Brent Weaver: Welcome back to our Cloudways Web Growth Summit 2024, it’s been a lot of fun jamming with you all in chat, what an amazing session with Carolyn Shelby kicking off today, lots of conversation on SEO and traffic and what it’s going to take to grow your business online. 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 your website traffic, your business traffic. We’ve got two amazing panelists joining me on stage here, I’d love to introduce first, Vassilena Valchanova, she’s a digital marketing strategist, founder of Valchanova.me, she helps brands build relationships and scale through digital channels, specializing in content marketing, brand messaging, and copywriting, she also organizes science events and has trained over 2,000 students, sharing her expertise across Europe. Vassilena, welcome to the program.

Vassilena Valchanova: Hey Brent, happy to be here.

Brent Weaver: Great to have you. And our second panelist is Jerry Broadway, Jerry is a digital marketing expert, a music producer and DJ, he’s an experienced producer, DJ, content creator, and he has demonstrated an amazing ability at creating viral content on TikTok and YouTube. Jerry, welcome to the program.

Jerry Broadway: Hey, thanks for having me, I’m happy to be here.

Brent Weaver: Great to have you here, you’re in the studio, you’ve got the creator vibe already, so loving that.

Jerry Broadway: Thank you, I gotta give credit to my fiancée, she pretty much designed it all, she took away the responsibility from me. If I did this myself it would just end up looking like a frat house.

Brent Weaver: Well, obviously TikTok and YouTube, how you look and how you present yourself matters a little bit, and you’re probably an amazingly talented musician and producer as well, so that probably does not hurt. So, all good panel discussions, we’ve got a handful of questions we’re going to work through over the next bit. To start things off, let’s talk about AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard, how are AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard influencing user search behavior, and what does this mean for your traffic strategies? Vassie, maybe we’ll go to you first.

Vassilena Valchanova: Sure thing. 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 had all the answers, we would be much richer and probably wouldn’t be spending time here. It’s a really dynamic situation currently, the context is changing every day, so what I say now and what I’d say if you ask me the same question in two weeks may differ quite a lot. But currently my mind is at this position: no matter how user behavior changes, whether we’ll be conversing and asking questions that way, or looking at the results, there haven’t been really 10 blue links for a long while now on Google search results anyway. 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 search would lie with having really detailed, experience-based opinions on things, and, paradoxically, designing our content more around shareability, 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 all of us are running the same race, looking at the results page and trying to outsmart the competition and regurgitate the same stuff in a slightly better manner than our competitors. So just to 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 experience to back this up.

Brent Weaver: So not just throwing in content that sounds like everything else, you’ve got to pick a position, you have to have that unique expertise to be able to stand out, which I think is a good message in general. Jerry, what are your thoughts on AI tools like ChatGPT influencing user search behavior and what this means for our traffic strategies?

Jerry Broadway: So personally I love using AI tools, not just ChatGPT 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 there’s a lot of AI tools coming up in content creation, like in DaVinci Resolve, that’s been super useful. Personally, in the affiliate funnels I’ve been involved in, I have seen AI content rank pretty well, and that’s kind of the big question going forward, how receptive are Google and search engines going to be to AI content, because especially with tools like ChatGPT, if you’re hooked up with an API of some sort, it’s really easy to just farm out content, and that makes me wonder, if you are somebody who’s just farming out content with various different scripts and a backend you’ve built out, is that going to get flagged, is that going to get penalized. So that’s a big question for me that I’ve been thinking about. But I do think that ChatGPT is going to, what’s nice is you can get answers right on the fly, and I guess for me I’m kind of in the position where I’m asking questions and trying to navigate how this is going to go, because if you have something like ChatGPT or Bard that’s indexed the internet and you’re getting answers on the fly, I just wonder how that’s going to play out, whether it’s going to be moved towards spam or if it’s going to be kind of anything’s up for grabs, if that makes sense.

