this subreddit called uh YouTube haou which is uh okay maybe I should take a step back um and maybe give it a little bit of context for people who uh for the people who don’t understand what Reddit is so Reddit is a social media platform that has these different pages called subreddits and each subreddit has its own little identity and its own Community right so there’s a subreddit for SEO I think big SEO is like the big uh uh subreddit or our startup there’s uh a subreddit for politics there’s a subreddit for like pretty much anything that you can think of you’ll find a little Community um you can almost think of it as like maybe a Facebook page but it’s Reddit um so anyways I started this channel uh by posting memes that I would make uh I I’d make these little midi drawings and then I thought this was like super short content like five to 10 seconds and I posted it to the subreddit called YouTube ha coup which was specialized in like this short form like very funny type content right and um this is just a random idea I had I started drawing out these midi uh these MIDI images and then I posted to Reddit um I would actually wake up early in the morning at like seven or uh like 6 AM to post it early because I know that like Reddit is primarily us-based so um and they would go viral essentially uh and another big thing about Reddit is that you can upvote and downvote things so it’s a very community-based community-driven platform and that the users are actively engaging with the content to upvote and downvote stuff so to make a long story short I started creating out these short form videos I posted it to Reddit and they would actually go viral on Reddit um getting like tens of thousands of views and then because they would go viral on Reddit and send a bunch of traffic to YouTube it would actually get picked up by the YouTube algorithm and start circulating around that uh uh kind of catch that wave and now some of like the top videos have like millions of views just like kind of these short uh little memes right um and I think that’s a good example of how you can really leverage thirdparty platforms that you might not even be thinking about to uh to like promote a video or to you know make it to to grow some content um and then something another thing that I’ve done with Reddit is actually leverage like my SEO skill set to actually uh promote products and this is something that I I did back this is probably back in college maybe about seven years ago um I used HRS and uh to scrape Reddit keywords because Reddit tends to rank really well in the search results but um it’s very difficult to you know keep something up on Reddit because uh I honestly I could talk like about like a couple hours about Reddit because it’s a it’s a very um what would you say it’s a it’s a very diverse Community but anyways back to the marketing so I I used HRS to scrape Reddit keywords like because a lot of things tend to rank in redit like and I would uh get these keywords like best gaming mouse best like labtop best uh you know best pillow and I would just had like I just had a spreadsheet of this you know and then I started actually creating Reddit posts and ranking them in Google so when people search for that keyword plus Reddit because a lot of people just tend to go to Reddit straight for information because Google search results have kind of gone downhill in my opinion over the time as the years have gone by so people use Reddit as like authenticity that people tend to feel that Reddit is more authentic but anyways so I was ranking for these keywords like best pillow best gaming mouse and I was actually compiling a list of like the best ones I was like researching what people on Reddit were saying were the best and I was linking to Amazon um and it it ended up doing really well I was ranking like number one for a lot of these keywords and it like um it was doing really well generating a lot of revenue for Amazon but unfortunately I guess that was against Amazon’s affiliate policy so that that uh they I had to end up removing all my affiliate links but um I guess I tell that story because if you are someone who’s like trying to sell something you have a good product that is like valuable to the community that would be a great way to you know to OTE it you know by you know engaging with the Reddit community in a meaningful way where you’re providing value and then you use an SEO skill set to rank that so when people search for your product plus Reddit or your Niche plus Reddit then you can actually maybe have a do Authority in that in that Niche love it I uh I’m sorry you got your hand slapped by Amazon but it’s a it’s a fun case study not everything always works in the long term I want to go to our attendees here for a quick minute we’ve got some fun polls for us to do uh which non search platform uh has given you the best traffic results so I’ve just published that out to our folks here whether it’s YouTube LinkedIn Tik Tok podcast or some other tool so let us know what your um what’s worked the best for you in terms of non search platforms and we’ll come back here to that poll in just a minute and I I love that you highlighted too Jerry that every subreddit has a very unique culture they have their own like Community they have their own standards uh and I think a lot of businesses make the mistake of just trying to jump into Reddit and they start to promote themselves or they don’t they don’t really become a part of that specific subreddit Community First before they start to um you know try to promote their stuff and then they end up getting you know downvoted or kicked or banned or not getting meaningful results so I love that you highlighted that because I think it’s really important and just the the user Behavior has changed I know for me personally I think I’m reading like way more Reddit results when I’m think about making big purchases um versus going to Google