254: Leveraging Traffic – What You Can Do With More Website Traffic

Bjork Ostrom: Hi there friends, Bjork Ostrom here. You’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Every once in a while we do what we call a solo episode, which is essentially me sitting in an empty room all by myself talking into a microphone. It’s not actually as bad as it sounds. It’s just a chance for me to share some thoughts, ideas, or potentially helpful tips for you and to not do it in an interview format, but instead to do it as a verbal blog post. Today I wanted to talk about traffic. It’s something that we’re talking a lot about lately. We’re planning a lot of content around it. It’s also an interesting season, especially for people who do food and recipe content on the web in regards to traffic because there’s a segment of people who are experiencing more traffic because of the reality of people being at home, making recipes from home, and consuming content in a way that’s different than we did two, three months ago.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ve really leaned into that and had some intentional conversations as a team about what can we be doing for the people that we serve in relation to the things that we’ve been thinking a lot about in the focus that we’ve had recently. I think with any of the content that we’re producing in this global pandemic, whatever the best way to describe it would be, it’s worth acknowledging that it’s just a really unique time. That there are people who are experiencing a certain level of anxiety, people who are experiencing a certain level of sadness, people who are experiencing a certain level of health issues. It’s no better way to describe it than just being extremely unique. I want to acknowledge that going into this and also acknowledge that we want to continue to do what we were created to do, this company, Food Blogger Pro which is figuring out ways to help and to serve creators. To do our best to figure out ways to allow you to create an income or to expand on a skill that you have or to develop a new craft or an area of expertise.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to continue to do that, whether that be through the membership, if you’re a Food Blogger Pro member of this podcast or other ways that we produce content in the world. Today we’re going to be focusing on traffic and specifically traffic and what you can do with it. I think a lot of times we think first and foremost about how do we get more traffic and that’s really, really important. We have some exciting things that we’re going to be doing with Food Blogger Pro to talk about that. Stay tuned for that because we’re going to be sharing all about that and how you can learn about some of the things that we do as a team to intentionally grow the traffic to our different entities, Pinch of Yum being one of them. We’re actually going to be focusing on for this podcast, things you can actually do with that traffic once you get it. Because sometimes we think about the acquisition of it, but we don’t think about then what.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m going to be going through a few different ways that we’re thinking about traffic. Really what it comes down to is thinking about people like who are the people that come to your site and consume your content. We talk about it as traffic, but every one of those stats, unless it’s a bot, which does exist, but we’ll just assume that it’s pretty clean stats. Every one of those metrics, every piece of analytics that you look at, data from analytics is going to represent a person. This is really a conversation around how do you continue to engage those people once you get people to your site and as well as how do you create value from that for your business. That’s usually one of the ways that we think of it immediately but there’s other ways that you can continue to engage those people and learn from and build your business through the acquisition of traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m going to talk about a few different ways that we’re thinking about doing that for Pinch of Yum, Food Blogger Pro, WP Tasty, all the businesses that we’re working on building. Let’s jump into it. We’re going to be talking about five different areas that you can focus on. A few of them are going to be really obvious and they’re going to be obvious value adds. Some of them might be a little bit more unique. Maybe some of them might just be a good reminder for you. I’m going to knock out the really easy one first. Number one is ads. If you have an increase in traffic, if you have a high traffic website, one of the ways that you can monetize that is via ads. Now what’s interesting is there’s a lot of really high traffic sites that don’t run ads and that’s because that’s first and foremost not how they create their income.

Bjork Ostrom: Relatively speaking, when you look at other sites, ads are not a super cost effective, that’s not the term there, they’re not a revenue maximizing way to create income because the amount that you’re earning from ads is actually pretty small. When you look at the earnings per page view or the RPM of a site that is primarily ads based requires a lot of traffic in order to get to a level that creates a substantial amount of income. However, for people who listen to this podcast, a lot of you are recipe publishers and food publishers and the product that we would create around the content that we are creating isn’t necessarily high dollar amount product. I’ll compare that to let’s say a website or a business, a web-based business that is creating a software. WP Tasty would be an example.