Brent Weaver: Yeah, I feel like sometimes when I’m browsing the web now or looking for products and services, I’ll be reading something, and you used to be able to tell what bad content was or what poorly written content was, but then there’s like the AI mistakes, which always flag a little bit, as a user you’re kind of 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 don’t add up, and I’m curious how the algorithms figure that stuff out, is it easy to flag, is this AI content or is it just poorly written human content? Seems like we’re in a very transition stage right now.

Jerry Broadway: No, I completely agree, and 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 getting helpful information from it, I think that’s going to be one of the primary factors of whether or not this is good content, because I don’t think AI makes content inherently bad, but you can use it for nefarious purposes like spam, or basically making content engagement farms which aren’t actually providing any sort of value, you’re just farming people’s attention, and I think over time the algorithms may shift to be able to determine what content is actually harmful with AI.

Brent Weaver: Have either of you seen people be penalized in terms of traffic for overusing AI or using it in a way that wasn’t effective for their business?

Vassilena Valchanova: Yeah, there was recently this example of some SEO expert who essentially went online and bragged about the fact that they had reverse-engineered their biggest competitor’s website and made AI write up the same type of posts, just paraphrasing the copy, and essentially created a dupe of their website more or less, and initially they had pretty decent traffic numbers getting traffic from organic search. I’m blanking on the name of the guy, but I’ll research that and come back to the chat. Initially the results were pretty amazing, but then what happened is, and I think this is something Google’s been very open about addressing with all the newer versions of the helpful content updates, they’re trying to flag that and make sure that it’s not just the same type of content in different phrasing, so what ended up happening was that their website lost rankings very very quickly, and they are currently left standing on the sidelines trying to figure out what to do next.

Brent Weaver: I mean, if they’re copying their competitor’s site using AI, I guess good riddance, but I wonder if it was the bragging of the success that maybe got them caught, or the actual semantics of the content itself. Let’s go to our second question, we’ll come back to you on this one, Vassie, to start. Besides search engines, what specific platforms should we consider for diversifying traffic sources, what do you think about LinkedIn, podcasts, video platforms, how do those fit into the mix?

Vassilena Valchanova: Oh man, that’s a very good question, and I’m going to use one phrase that I know irritates people quite a lot, but it really depends on who you’re trying to target, so the first rule of thumb is get back to your audience and figure out where they’re spending most of their time and try to create content that way. If I put my content creator hat on, there’s this really useful framework that I use, especially when I’m working with customers who may have an issue with expanding their content operations because they have limitations of human resources. What we usually try to do is focus on one Discovery platform and one relationship platform, after a framework that Jay Clouse created, and essentially the idea is your Discovery platform is the place where you’re auditioning for attention from a larger audience, and this can be search but it can very well be any form of social media platform, be it LinkedIn, TikTok, or Instagram. I’m not personally using these as much, but I feel like Jerry is going to fill in these gaps pretty quickly for us. And then on the other hand you have a relationship platform, which may have less reach, fewer people consuming that content, but the engagement is of much higher quality, and these would usually be long-form videos or podcasts or newsletters, some place where people need to actively make another step to consume your content, by subscribing or following your podcast on Spotify, but they are that much more engaged. So this is a nice balance between going for reach and wider awareness, and then going after the people who are most engaged, to forge these relationships that are at the end of the day going to bring in the revenue.

Brent Weaver: And if you could link to that framework, I love that, I think just giving people that clarity of having a traffic Discovery channel where you’re getting big reach but maybe not going as deep, and then having that place you really go deep with your user base or fans or customers, I love that, that’s genius. Jerry, what do you think in terms of platforms we should consider beyond search for diversifying traffic sources, what’s your traffic drug of choice outside of search?

