My Traffic Source Graveyard

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I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now, it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

[0:53] 

Pinterest is another platform that I’ve tried actually several times, and my findings were that their compliance is a lot less strict than Meta, Google, and all the other platforms. And on the surface, that was nice, that was nice, because strict compliance pretty much kills any opportunity for any kind of decent lead generation, which is why I like email drops and solo ads, because there’s no compliance, like no one can tell you not to say something. I really like that. But with Pinterest, while the compliance was all right, and there were plenty of targeting options, I found two things to be interesting.

First, Pinterest was extremely expensive. For a platform that mostly has visual traffic, it turned out to be extremely expensive, where I was paying $5, $6, $7 per click. That’s like a lot. That’s a lot for anyone, by the way, not just for people who just get started. Anyone would be kind of alarmed about that price. And the second thing, I found that the traffic I was getting from Pinterest was not really buying much.

I just couldn’t find a way to get this traffic to convert into purchases. They were opting in, but they weren’t checking their email very often, and they weren’t very eager to buy stuff, and I couldn’t get to the bottom of it, I couldn’t figure out exactly what I needed to change about it. At some point, I stopped driving all mobile traffic from the platform.

[2:52] 

I disabled iPads, I disabled phones, and I just tried to keep it to desktop only. I also said not to drive traffic to devices that weren’t on a Wi-Fi network, meaning if somebody is out and about, and they’re connected to their 4G or 5G, I didn’t want to appear in front of them. There’s also age restrictions, etc. Countries. I mean, targeting-wise, I’ve really, really tightened that up to a point where I was getting only 30 years old to 50 years old, United States, desktop only, Wi-Fi only, and I just couldn’t get that audience to work. So no, unfortunately, Pinterest is just another traffic source that goes into the wastebasket for me.

I could never make it work. I’ve read some case studies, I’ve read some stories about people making Pinterest organic traffic work, like creators who built big followings off of Pinterest, I know at least of one of them. But also, you have to ask for which kind of niche market, because Pinterest is good for what? First of all, it’s visual, so it’s always image boards, so it’s interior design, it’s clothing, it’s makeup, maybe, tattoos, cooking, stuff like that, right? So you get a lot of visual traffic that’s just looking at the picture, but what do you do with it? How do you monetize it? I haven’t personally ever met or heard of a Pinterest millionaire, right? Somebody who actually sells a million dollars a year worth of stuff on Pinterest.

I mean, I’ve heard of people making a million dollars a year on TikTok, actually selling stuff, like with TikTok shop, for example, but I just got an impression that Pinterest is one of those things where the click isn’t really worth anything. By the way, speaking of other platforms, since I’m kind of sharing traffic sources that didn’t work for me, another traffic source that didn’t work for me was Reddit, specifically Reddit ads, as well as, what’s that platform where people post questions and other people answer? It’s, oh man, Quora, another one. So Quora was another platform that, kind of like Reddit, I would run ads on.

[5:43] 

Yeah, you guys know it. Wow, everyone knows Quora. So, you know, back in the day, I remember spending a lot of time on forums. I’m sure many of you are old enough to remember what forums are. And I’ve built quite a reputation, quite a good reputation, actually, on the warrior forum at the time. And so when I ran ads on the warrior forum, I ended up making $1.3 million in 13 months.

And that was awesome. That was a big win. It wasn’t my first win, but it certainly was the biggest win at the time. And I figured, look, if I could make forums work back in the day, maybe I can make Quora work. And I started bidding on certain questions that were related to my thing. You know, I bid on questions related to affiliate marketing. I bid on questions related to lead generation, traffic generation, ClickBank, JVZoo, things like that. And, you know, I was shocked at the amount of clicks I’ve gotten that did not engage with me at all.