Bjork Ostrom: We don’t run any ads on WP Tasty because we want to talk about the plugins. The reason that WP Tasty exists is because we want to make high quality plugins for WordPress bloggers. If we were to run ads against that, it would be minuscule compared to the amount that we would earn from selling a plugin, but we don’t have that opportunity on a site like Pinch of Yum because we’re not aligned closely with a certain product. We can maybe have that if we had a cookbook or maybe if we had like a meal planning service or something like that, but we don’t have that to the option that we do have as ads. We find that to be often true and that’s most often the case for other people who have sites similar to a site like Pinch of Yum, but that starts to diverge a little bit once you get into a specific niche.

Bjork Ostrom: Once you get into a niche, the traffic potential for your site goes down because naturally you’re niching down so there’s fewer people that you can serve. However, you can have a more specific offering to that certain group of people. If you have a certain diet that you’re creating content around or maybe it’s a certain demographic, maybe you’re creating content for families with kids who want to feed healthy meals to them. You’re going to be able to create content and then you’re going to be able to create product around that content. It’s going to allow you to have a higher dollar amount that you’re earning from that traffic. But for those who don’t have that ads, it’s a really good place to start. It’s one of the most important ways that we create income for Pinch of Yum because it’s a high traffic site, but that’s not true for the other sites that we have because they’re low traffic like WP Tasty and Food Blogger Pro, but high value from that traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re in that bucket of attempting to get high amounts of traffic and you’re seeing that in the season, your traffic is going up, one of the easiest ways that you can start to create income is to put ads on your site using a company like AdThrive or Mediavine, or there’s publishers who use ad company called Sortable. All of these are common ad network, companies that you can get connected with and they’ll run ads on your site. It’s easy because if the traffic is already there, you will connect with one of these companies and they’ll layer in ads over that content and you’ll start to earn money. There’s not a lot of marketing that you have to do. There’s not a lot of strategy around funnels or anything like that. It’s plug and play once you get the traffic, but that’s the hard part. It’s acquiring that traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: Number two, affiliate. This is a layering on approach. If you have traffic, you’re starting to get traffic, affiliate is a great way to create an additional layer of income. I say layer because what we’ve found is that it’s usually a nice to have. It’s not the core income that we see as being created from recipe sites. However, there is a substantial amount of income that you can create if you are smart about how you’re doing affiliate marketing. Now, the bummer with affiliate marketing, especially as it relates to food sites and recipe sites, is that one of the most common ways that people create affiliate income is through Amazon. Amazon just recently went through a really big change where they cut, they substantially cut the percentage share that they gave publishers and affiliate marketers.

Bjork Ostrom: Just by a rule change that Amazon is making, suddenly you as an affiliate are earning less money. It’s one of the difficult realities of affiliate marketing or really promoting anybody’s product is that they have control of that. A lot of times you hear people talking about the benefit of having complete control over what you’re doing, what you’re publishing, where you’re publishing it right on your blog or email and not relying on social. Then also, how you’re creating income that being from a product that you’re selling as opposed to somebody else’s. In this case, what you see pretty clearly is that overnight, people who had built a really successful business based on affiliate marketing see a substantial decrease in the revenue that they’re making because of a decision that Amazon makes. Because they’ve deemed affiliate marketing to be less important or they’ve deemed it to continue to be important but that they don’t need to pay as much in order for that to have the same result.

Bjork Ostrom: Who knows what those internal conversations look like. There’s also conversations and a belief around Amazon wanting to start to move in the direction of owning some of that best of content. Really popular affiliate sites will often do best of or top type content. We did a podcast with Ewen. He was talking about affiliate marketing and SEO. In that, he talks about that idea of intentional content creation around affiliate content where you’re thinking of like, hey, what’s the best blender? Creating content around that because that’s a really smart affiliate play. For those who want to check it out, that’s episode 243. You can go to foodbloggerpro.com/243. He talks a lot about, we called it best in class content, keyword research, creating value, and creating authority. Really great podcast with somebody who is super smart and incredibly nice. Ewen’s podcast is episode 243. Be sure to check that out.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things he talks about is this idea of creating best of. Like I said, best blenders, best shoes. If you’re a shoe blogger. Best pour over coffee. This idea that creators were creating best of content, you would see that even on food and recipe sites. Amazon is starting to say, hey, we want people to create that on Amazon. We don’t want people to go to Wirecutter, we want Wirecutter to use Amazon as the platform for them to create that content so it all lives in our ecosystem. One of the beliefs is that the shift in the ad rates or the affiliate rates, the affiliate commission on Amazon is tied into Amazon’s continued movement towards having Amazon be the hub where people go to find the best water table for toddlers, which is something that we’ve been looking at lately.