Jerry Broadway: So I definitely agree with Vassilena, it really depends on what your niche is, I know that’s kind of a cliché but it really does depend where your audience is spending the most time. Now in my personal experience, of course I’m biased, I really like TikTok and I really like YouTube, and the reason I like video platforms is because, you’ve heard the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words, well, a video is worth a million words in my opinion, because you really get to engage with your audience, they can put a face to the content. So for me, TikTok and YouTube, any sort of video platform like Instagram where you can put out content, is absolutely phenomenal, and I would say when creating content, go at it from the perspective of trying to provide value and actually help out your audience. Sometimes I encounter content creators that function more like gatekeepers to information, and I think that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths, you want to provide value, and then the thing that you’re selling or promoting is in addition to that. So using TikTok and YouTube and video platforms to create a broad range of information regarding your product, so that people can come to your channel, get immersed in your content, see who you are, get a feel for your personality, and see that you know what you’re talking about, and then you have the stuff in addition that people can subscribe to if they’d like more information, whether that’s a newsletter, your Twitter, a blog. But it really depends on who your target market is, because if you’re targeting, like more the niches I’m involved in, which is probably 20-year-old teenagers making music looking for sound design tips or how to produce a specific sound, that’s going to be a lot different from someone trying to set up a server or build their own website using Cloudways and working with Linux.

Brent Weaver: I think the headline there is providing as much value as you can, and look at the competition, in terms of content, at least what I see personally as a consumer and creator, there’s just so much really amazing high-quality content with lots of high-value free information out there, and I think if you’re getting into the space as a creator wanting to compete with that, you do have to offer some of your best stuff for free or some snippet of your best stuff. Any insight, Jerry, for you, in terms of what platform has been better, and I know it depends, but for you specifically between Insta, TikTok, YouTube, from that framework Vassie was talking about, what platforms have given you the biggest audience versus maybe the best relationships and monetization?

Jerry Broadway: In terms of affiliate-related funnels I would say YouTube, because you can really post that long-form content and build out that web of content, I really like long-form content, even personally when I’m searching for things I tend to stay away from short-form content because I know the good stuff is going to be in those videos that are over 20 minutes, especially if I’m trying to learn something. But in terms of audience and reach I would say definitely TikTok, and Instagram, because with those videos you have the potential to reach literally millions of people with a good viral video, and then making sure you’ve done the work to interlink your accounts together, so when you do have a video that goes viral they can find your other content and get immersed in that content you’ve created, whether it be YouTube, a podcast, whatever medium you choose.

Brent Weaver: I love that, using those platforms, being more strategic about it, not just being all in on TikTok, but having that strategy where you can actually monetize and grow.

Jerry Broadway: One last thing, I can speak from personal experience on TikTok, because you can’t really put links in the video content, what I would do is create a video with the intention that it may or may not go viral, but in the event that it does, I would make a comment and pin that comment, like, hey, if you want to find my song or more information you can search this into YouTube, and that would be my call to action, search this phrase in YouTube, and then my video would be first, and that was in relation to promoting my own music. And I find that at least for me personally, once I’ve gotten a hold of somebody’s content, I’m learning from them and I follow them on YouTube and I’m consuming hours and hours of their content, obviously at that point you’re much more likely to take recommendations through affiliate links, buy a course or a program, take some type of monetization action.

Brent Weaver: Very cool. Another question on leveraging new avenues for traffic for SMBs, small to medium businesses on a tight budget, because it’s 2024, everybody’s got to watch their money, what are the most cost-effective strategies or platforms for driving high-ROI traffic? Vassie, what’s your opinion on high-ROI traffic, what are the most cost-effective ways to make that happen right now?

Vassilena Valchanova: This is a pretty good question, I think we’re all wondering about that. One strategy I want to highlight would definitely be repurposing content, and Jerry sort of hinted at that when he was saying, if you want to watch 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 interest and awareness. What I found most helpful is to design my content with repurposing in mind from the get-go, so that when we have a long-form podcast episode with a guest or a live webinar like this one, you can then create short outtakes of that content and share them as YouTube Shorts or short-form Reels or any other format that makes sense. So focus heavily on repurposing content, and there are a lot of ways to do that, I’m going to include in the chat a link to a blog post where I structure these different repurposing methods in six categories, so people can get some ideas. But the biggest highlight 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 didn’t design your content in a way where it’s easy to create short formats.