and being bombarded by uh affiliate listicles like right where you’ve got these you know 10 best whatever right and you look at them and you’re like these are all affiliate links you’re all getting you know you’re all making money off of this is it really the best security system right um and I think that you know people have gotten a little bit wise to that obviously Google’s trying to make some changes there but uh I know Reddit it’s like a it’s a very Doggy Dog platform if you post some stuff that’s not like in alignment with that community and the standards like they’re going to they’re going to eat you alive right and so when you actually see content that is upvoted a lot you can probably trust those recommendations trust that experience so um if you haven’t yet put in your poll results make sure you do that I’m seeing a couple of results still coming in here on this question of which non- search platform has given you the best traffic results and hopefully the answer to this poll poll will give you a little bit of an Insight on maybe your strategy where to invest your time as a online business uh person as a Creator as an agency as a freelancer if you’re out there thinking about where you’re going get the best results for traffic outside of search yeah do you mind if I add on to uh what you said uh about Reddit uh yes so you’re you’re definitely right uh Reddit is extremely adverse to marketing uh which is why I think people that are not familiar with the platform find it a little bit difficult to I guess work with but you really can’t treat Reddit as like a marketing how do I how do I explain this like with Reddit you really need to immerse yourself into the community and really like because it kind of is like it feels like a little bit of a club and people can tell if you’re just like trying to Market or just like Shi something right so you really need to provide value you really need to be engaged with the conversation and pro provide something that’s helpful you know that and that’s the cool thing is that once you are once you are engaging with that community and you are providing something that’s meaningful and you’re not just like there to justk market and like shove products in people’s face then uh the community will actually promote you and you know like this is this I guess male fashion advice is like a really good example of that because that subreddit is like this guy that just wrote like a ton of content about male fashion advice and it was like really good right and uh now that stuff ranks really well it’s it’s a subreddit that does phenomenal and in his guides he like has affiliate links and he probably works with uh like retailers you know but that’s a good example of someone who’s like who understood the plat form wasn’t there to just like Market to people but actually provided like high uh value content and as a result is like a community that’s really highly respected and cherished yeah that’s awesome I’m gonna uh I’m gonna close this poll here I’m not seeing a huge amount of answers so if you get your answer in the next five seconds it will be included in this poll but I’m going to go ahead and close the poll on which non search platform has given you the best traffic results um so let’s go ahead and close this poll and see how our results did so looks like YouTube is the winner for folks that are getting best results from non search so YouTube clearly a winner here uh followed by LinkedIn Tik Tok podcasts and other obviously don’t know what other is if you put in other if you answered other maybe throw in the chat what platform uh you’re currently using kind of where that Insight came from um let us know what platforms are working for you outside of those top four um I want to talk next about like the the number of channels and we actually have a poll on this of how many different traffic sources does your business actively use um and just how to manage this sometimes I feel like like trying to be a digital marketer these days or be a Creator like it’s easy to get really overwhelmed by the plethora of choices like do I go YouTube do I go Tik Tok do I go reals do I invest in Facebook and it’s like you can almost become so overwhelmed with that uh decision or how many channels you’re going to use that sometimes it can be hard to even start um so I’m curious how can small teams effectively manage multiple traffic channels without overextending themselves what tools or processes uh do you guys use or have your team as use and maybe vassie will start with you and while we’re talking about this topic make sure you get those poll answers in we’ll check our results here in just a minute or two yeah um I think um I think we already hinted at the answer to this question was talking about the discovery and relationship platforms but my advice to companies would usually be to start small and then build on top of that uh because what I’ve seen as the top major mistake from most clients that I start working with on building a a successful content strategy what I see is that they’re essentially present on all the platforms without differentiating the content and it’s very easy to see when they just slap around something that was made for let’s say Instagram back on Facebook and then on Tik Tok and then on Twitter and then maybe as a YouTube short and so on so it it just shows that they’re just going for volume over quality which is never never a good choice even if something turns out to be working when a person comes back to research more about you you looking at all the other content on your profile if they see just this long just F list of different things that don’t quite hit the mark they’re going to be quickly disappointed and they’re going to basically assume that this was a oneoff wonder and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re worth following uh so what we usually try to do is start with one or two channels try