Bjork Ostrom: Context around that shift and it’s important context because that’s why this podcast exists, to be aware of the things that are shifting and how the tide is turning. You can start to see that on Amazon if you pay attention. My guess is you’ll start to see some of that best of content living on Amazon as they attempt to take more of that in-house as opposed to paying affiliates on their site who come and click. Point being, it’s not like affiliate is going away but it’s something that’s always changing and adjusting and you need to be aware of that because it’s going to have an impact on where you decide to partner. You could partner with Amazon but the rates are going to be lower. You can also partner with an individual company. Maybe if you’re going to blender route, you decide to partner with Blendtec as opposed to linking to the Blendtec blender that’s on Amazon.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that we’re really excited about with Tasty Links, which is a WP Tasty plugin, is we just recently rolled out the ability to easily bring in the product image from Amazon and have that displayed on your site. It was a huge issue that we had with affiliate links on Pinch of Yum and other sites was in order to properly use a link, an image link with an Amazon affiliate link, that has to be brought in via the Amazon API. You can’t just copy that and then put it onto your own website and then use that link. What we were doing for Pinch of Yum was we had somebody on our team, Eman, who was going and she was connecting with companies and saying, hey, can we use this image? Can we get your permission to include it on our site?

Bjork Ostrom: We would download that image. We would put it onto our site after getting permission. Now with this new release on Tasty Links, we can link to that in the show notes. We’re bringing that in from Amazon using their API, which is in accordance with their rules and regulations on how to properly display link. You probably see that within different recipe cards because Tasty Links communicates with Tasty recipes. There’s other affiliate plugins that will do that. If you are interested in using Amazon and including links, be sure to check those out. Also, if you partner with the individual companies, know that a lot of times they’ll have a database of images that you can use that they’ve approved. Example being, if you’re an affiliate for Food Blogger Pro, WP Tasty, we have this library of images. You can pull those in and use those to promote whatever it is that you want to promote.

Bjork Ostrom: The same is true for most individual companies who have an affiliate program. They’ll have that image library that you can pull from. Those are approved and you can display it in your site. Traffic and what to do with it. Number one, ads. It’s the low-hanging fruit. It’s easy if you have the traffic but it’s going to be a low dollar amount when compared to things like selling a product or in certain cases maybe even affiliate. Number two would be to start to layer on some of those affiliate plays. You’re intentionally thinking about any product that might go along with something that you’re publishing. Maybe you’re even producing a specific individual post that is specifically crafted around a certain purchase behavior like best blenders and you link to that any time that you do a smoothie recipe. It’s a great way to layer on some additional income.

Bjork Ostrom: Number two. This is one that I think in our space, our, meaning food and recipe, often gets neglected because we don’t really know what to do once we have these, but it’s email. You’ll start to see us become really intentional over these next few months with email as we try and level up our email game. That’s for Pinch of Yum, Food Blogger Pro, and WP Tasty across the board. We’re trying to be better about email because it is such a powerful tool. With Pinch of Yum, we’re starting by segmenting. We’re starting to have conversations with people once they sign up and saying, hey, why is it that you signed up for this email list? We’re also starting to bucket off content on Pinch of Yum and creating content for people who are in that specific bucket. Some of those buckets might be sugar-free.