Brent Weaver: Or just having somebody kind of always filming, making sure that while you’re producing content you have a side camera or something that grabs those more impromptu moments. Jerry, do you have a repurposing content strategy, does that play into how you drive more high-value ROI traffic?

Jerry Broadway: I would definitely agree with Vassilena, yes, repurpose your content, and the way you would go about doing that is I would start with creating something that’s long-form, so recording for four, five, six hours, however long you need to record for. And this also involves leveraging yourself and your own creativity and ability to do and learn, because if you’re on a tight budget, obviously you can’t be spending thousands of dollars on an agency, so you have to rely on yourself and take the time to utilize all the amazing tools that are available. YouTube is an amazing resource in this regard, you can learn how to video edit, how to do captions, a lot of this stuff that may seem difficult at first but it’s really not that hard if you’re willing to spend the time to learn. So to get back to the method, you start by recording for a long period of time, then bring that into your video editing program and cut it up into sections, you’d have the long-form content that could be an hour or two, maybe 30 minutes, and that’s the long-form you’d post to YouTube, or as a podcast to SoundCloud or Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and then from there you take the little bits and pieces, cut it up into even shorter form content, the highlights, and that’s the content you’d do the captions for and put on Instagram, TikTok, maybe LinkedIn, and then because you have all that content you could probably even write a blog post or something that goes on LinkedIn. So you spend a day recording content and then chop it up into sections that are compatible for each platform, and then once you go through the process yourself and get really good at it, then as your business grows you can start outsourcing that process, because you’ve done it yourself, you have that intimate knowledge of, okay, this is what it needs to look like, and then you’ll know how to hire appropriately. And if you want to get really technical you can even interface with different APIs to automate some of that process, because a lot of repurposing content is filling in descriptions, reposting, very monotonous work that can be done by a Python script.

Brent Weaver: It’s cool to watch people that have grown up, probably like yourself Jerry, who are native content creators, you’ve been introduced to mobile content creation, and I think a lot of brands or businesses with leadership that’s been around a little bit longer, they’re still creating content on some old paradigms where they’re trying to create really polished stuff, and when I go on Instagram or TikTok, the stuff that’s getting widely shared is rarely the highly polished, really expensive-looking content, it’s the behind-the-scenes stuff, the off-the-cuff stuff, the more authentic, raw stuff, and I think that comes out of producing content yourself with your phone camera and capturing those candid moments that end up going viral. The video platforms we’ve talked about, but are either of you using alternative platforms like Reddit or Quora? I know with AI, those platforms have gotten a lot more interest just because they’re such question-answer, discussion, authentic-content platforms, if you go on Reddit pumping affiliate links you get dumped pretty quickly, whereas 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?

Vassilena Valchanova: I can maybe talk about Reddit a bit, and it’s really funny to be watching this space because I have by now something like more than 15 years of 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. With Reddit I feel it’s 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 from what’s going to drive traffic to what’s going to drive the right people to be introduced to your brand. I can give you an example, like five or six years ago I was working for a company called Enhancv, a resume builder app, and our whole shtick when it came to creating content was to create different examples of resumés for celebrities and popular characters, just to showcase how the product was working in real life and add an element of interaction with new audiences that didn’t necessarily need to use the tool at the moment. One of my favorite campaigns was when the last season of Game of Thrones was airing, we created the CVs of the top contenders for the Iron Throne and posted them on Reddit with the imagined feedback of Westeros HR. First off, on a content creator level, if you’re working on something you’re really passionate about, it shows and people get excited about it just because you’re excited, so that’s a top piece of advice from me. What ended up happening was we shared these images on Reddit, 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 that they would remember the format, and we popped up on the first page of the subreddit r/freefolk, which was the top subreddit for Game of Thrones fans at the time, and we got quite a lot of views on that individual piece. 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 the time was right for them to look for a resume builder, they started Googling and looking for that specific tool they had seen back then. I’m sorry for the long expose, but my point is that traffic isn’t the only metric of success, we may be looking at what has 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 the attention, and this is valuable in and of itself.