So when I think about how I use Reddit, when I think about how I use Quora, first of all, I don’t register a user. I just go and I browse it, oftentimes anonymously. And then, you know, I just look up the question that I’m interested in, and I click on the Google listing, right, for that question. And I don’t click on the ads. Like, when I’m scrolling through and I’m trying to get an answer to a question that really interests me, all of these questions, they’re just not, they’re just getting in my way, so to speak. You know what I mean? They’re just getting in my way. As opposite to things like, let’s say, YouTube ads, where you’re there either for entertainment purposes or learning purposes, you’re not necessarily looking, not always looking for an answer to a particular question. But oftentimes, you’re just watching content, and so you allow the ads to interrupt your experience. But with these platforms, I think most of the time, people are just looking for a specific answer, and the ad might be just getting in the way. So it’s harder.

[8:02] 

Not to mention that there’s a certain type of people that gets attracted to platforms like, for example, Reddit. So Reddit attracts mostly millennials, software developers oftentimes, right? Like, there’s a profile, and maybe what I was marketing just didn’t fit the profile. So all these traffic sources, specifically the ones that we’ve discussed today, you know, Reddit, Quora, Tabula, Pinterest, like, they didn’t work for me, for my market.

But if I were entering a different market tomorrow, I would probably retest all of these platforms again. Does that make sense? Like, whenever you’re going out to different traffic sources, and you’re trying to understand how to generate leads, you will oftentimes find that there is like a very low chance for you to find a traffic source that is entirely one size fits all for all industries. And you will mostly find that one or two traffic sources work way better for the kind of product service or niche that you’re trying to sell or market than other traffic sources.

It doesn’t make other traffic sources not great, it just makes them not great for this particular funnel, service, product, niche market, and so on. Okay. For example, meta ads is not great for everyone, even though it might seem like it is because everyone’s trying to advertise on meta. But most of my peers that I talk to cannot make meta ads work. And I’m talking people who are making six figures, multiple six figures, and even seven figures, they cannot make meta ads work for them. Even though meta ads is probably considered one of the largest, if not the largest ad platforms out there, aside from maybe Google, right? Google and YouTube.

[10:06] 

Now, does it make the traffic source itself wrong in general? No, it just means that whatever they’re marketing, that’s probably not going to work. In my kind of journey, I would probably invest extra effort into making the traffic source work if it’s showing signs of life. Because once I have a reason to believe that it can work, I will then start working with the format of my offer in order to start generating more traffic.

So for instance, some traffic sources like solo ads, all you really need to do is just put a capture page or a squeeze page in front of it, and you’re gonna do just fine. And that’s, you know, that’s pretty good. It used to be the case on most traffic sources, but not anymore. Now, on something like Tabula, you probably need to put a content website in front of that traffic, because that’s what that traffic does, just kind of goes and reads articles and clicks on things. With meta ads these days, there are many different approaches. Five years ago, you could have just driven traffic directly to a webinar. Three years ago, you could have just driven traffic to a video case study of some kind and then a link to sign up. These days, you have to do like a really low ticket item to actually get buyers off of that platform, because otherwise you’re gonna it’s gonna eat your wallet, it’s gonna destroy you.

[11:38] 

With YouTube ads, right, about seven years ago, you could have just driven traffic to an automated webinar or a video case study just as easily as you would have on meta ads, and you would have made bank. But then everybody starts doing webinars, and it doesn’t work anymore, right? So all of a sudden, it has to change. And so when that shift started happening, I produced a podcast, like it was a VSL in a podcast that started attracting people. We ended up spending, I think, quarter of a million dollars on that and generating about 750,000 from that.

And then, you know, we abandoned that, we switched to something else. Then, all right, then I switched to a VSL to a $197 offer directly, something that nobody was doing. And then I said, OK, let’s try that. So it was just a continuous experiment of which format, which sort of presentation would work while keeping the basic premise of what I was selling the same.

And then, curious thing happened, compliance. So YouTube just changed their compliance rules, completely changed them. They’ve pretty much eliminated any ability to say anything. And if you were doing dating, investing, any kind of make money, losing weight, all of a sudden, all your ads get rejected, accounts get suspended, and so on and so forth. And so it just evolves like that, you know, as a traffic platform just evolves like that.

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Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, transcripts, and other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch, plus $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.