Bjork Ostrom: If somebody is on a post where it’s a sugar-free recipe, we’ll have the ability for them to sign up for an email series based on being sugar-free. Same with Instant Pot. Instead of what we have right now, which isn’t great, it’s a generic sign up for Pinch of Yum’s email list and you’ll see this a lot. You’ll see, never miss a recipe. I think that’s great for a really, really small group of people who follow you and want to get every single recipe that you publish but what you’ll find is that’s not usually how people are discovering your content and finding out about your content. There’s usually a really specific need like somebody has an Instant Pot recipe. They’re on Instant Pot and they’re looking for a recipe on how to create something that’s quick and healthy and they can make while they’re working and their kids are at home doing school. They can do it in the morning and then it can be ready for dinner.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s usually less about somebody following along with what you’re doing and getting every single post, although that exists, and more about somebody with a really specific need. What you’ll see us start to do over time is try and figure out for our different sites what are those specific needs and how do we address those via email. What that allows you to do then is to have an understanding of what type of content you can surface to those people and make as sticky as possible for those people who are following along with what you’re doing. To use the Instant Pot example, if we have that as a segment for Pinch of Yum, we know we have three, four, five really popular recipes and we can surface those in that little email series that the person will go through after they sign up on the blog.

Bjork Ostrom: They eventually might get every single post that we publish to Pinch of Yum after we’ve gone through a series of emails. In the short term, we’re addressing a really specific problem in doing our best to help them with that problem using the content that already exist on the site as opposed to only showing them new content that’s coming out. One of the things that I’m going to be talking about, it’s actually the last thing is kind of exciting concepts to maximize revenue. It has to do with email and in other ways, to surface some of that existing content that you already have. We’re talking about traffic, but really what we’re talking about is what do you do with it once you have it. A lot of times we try and solve that problem with traffic and just think of that, but what do you do when you actually have the traffic?

Bjork Ostrom: We talked about ads, makes sense, affiliate marketing, layering that on intentionally. We talked about email signups and not just generic email. Get every recipe but instead getting focused on what the actual problem is or what bucket people would fit into as it relates to the content that you’re producing. Doing your best to surface the content that you consider awesome in that bucket to that person and do your best to solve the problem that they might have or to help them with their journey wherever they’re going. Number four, once you have traffic, once you start to get people coming to your site, once you start to get people engaging with what you’re doing, it’s a great opportunity to learn. I think a lot of times, myself included, we as creators go in and we look at our general stats. We say, hey, how many page views did I have yesterday?

Bjork Ostrom: How many page views did I have last month? How many unique visitors did I have? Instead of those generic stats, we can actually use analytics. We can use the traffic to help inform us on the content that’s working. We can look at it and we can explore it and we can inform the gut decisions that we’re making about what content is working. The best way to do that is to spend a lot of time in the analytics and exploring that and learning from it. There was a study that they did on, they hooked up a individual to a little shock machine, I don’t know what they’re called. They would show them certain cards like a deck of cards and for certain cards they would do a light electric shock. What they found was that people’s subconscious brain started to associate the trigger card with the shock before the person actually realize what the pattern was.

Bjork Ostrom: To me, that is gut. That’s you developing a gut response to something happening. I think there is evidence to show that spending time with analytics and data and letting that inform the decisions that you’re making with your content will lead you to a place where you’re able to produce content at a higher level of success. I think the opposite of that would be if you publish a blog post and you don’t have anything at all, you don’t have comments, you don’t have analytics, you don’t have any type of insight from people telling you they liked it or not. It’s just a black box. You would never know what you need to do in order to be more successful. The opposite of that is trying to find as many areas as you can to start to inform yourself on the success of the things that you’re publishing.

Bjork Ostrom: A great place to start with that because most people have this installed is Google Analytics. As an example, I just want to share with you, it’s hard because you have to talk through it, but I want to share with you a way that you can start to explore that area of analytics and inform your gut a little bit. I’m in Google Analytics here. You can go probably easiest to press pause on this or just listen through if you’re in your car, at the gym, come back to it later. You can make a mental note of where it is in the podcast, but eventually sit down at your computer and you can go through this with me. I’ll talk through it. I’m in Google Analytics. On the left side, click on behavior and then site content and then all pages. This is an area in Google analytics that’s showing you literally all of the pages that are being recorded within Google Analytics for your site. This will show you the popular content, the content that doesn’t have any page views at all or low page views, like one page view. It’ll show up in here.