Brent Weaver: I love that, first of all, amazing creative direction idea, I can just imagine when I’m watching the season finale of Game of Thrones how entertaining it would have been to see all the major characters’ resumés. But as a marketing leader, sometimes it’s hard to sign off on ideas that are amazing like that, because you’re like, man, the ROI, who knows if this is ever going to go viral, and even what you just said, it took a year before you started to get some soft feedback that clearly made a huge mark on customers. But that’s the stuff that’s going to really get you that viral reach and grow. I’ve always thought it’s really hard to have a strategy of “create viral content” because it’s like gambling in some ways, you never know what exactly is going to go viral. Jerry, are you doing any other platforms outside the core you’ve already talked about, like Reddit or other social platforms, in terms of some success stories?

Jerry Broadway: Yeah, I love using Reddit, personally I’m biased, I think Reddit was a lot better even before the redesign, because it felt like the platform had a lot more soul and a lot more community. With the redesign it’s become very corporate and everything’s kind of the same, each subreddit you go to feels all the same, where before, each subreddit had its own soul because you could customize the CSS and Reddit allowed a lot more individuality and personality, and that’s something I really miss. I do still use Reddit for smaller communities, and I have had success using Reddit for marketing campaigns. One of my first YouTube channels I actually started through Reddit as kind of a side art project, I put the link in the stage chat. Maybe I should take a step back and give context for people who don’t understand what Reddit is: Reddit is a social media platform that has these different pages called subreddits, and each subreddit has its own little identity and community, so there’s a subreddit for SEO, I think r/bigseo is the big one, there’s a subreddit for startups, for politics, for pretty much anything you can think of, you can almost think of it like a Facebook page but it’s Reddit. So I started this channel by posting memes I would make, these little MIDI drawings, super short content, five to 10 seconds, and I posted them to a subreddit called r/youtubehaiku, which specialized in that short, very funny type of content. I would wake up early at like 6 or 7 AM to post it early because Reddit is primarily US-based, and they would go viral, getting tens of thousands of views, and because they’d go viral on Reddit and send a bunch of traffic to YouTube, they’d get picked up by the YouTube algorithm and catch that wave, and now some of the top videos have millions of views, just these short little memes. I think that’s a good example of how you can leverage third-party platforms you might not even be thinking about to grow content.

And then another thing I’ve done with Reddit is leverage my SEO skill set to promote products, this is probably back in college, about seven years ago, I used Ahrefs to scrape Reddit keywords, because Reddit tends to rank really well in search results, but it’s very difficult to keep something up on Reddit. So I used Ahrefs to scrape Reddit keywords like best gaming mouse, best laptop, best pillow, and I had a spreadsheet of these, and then I started creating Reddit posts and ranking them in Google, so when people searched for that keyword plus Reddit, because a lot of people just tend to go to Reddit straight for information, since Google search results have kind of gone downhill in my opinion over the years, people use Reddit as authenticity, they feel Reddit is more authentic. So I was ranking for keywords like best pillow, best gaming mouse, compiling a list of the best ones based on what people on Reddit said, and linking to Amazon, and it ended up doing really well, I was ranking number one for a lot of these keywords, generating a lot of revenue for Amazon, but unfortunately that was against Amazon’s affiliate policy, so I had to end up removing all my affiliate links. But I tell that story because if you’re someone trying to sell a good product that is valuable to the community, that would be a great way to promote it, by engaging with the Reddit community in a meaningful way where you’re providing value, and then using an SEO skill set to rank that.