to build consistency there really being to to Point earlier we really making sure that we’re acting as a native to that platform rather than someone who’s just you know opening the door and Whispering hey you want to buy my stuff and then just running away again because that’s uh very very easy to spot marketers who are doing their job that way so as soon as you actually feel comfortable with the volume that uh you’re creating and the number of platforms you present in then you can expand but no earlier than that just starting off you you can obviously reserve your name in a lot of different platform but just don’t don’t start publishing everywhere it doesn’t it doesn’t really work creating less content that’s more interesting and native to the platform itself is definitely the way to go um I’m aware that I’m not seeing something new but when I’m looking at real life examples I feel that it Bears repeating it it feels like too like if you pick multiple platforms like it’s going to keep you busy you know you’re constantly posting everywhere but you’re not going to have that attention to really see like what’s working with my audience how do I really deeply engage and even if you pick one platform I feel like and you go kind of all in on it and at first it doesn’t feel like you’re getting results like like I feel like you’re going to learn so much more than if you’re just spread thin like trying to repurpose and post on you know seven different platforms but you have no traffic right to really speak of like pick fewer channels go deeper I love the framework we shared earlier Jerry how do you have your teams manage I mean obviously you’re doing multiple platforms but like from a logistic standpoint how do you help your teams effectively manage those different traffic channels without overextending yourself so I would say um I would I would say definitely to vaselina point is like really focus on like starting small okay um and I I know that sounds kind of like a a bit of a cliche but it’s I mean it’s true you know like start small see what works uh do your analytics like Start From First principles you know like I I think people fall into the Trap of posting for the sake of posting because it feels like you’re doing something but if I it’s more effective to like focus on one channel uh brainstorm go like you said Brent go deep and actually like see how your audience is receiving that and then once you figure out something that works trying to scale that to other platforms um to me that makes a lot more sense uh and then I would say just like I guess some other foundational stuff is like staying organized you know make sure you have a spreadsheet so I I work with uh a channel for example and then we all have a spreadsheet where you know the YouTube description goes here the Tik Tok description goes here here’s the link to the original Source you know okay here’s the dropb you know just making sure that you’re staying organized and you have like a process of funnel in place for creating content uh BEC that is really your foundation and once your foundation is solid then you it’s makes it a lot easier to build upon that you know when you add people to the team or once you start realizing that stuff is working uh scaling becomes a lot easier very cool we have our our audience uh contribution here on our poll how many different traffic sources does your business actively use if you haven’t yet gotten your answer in there we’re going to be closing that poll momentarily and I actually am a little bit surprised um on some of these answers here so I’m seeing the results change quite a bit so let’s make sure we get those answers in I’m going to close that poll just to get an idea here anybody else have any votes on this get it in and we’re going to close that poll in three two one and close so let’s go ahead and take a look at our results there uh and there we go so um in terms of I’m a little bit surprised at these results right I mean 3 to five channels is clearly the winner here at 47% of our audience is is currently managing three to five different traffic channels um I kind of expected more people to be really focused on fewer but hey there’s some people even working on six to 10 different traffic channels that is a lot in my book 21% of our viewers are focused on six to 10 traffic sources 5% of our viewers are doing 10 plus traffic sources that sounds like intense to me intense to be managing I just don’t I don’t have that much time to keep track of those things but hopefully have a strong team there um thank you all for getting those poll answers in there uh we have one more poll which we’ll get here to in a minute um here’s what I want to go to next on our questions once we’ve identified a promising new traffic Source what specific steps should we take to scale our efforts while maintaining Effectiveness so you know once you’ve got that that new that new shiny Channel maybe you know when Tik Tok first came out and people were getting all excited about it right we see some opportunity there I guess how have you managed those new Platforms in your strategies uh vassie we’ll go back to you on this one well I feel that there’s there’s a part of of this question that I’m sort of wondering about and that’s maintaining Effectiveness um so that’s a bit of a the the tricky bit about it and if I had to sort of almost um take this into account as a secondary as a secondary component to that question my answer would definitely be when you find a new promising Channel just test the F out of it um really experiment with uh different uh formats different topics of content to really figure out what resonates with the audience there because in my experience even if you’re catering to basically the same type of people in different channels there’s still subtle difference is um about what what really hits with an audience on a specific Channel and you can see that even in