Bjork Ostrom: What we want to do is we want to look at the content that is really sticky where people are staying around for a long time. What I’m doing is I’m ordering those page views or the pages, not by page views but by average time on page. If you’re looking at this, you’ll see page views, unique pages, and then average time on page. For me to talk through this, once I do that, it’s a lot of crummy data because there’s people who stayed on a page for 40 minutes but it was only one person who did that so it’s not super helpful. Then what I do, this is a little bit of Google Analytics 201. I’ll talk through this quickly for those of you who are just listening. I just exclude any of the pages that have page views of less than 10,000. I do that using an advanced filter. We can include these steps in a screenshot to this. I’ll take a screenshot as we speak live now so you can see exactly what I’m looking at.

Bjork Ostrom: Include these screenshots within the show notes if you want to see where they are. What we’re doing is we’re sort ordering there by any pages that had over 10,000 page views. I can quickly see on Pinch of Yum, there’s actually some really interesting findings that I had as I spent some time with this. One of the first things that I realized quickly was all of these pages with the high average time on page are multimedia in that they are text, photo and video. A lot of them have stories embedded within them, we have using Slickstream. We’ve done story embeds. In a podcast episode coming up we’re going to be talking with a founder of a company called Jumprope. Jake is talking about how they’re really leaning into stories and the search impact of that. Be sure to check out that podcast episode coming up.

Bjork Ostrom: The point here is I am able to surface to the top the content that is performing exceptionally well in a certain area, in this case, average time on page with a user base or a number large enough to know that it’s not some anomaly. It’s not somebody setting this up and having the browser run in the background for a really long time and inflating that average time on page number. I can look through these and I can start to inform my gut opinion on what’s having success and why it’s having some traction in this area. If you have traffic, the great thing about traffic is the more traffic you have, the more that you can learn from it. A great place to start with that is a tool like Google Analytics. This ties into the fifth and last thing that I want to talk about as it relates to traffic and what we can do with it and why it’s beneficial not just for traffic’ sake, but also how you leverage that traffic once you have it. That is to surface your most popular or this is the really cool thing, best earning content.

Bjork Ostrom: As you spend more time learning about your content within Google Analytics, you’re going to get an idea of really your hit singles. Like if you’re a musician, you would know these are the songs that people love, that get played on the radio all the time and that helped me be successful. As publishers and content creators, you have those hit singles, you have those songs. In your case, it’s content that people keep coming back to, that really love, that are probably what they know you for or at least how they get to know you before they dive into your deeper catalog. It’s your job as a creator to surface that popular content to as many people as you can. If you think about the musician analogy, if you are a musician, you know you have these songs that people love, chances are you’re not going to play a show without playing those songs and also putting those songs in a really prominent place.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re probably not going to play them right away when everybody’s walking in because you want to make sure that as many people as possible get exposure to those. Find those pieces of content that are the most popular and do whatever you can to continue to surface those via email like we talked about. If you have a sequence of emails that go out after somebody signs up, make sure that it’s your most popular content that people are seeing right away. You don’t want to have the random first blog post that you publish be the first piece of content. You want it to be the content that you know people have had success with, that they love, and that’s really valuable for them. The other thing that we are just starting to think about for Pinch of Yum is to surface the content that is the highest earning content. What you’ll find is a lot of the ad networks that the ad optimization companies like AdThrive, Mediavine, Sortable.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m not familiar with the dashboard of all of those, but a lot of those companies are starting to push out the ability to see the earnings per page or the RPM, which stands for the revenue per 1,000 page views. If 1,000 people look at this, how much revenue do you make? They’re starting to surface that for your blog, for your website so you can have an understanding of the content on your site that earns the most money. Their strategy for you as a content creator if you are running ads, to start to surface that content that is earning you the most, where can you surface it? Well, all the usual places. You can link to it from other blog posts. It’s something that’s incredibly important that we don’t think enough about. A lot of times we think about how can we get other people to link to us, but another important strategy is how can you build links within your own site to other content.