Brent Weaver: I’m sorry you got your hand slapped by Amazon, but it’s a fun case study, not everything always works in the long term. I want to go to our attendees for a quick minute, we’ve got some fun polls, which non-search platform has given you the best traffic results, I’ve just published that out, whether it’s YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, podcasts, or some other tool. And I love that you highlighted, Jerry, that every subreddit has a very unique culture, their own community, their own standards, and I think a lot of businesses make the mistake of just trying to jump into Reddit and start to promote themselves before they become a part of that specific subreddit community first, and then they end up getting downvoted or banned. I know for me personally I’m reading way more Reddit results when I’m thinking about making big purchases, versus going to Google and being bombarded by affiliate listicles, where you’ve got these “10 best whatever” and you look at them and you’re like, these are all affiliate links, is it really the best security system? I think people have gotten a little wise to that.

Jerry Broadway: Do you mind if I add on to what you said about Reddit? You’re definitely right, Reddit is extremely adverse to marketing, which is why people not familiar with the platform find it difficult to work with, you really can’t treat Reddit as a marketing channel, you really need to immerse yourself into the community, because it feels a little bit like a club and people can tell if you’re just trying to market or shill something, so you really need to provide value and be engaged with the conversation. And the cool thing is, once you are engaging with that community and providing something meaningful, and you’re not just there to market and shove products in people’s faces, then the community will actually promote you. I guess r/malefashionadvice is a really good example, that subreddit is basically this guy that wrote a ton of really good content about male fashion advice, and now that stuff ranks really well, it’s a subreddit that does phenomenal, and in his guides he has affiliate links and probably works with retailers, but that’s a good example of someone who understood the platform, wasn’t there just to market to people, but provided high-value content, and as a result has a community that’s really highly respected and cherished.

Brent Weaver: That’s awesome. I’m going to close this poll here, so if you get your answer in the next five seconds it’ll be included, so let’s see how our results did, looks like YouTube is the winner for folks getting best results from non-search, followed by LinkedIn, TikTok, podcasts, and other. If you answered other, maybe throw in the chat what platform you’re currently using. I want to talk next about the number of channels, we actually have a poll on how many different traffic sources does your business actively use, and just how to manage this, because sometimes trying to be a digital marketer these days or a creator, it’s easy to get really overwhelmed by the plethora of choices, do I go YouTube, do I go TikTok, do I go Reels, do I invest in Facebook, and it’s like you can become so overwhelmed with that decision that it can be hard to even start. So how can small teams effectively manage multiple traffic channels without overextending themselves, what tools or processes do you use? Vassie, we’ll start with you.

Vassilena Valchanova: I think we already hinted at the answer when 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, because the top major mistake I see from most clients I start working with on building a successful content strategy 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 TikTok and then on Twitter and then maybe as a YouTube Short. It just shows they’re going for volume over quality, which is never a good choice, even if something turns out to be working, when a person comes back to research more about you and looks at all the other content on your profile, if they see this long list of different things that don’t quite hit the mark, they’re going to be quickly disappointed and assume that this was a one-off wonder. So what we usually try to do is start with one or two channels, try to build consistency, really making sure that we’re acting as a native to that platform rather than someone who’s just opening the door and whispering, hey, you want to buy my stuff, and then running away again, because that’s very easy to spot. So as soon as you feel comfortable with the volume you’re creating and the number of platforms you’re present in, then you can expand, but no earlier than that, you can reserve your name on a lot of different platforms, but just don’t start publishing everywhere, it doesn’t really work, creating less content that’s more interesting and native to the platform is definitely the way to go.

Brent Weaver: It feels like if you pick multiple platforms it’s going to keep you busy, you’re constantly posting everywhere, but you’re not going to have that attention to really see what’s working with your audience and how to deeply engage, and even if you pick one platform and go all in on it, at first it doesn’t feel like you’re getting results, but I feel like you’re going to learn so much more than if you’re spread thin trying to repurpose and post on seven different platforms with no traffic to speak of. Pick fewer channels, go deeper, I love the framework we shared earlier. Jerry, how do you and your teams manage multiple traffic channels without overextending?

