Why you shouldn’t rely on a single traffic source

A few years ago everybody wanted to be on the first page of Google search results. There are still many people that only rely on organic search traffic, but there’s been an increase in the popularity of Pinterest in the last couple of years.

Now, SEO seems to be a bit outdated and everybody is or wants to be a Pinterest expert. I know many successful business owners that make a living out of selling Pinterest courses and a lot of bloggers that receive over 90% of their traffic from Pinterest.

It sounds amazing, right? Well, it’s not! You shouldn’t rely on a single traffic source. It doesn’t matter if it’s Pinterest, or Google, or Facebook.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Pinterest and over 50% of my traffic comes from it. But I don’t want that number to grow. In fact, I’m working even harder on my SEO and I also try to increase my social media traffic.

How a small mistake can make you lose all your blog’s traffic

In 2016 I made a lot of changes to my blog. I moved to a better host, I started using Cloudflare, I added an SSL, and at the end of the year, I changed my blog’s name. With that last change, my traffic plummeted.

It’s common to lose a few readers when you change your website’s name, but not to lose half of your traffic. After a few days, I realized that all the links to my blog that started with https did not work anymore. That means I had no traffic coming from Google and I also lost a small percent of social and referral traffic. Thankfully, I still had a lot of traffic coming from Pinterest.

I made a mistake when I redirected my old domain to my new one and fixing it would take a lot of time. It was a small disaster, especially because I’ve changed domain names many times before without any issues. Three months later, my traffic is back to normal and March is my best month yet.

Moral of this story: you shouldn’t rely on a single traffic source or you might lose all your blog’s traffic. Oh, and always hire an expert when you make big changes to your blog.

If you rely on a single traffic source, whether it’s Google or Pinterest, you might risk losing readers and clients if the search algorithm is changed. You can even find your account banned because someone reported it for spam or your blog’s host might be penalized by search engines.

You can lose all your traffic and your business might suffer if you don’t diversify your traffic sources.

How to diversify your traffic sources

It’s very important to drive traffic to your site from as many sources as possible. That doesn’t mean you have to spend all your energy working on promoting your site. The best strategy is to focus on two platforms that work for you and also share your work on other sites.

I focus on search engines and Pinterest. Both are great traffic sources, but it takes a lot of work and patience to see good results. I also share my posts on Twitter and Facebook, and I’ve recently started an Instagram account for my patterns.

Here are a few ways to diversify your traffic:

• SEO: optimizing your website for search engines and learning a few SEO tricks will help you rank better in searches and your website will also be more user-friendly.
• Pinterest: this is both a social media platform and a search engine, and while it takes a lot of time to get your posts noticed, it’s also a lot of fun.
• Twitter, Facebook, Google+: Sharing your content on these platforms doesn’t take a lot of time and you can also use a scheduler to make this faster. Just don’t forget to interact with your followers.
• Guest posts: posting on other blogs is a great way to get your name out there and to gain referral traffic.
• Focus on your email list.
• Post on forums and Facebook groups.
• Comment on other blogs.
• Create valuable resources that will be shared by other blogs.

Keep in mind that the best way to grow your traffic is to continue to publish good content. And no matter what platform brings you the most traffic, you should never rely on a single traffic source.