Bjork Ostrom: If you have a site that is especially high RPM and you want to make sure that you’re doing whatever you can to link to that in places that make sense. You don’t want to just throw a link everywhere but link to it where it makes sense. You also can include that in your email series and obviously social media being a big part of that too. Think about not only your most popular content and how you can direct people there, but also your best earning content, your highest earning content, and how do you direct people to those pages. A lot of times what you’ll find is there is a correlation. Something that’s popular and higher earning and that’s the sweet spot because you know that people have had success with it, they’re sharing it, it’s getting a lot of traction and you have the validation from your readers, from the consumers. But then there’s also the validation from the ads that this is something that is worth running ads against and companies are paying to have their ads show up on that page.

Bjork Ostrom: When you find something like that, again, you can do that in the dashboard of the ad company you work with or using a company like Slickstream. Slickstream is a company, we had Kingston on the podcast and talked about engagement. Full disclosure, I’m an advisor and a very small equity owner in Slickstream, because of that advising that I’m doing. Slickstream also has a page that shows you the RPN per page view. If you’re a Slickstream user, you can check that out. A disclaimer with that RPM number is that this is getting a little bit technical, but those RPMs are based on the open market. Those RPMs aren’t based on the entire RPM that your page is earning. Meaning that a lot of the companies that are running ads on sites will do premium relationships with a company and they will give them premium ad spots and that you’re not able to collect that data.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re able to collect data that’s on the open market when ads are being run and header bidding is being done. You aren’t able to collect the data on the private relationships that they’re doing with ad inserts if they have a more traditional deal with a certain company to run ads on a certain site. The point is figure out a way, whether it’s with the ad company you work with or whether it’s using a third party tool to understand the content that is working the hardest for you. Right? If you’re on a sports team, chances are that you know the people that work the hardest on that sports team, right? Track and field or soccer, I can think of the people on my soccer team who were hustling and they worked super hard. The same is true for your content. There’s posts that you have published that are working really hard for you and you want to do whatever you can to surface that content and even better if it’s a piece of content that’s also really popular and people enjoy that content as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Like I said, we’re talking a lot about traffic and it’s a unique time for us as publishers, especially food and recipe publishers because it’s a different type of traffic that we are getting now compared to a year ago or even compared to three months ago. I’m guessing that you’re seeing that in some way with the content that you’re publishing. If you’re not, it doesn’t mean you need to be worried. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong. There’s lots of variables that go into it. For a lot of people, internet usage in general has gone up and you see that reflected across sites. To recap, when we’re talking about traffic and what we can do with traffic, ads is that low-hanging fruit. It’s not going to be huge in terms of the income potential from it unless you have lots of page views and lots of traffic, but it’s a great place to start.

Bjork Ostrom: Affiliate income using those links to layer on additional income from your site. Intentionally email signups. It’s not just getting emails and then sending out an email blast every time you publish a post, which is what we’ve done for Pinch of Yum for a really long time. We haven’t been doing it right and we’re just in the early stages of fixing that and getting more intentional and better about that. Intentional email signup is one of the great things that you can do with traffic and the earlier, the better. Number four, actually learning from the traffic. You’re building traffic, you’re building a following, you’re getting people to engage with your content. That is in and of itself valuable because now you have insights and those insights will allow you to surface number five, your most popular or highest earning content in a strategic way, whether that be through email, social media, or linking internally within your site.

Bjork Ostrom: My hope for this is you had a little nugget, something that you could take away. Maybe it was new information or maybe it was just a reminder of something that is best practice and you’ve known it and you’ve just needed a little motivator to actually move forward on it. I hope wherever you are that you are doing well, all things considered. Thank you to those of you who continue to be on what is now called the front lines, right? It’s people who are continuing to show up and to do work and can’t work remotely and can’t shelter at home. To you who are doing that, we want to say thank you and acknowledge you and let you know that we see you. It is a great joy and honor and privilege to do these podcasts and we wouldn’t be able to do it without you listening. Thanks for tuning in. We will be back here next week. Until then, make it a great week. Thanks.