Jerry Broadway: I would say, definitely to Vassilena’s point, really focus on starting small, I know that sounds like a bit of a cliché but it’s true, start small, see what works, do your analytics, start from first principles, because people fall into the trap of posting for the sake of posting because it feels like you’re doing something, but it’s more effective to focus on one channel, brainstorm, go deep like you said, Brent, see how your audience is receiving that, and then once you figure out something that works, try to scale that to other platforms. And then some other foundational stuff is staying organized, make sure you have a spreadsheet, I work with a channel where we all have a spreadsheet where the YouTube description goes here, the TikTok description goes here, here’s the link to the original source, just making sure you’re staying organized and have a process and funnel in place for creating content, because that is really your foundation, and once your foundation is solid it makes it a lot easier to build upon that when you add people to the team or once you start realizing stuff is working, scaling becomes a lot easier.

Brent Weaver: Very cool. In terms of our audience poll, how many different traffic sources does your business actively use, I’m a little surprised, three to five channels is clearly the winner at 47%, I kind of expected more people to be really focused on fewer, but there’s some people even working on six to 10 different traffic channels, 21% of our viewers, and 5% are doing 10-plus, that sounds intense to me. Once we’ve identified a promising new traffic source, what specific steps should we take to scale our efforts while maintaining effectiveness, once you’ve got that new shiny channel, maybe when TikTok first came out and people were getting all excited about it, how have you managed those new platforms in your strategies? Vassie, we’ll go back to you.

Vassilena Valchanova: There’s a part of this question I’m wondering about, and that’s maintaining effectiveness, so that’s the tricky bit. If I had to take this into account as a secondary component, my answer would definitely be, when you find a new promising channel, just test the hell out of it, really experiment with different formats and topics of content to 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 differences about what really hits with an audience on a specific channel. You can see that even in content from my own niche of digital marketing, I would see great experts change their approach massively from one channel to another, being much more informal and geeky on stuff like Instagram, and then a lot more to the point and 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, there are going to be content pieces that flop, decreasing that sense of effectiveness in the short run, but 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.

Brent Weaver: I’m reminded of, every new social media platform, it feels like it gets this huge injection, I don’t know if you all remember Clubhouse, I saw several business owners just go all in, they abandoned everything else, Clubhouse is the future, and I’m a slow adopter, I was like, maybe maybe not, and it really fizzled out, it didn’t amass much in terms of monetization. But I think it’s tempting to see those kinds of things happen and want to go all in. Are there new platforms that you all are looking at, Jerry, or are you just continuing to invest in your same core platforms in terms of new traffic sources?

Jerry Broadway: In terms of new platforms, I haven’t seen anything particularly new, I’ve just been staying with Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram as the core. But in terms of scaling your efforts while maintaining effectiveness, when I hear that question I think effectiveness, I think of engagement, that’s ultimately what people are looking for, because if people are engaging with your content then it’s like, okay, how do we monetize that attention, and when I think of scaling I think of taking that same thing and duplicating it to different platforms. So if you have something that’s working, if you’ve done the groundwork to try out different ideas and found something that’s working, I would say make sure you understand why it worked, which is kind of a creative process, because you don’t know why something goes viral all the time, which is why you have to try out different things and be okay to be creative and take a little risk. So once you find something that’s working, try to duplicate that process, it’s a learning process, once you learn from it you take that experience and 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.

Brent Weaver: I think it’s hard to reverse-engineer, you’ve seen a very small amount of creators, like Mr Beast and a handful of others, that have kind of reverse-engineered virality to some degree, but they’ve also put a huge amount of time and effort into thinking about what content they’re producing, what people are responding to, they’re immersed in the community and the platform, constantly consuming what’s out there and figuring out how to leverage those ideas to make the content better. We’ve got our last question here for our audience as well as our panelists. Audience question first, what’s your biggest challenge in managing multiple traffic channels, let us know. And our final question for our panel: with platforms and user behaviors constantly evolving, what specific practices can businesses implement to stay adaptable and current?