in content from my own niche of digital marketing I would see great experts out there who change their approach massively from one channel to another being much more informal and geeky on stuff like Instagram and then being uh a lot more to the point and much more educational on LinkedIn although on both channels they’re trying to attract other fellow marketers so trying to experiment and really being okay with the fact that you’re not going to guess right every time and there are going to be content pieces that flop uh th decreasing that sense of Effectiveness in the short run this is really bringing you great lessons and it’s going to improve your Effectiveness in the long run because you’ll be that much more aware of what’s working and what isn’t yeah I almost like I’m I’m reminded of I mean every new social media platform it feels like gets this huge injection um I don’t know if youall remember like Clubhouse like I saw several business owners just like go all in on they just abandoned everything else clubhous is the future right um and I was kind of like I was like I’m a slow adopter I was like maybe maybe not right maybe I’ll jump on here and there right and and it really like fizzled out right it didn’t it didn’t amass to much in terms of monetization things like that but I think it’s it’s tempting to see those kinds of things happen and wanting to go all in are there new platforms that you all are are looking at or or Jerry that you’re looking at or are you just continuing to invest in like your same core Platforms in terms of new traffic sources uh in terms of new platforms I I mean I haven’t seen anything uh particularly new I’ve just been kind of staying with you know Reddit Tik Tok YouTube Instagram um as kind of the the core for that I’ve been using uh but in terms of like um in terms of scaling your efforts efforts while maintaining Effectiveness when I when I hear that question I think Effectiveness I think of like engagement so I think that’s ultimately what people are looking for like because if people are engaging with your content then it’s like okay then how do we monetize that attention um and then when I think of scaling I think of you know taking that same thing and duplicating it to different platforms so I if you if you have something that’s working right so if You’ done the the groundwork to you know try out different ideas and you found something that’s working I would say you know making sure you understand like why did it work you know um which is I guess that’s kind of like a creative process like because you never you don’t know why something goes viral all the time right which is why you have to just like try out different things and you have to be okay to you know it’s it’s okay to like be creative and try something new and take a little bit of risk you know so once you find something that’s working trying to I guess dup duplicate that like I guess the process of that uh it it’s a this is a kind of a difficult question for me because like it’s like trying to answer like oh how do you go viral and the the answer is you like you I guess you lay Good Foundations you try different ideas once you figure out something that’s working uh try to stick with it and and keep posting in the similar vein and then if that’s working then you can scale that by like taking the it’s it’s like a learning process once you learn uh from that process you take that experience and then you translate it to other things and then making sure you have some sort of infrastructure some sort of funnel underneath that allows you to pump out that content um uh yeah yeah I think it’s it’s hard to like reverse I mean you’ve seen a very small amount of creators like you know Mr Beast and and a handful of others that I think have kind of reversed engineered like verality to some degree but you know they obviously have had they’ve also put a ug amount of time and effort in thinking about you know what content they’re producing what are people responding to they’re immersed in the community they’re immersed in the platform they’re they’re constantly consuming stuff that’s out there and figuring out how do we how do we leverage these ideas to make the content better and better um we’ve got our last question here um for our uh audience as well as our last question for our our um our panelists here so I’m going to put the audience question out here first uh this is on what’s your biggest challenge in managing multip traffic channels so I know there’s a lot of folks out there that are um juggling these things but what’s the biggest constraint for you let us know um and while you all are working on that final poll we’re going to ask our hand this our final question here of with [Music] plat Implement to stay adaptable and current platforms and user behaviors constantly evolving what specific practices can businesses implement to stay adaptable and current I feel that if if I can take this a stab at this one first I feel that um we more or less touched on on the few things that that I want to highlight here already but just to to sort of recap I think one thing for me definitely is uh paying attention so observing before you start interacting in that channel so that when you do start creating content or engaging with an audience there it really feels native to the platform itself and it doesn’t uh it doesn’t feel like you’re just the marketer doing their marketing stuff it really feels like you’re a user who knows where they’re at and what makes sense for that particular audience so uh this would be definitely my my biggest piece of advice because what I’ve seen and uh you Brent you mentioned Clubhouse uh as well here and it was very very visible when when that came around that people were just the first days were very noisy and in my experience very bad because people were just trying to use the approaches that they were already using in a completely new environment and in a completely new platform and it just didn’t work out in the way that they wanted it to um so this would be one thing the second would definitely be experimentation and mindful experimentation at that not just you know throwing spaghetti at the W to see what sticks but actually taking the time to First Look for um good examples that you can maybe put your own personal spin to you and test out for yourself and then really take taking the time to analyze the results and look for these patterns and just as Jerry said I don’t have a a very specific you know process of looking for patterns I feel that it’s just about looking for to for ways to connect these dots and and see what works so I don’t have a great piece of advice on that one but that’s really really what it comes down to and then finally um sticking with what works even if it’s not the most sexy new tactic out there um you hinted at that as well brand that we as marketers have this shiny object syndrome more more than most so you don’t abandon what works just to chase a new platform that has never worked out for anyone so making sure that you’re building on top of what you already have rather than just abandoning it for something that has the the look and feel of being effective is just like table Stakes here and Jerry just in conscious of time here real quick on uh any specific practices that are helping you stay adaptable in current yeah I would say uh you know um it’s like if you’re the space is of course always evolving so the best way to stay up to date is literally engaging with the space you know going to things like you know this the summit and listening to other speakers networking uh just being involved in your scene and talking with and having conversations with people who are also involved uh will help you like if you want to stay up to date with stuff you got to be involved in the scene you know if you can’t just sit like from the sidelines all the time uh so actively engaging with people that are like-minded um I would also say again like long form content on YouTube is amazing watching videos like being willing to watch an hour long two hour long videos uh if it helps to like speed up speed up the video to like 2x speed um I know it sounds like super fast at first but then you get used to it over time and um yeah yeah that’s that’s what I would say and then I would also say like not being afraid to experiment with other like for me personally like I don’t mind experimenting with other platforms and you kind of mentioned this Brent uh earlier how it’s like it feels a little bit like gambling um and I mean it can feel like that because there’s like a a risk to reward ratio you know and that’s like if this platform does do really well and you’re an early adopter then you know you can kind of capitalize on that but if it ends up fading away then you just like dedicated all those resources to a dying platform so but for me I like because of my creative nature and like I’m an artist like I I I like to take the risk more to experiment with new platforms and you know I I don’t I don’t think that’s a bad thing yeah it feels like just being somebody that like falls in love with the process and the doing and the joy of the work versus just the outcome is one of the ways to go and stay consistent um but I love these takeaways mindful experimentation find those patterns be consistent sometimes do that boring work um on a regular basis is going to help you be successful on these alternative strategies let’s look at our audience question here we’re going to go ahead and close that poll of what’s your biggest challenge in managing multiple traffic channels so if you have any final thoughts on this we’ll close it in three two one and we will get our poll closed there um while we’re waiting for those results uh vasi what has been your experience so far in the web growth Summit yeah it’s been super interesting I mean these events I don’t know how cloudways do it every time I see new speakers that I immediately want to follow and learn from so kudos to that the the selection the lineup is is amazing and I love sharing the stage and sharing what I know with the audience hope that was interesting and helpful to them as well and Jerry how’s your experience been so far with the web growth Summit Oh I thought I thought it’s been amazing um I I enjoyed the process um I feel very grateful that you guys asked me to come speak um this is the first uh Summit that I’ve ever spoken at uh but it’s been really fun for me and it’s it’s cool to see all the the different speakers um I’m definitely going once this I’m assuming this gets posted to YouTube uh so I’m definitely going to go back and be watching all the speakers at 2x speed to to get the download especially like the the AI talk um the navigating search uh landscape and the the midst of AI That’s that’s something that’s really interesting to me we’ve got that uh session obviously there’ll be the recordings but if you want to catch our sessions live we’ve got one more session for today on unlocking AI Secrets speaking of practical practical SEO tips that you cannot miss we are going to be right back with that session from Andy craden uh vassie thank you again Jerry thank you again you are amazing um you’ve been such a great great speakers and great panelists here at this year’s web growth Summit and best of luck to both of you in your businesses and Ventures uh and best of luck on YouTube and Tik Tok and all that good stuff we’ll see you out there uh thanks again for being here thanks for having me thank you bye and as expected I think our last poll there uh time was the biggest challenge so uh hopefully today’s sessions are giving you some tactics and tips on how to save time in your content uh strategies as well as being more strategic on [Music] that going our next session of practical SEO tips so stick with us for this year’s web growth Summit