Vassilena Valchanova: If I can take a stab at this one first, we more or less touched on the few things I want to highlight already, but to recap, one thing for me is paying attention, observing before you start interacting in that channel, so that when you do start creating content or engaging, it really feels native to the platform and doesn’t feel like you’re just the marketer doing their marketing stuff, it feels like you’re a user who knows where they’re at. This would be my biggest piece of advice, because, Brent, you mentioned Clubhouse, and it was very visible 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 they were already using in a completely new environment, and it just didn’t work out. The second would be experimentation, and mindful experimentation at that, not just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, but actually taking the time to first look for good examples you can put your own personal spin to and test out for yourself, and then take the time to analyze the results and look for patterns. And then finally, sticking with what works, even if it’s not the most sexy new tactic out there, you hinted at that as well, Brent, that we as marketers have this shiny object syndrome 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 you’re building on top of what you already have rather than abandoning it for something that has the look and feel of being effective is just table stakes here.

Brent Weaver: Jerry, just conscious of time, real quick on any specific practices that are helping you stay adaptable and current.

Jerry Broadway: I would say, the space is always evolving, so the best way to stay up to date is literally engaging with the space, going to things like this Summit, listening to other speakers, networking, just being involved in your scene and having conversations with people who are also involved, you can’t just sit from the sidelines all the time. I would also say, again, long-form content on YouTube is amazing, being willing to watch an hour-long, two-hour-long video, and if it helps, speed up the video to 2x speed, it sounds super fast at first but you get used to it over time. And I would also say, not being afraid to experiment with other platforms, you mentioned this earlier, Brent, how it feels a little bit like gambling, and it can feel like that because there’s a risk-to-reward ratio, if this platform does really well and you’re an early adopter you can capitalize on that, but if it fades away you just dedicated all those resources to a dying platform, but for me, because of my creative nature and being an artist, I like to take the risk more to experiment with new platforms, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Brent Weaver: It feels like being somebody that 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 stay consistent. But I love these takeaways, mindful experimentation, find those patterns, be consistent, sometimes do that boring work on a regular basis, that’s going to help you be successful on these alternative strategies. Let’s look at our audience question, we’re going to close that poll on what’s your biggest challenge in managing multiple traffic channels. While we’re waiting for results, Vassie, what has your experience been so far in the Web Growth Summit?

Vassilena Valchanova: It’s been super interesting, 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 lineup is amazing, and I love sharing the stage and sharing what I know with the audience.

Brent Weaver: And Jerry, how’s your experience been so far?

Jerry Broadway: Oh, I thought it’s been amazing, I enjoyed the process, I feel very grateful that you guys asked me to come speak, this is the first Summit that I’ve ever spoken at, but it’s been really fun, and it’s cool to see all the different speakers, I’m definitely going to go back and watch all the speakers at 2x speed to get the download, especially the AI talk, the navigating search landscape in the midst of AI, that’s something that’s really interesting to me.

Brent Weaver: We’ve got that session, there’ll be the recordings, but if you want to catch our sessions live we’ve got one more today on unlocking AI secrets, practical SEO tips you cannot miss, we’re going to be right back with that session from Andy Crestodina. Vassie, thank you again, Jerry, thank you again, you’ve been such great speakers and panelists here at this year’s Web Growth Summit, and best of luck to both of you in your businesses and ventures, and best of luck on YouTube and TikTok. Thanks again for being here.

Jerry Broadway: Thanks for having me.

Brent Weaver: And as expected, our last poll there, time was the biggest challenge, so hopefully today’s sessions are giving you some tactics and tips on how to save time in your content strategies as well as being more strategic. Going to our next session of practical SEO tips, so stick with us for this year’s Web Growth Summit.