FBC – 287 – The truth about your online traffic finally revealed

Today, I want to make some revelations about your online traffic. There could be things that you have taken for granted or simply misjudged that could, one day, bite you in the b*tt.

Thankfully you have me to warn you about some of those things and make sure you are prepared.

All the answers and more in today's episode.

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Today I'm going to talk to you about the different types of traffic. And it's not what you think. You might be thinking, oh, man, is going to say something about Facebook, about Instagram, about this, about that. No, it's really not this.

So this is a distinction that only a few people make with traffic. And it's actually very important that you understand the difference.

So the first traffic that I want to talk to you about is paid traffic. Commonly referred to as Facebook ads, Google PPC campaigns and stuff like that. If you have the money to pay for it you pay for it. It's immediate. You get the traffic straight away. OK, so it's paid. It's not your traffic. You're paying for the traffic. The minute you stop paying, the traffic stops immediately.

So there's nothing wrong with this. Paid traffic is good to generate sales, generate leads and stuff like that. OK, so it's not your traffic. And you understand that if you if you're broke, you run out of money, you'll see very quickly that traffic is not yours. So that's the first type of traffic that you that you can have.

Then you have traffic that you control. This is the one where people actually struggle, so what kind of traffic do you control? So the traffic that you control is your social media accounts, your Facebook page, your Facebook group, your Instagram account and your YouTube channel, stuff like that.

You can control the traffic that's in there, but please understand something you don't own that. If Facebook decides to shut down your page, your group or whatever, they will shut it down. That's it. It's gone. So you basically have control over it for now. But dude, you don't own it. They do own it, OK?

And you hear horror stories of people losing. Man, I lost my Instagram account with one hundred thousand two hundred thousand people on it. Me, I just lost an Instagram account with one hundred and twenty thousand people, you know, and I lost a lot of Instagram accounts with twenty thousand people and stuff like that.

So if you have a YouTube channel you can put a link and send people there, whatever you want. So you have control over it, but you don't own it. Right. Very important for you guys to understand this. You don't own that.

So the other source of traffic that you have is organic traffic. Organic traffic is something that you have some level of control over. Organic is just people landing on your website and your blog and your landing pages and stuff because they typed something on Google. They found you on Google for whatever reason. So you can impact it using SEO techniques and stuff like that. But then at the end of the day you can't control it. You can't control what people type on Google.

The truth about your online traffic finally revealed.

Then there is another level. OK, so this one is very interesting. It’s borrowed traffic. And this is something I'm looking into right now. It's basically doing some joint ventures. So that's another term. People like, dude, what the hell is a joint venture? So you're just collaborating with people. You basically have some people sending you traffic to your pages.

So let's say, for example, you have a bunch of affiliates. So these affiliates are sending you traffic. You're basically borrowing their audience and they're sending you the traffic. Or if you're paying for something called a solo ad. So a solo ad is you writing an email, giving it to Bob because Bob has a list of people who seem to be interested in the kind of product that you sell. Bob sends that email to his list and they go to your page. This is what's called a solo ad.

So that's one form of borrowed traffic, you have some other borrowed traffic where right now with these influencers on Instagram you can pay for a shout out. So a shout out is posting something on their Instagram account and directing it to you. OK, so you're basically borrowing their audience for a given time period. So on Instagram it might be twenty four hours on, on the solo ad for email, it might be a number of clicks.

So they're going to basically promote stuff for you, for you. It's one of the closest things to free traffic. I will call it free traffic. But there is still a little bit of work for you to go contact these people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now, the ultimate level is the traffic you own. The traffic that you own is your email list. You own that email list. So, let's say you're working with some autoresponder and they want to shut you down. You still have your list. It's your list. And then you'll be able to contact them when you want. OK, nobody can shut you down on that.

OK, so it's very important that you understand the difference between all these kinds of traffic sources. And ideally what you want is to have a little bit of everything. You need to do all of them and you need to understand, you know, why you need to do all of them, what each and every one of them does for you and how to integrate something in a mix that's harmonious.

The truth about traffic: more is not the problem you think it is

Everyone wants more traffic. Almost nobody needs it. In 20+ years of building systems I have seen far more businesses killed by leaky funnels than by low traffic. If a thousand visitors earn you nothing, ten thousand will earn you nothing louder. The uncomfortable truth is that traffic is the vanity number, and what happens after the click is where the money actually lives or dies.

So before I buy a single extra visitor I fix the plumbing: what triggers on signup, what nurtures the lead, what recovers the ones who ghost. I run all of it on Make.com and Airtable so no lead falls through a crack while I sleep in Bali. McKinsey estimates automation can absorb 60 to 70% of the routine work that usually eats a founder's attention, and Zapier found 88% of small businesses say it lets them compete with far bigger names. I unpack the full funnel math on my growth hacking series and in The Diary of a Virtual CEO. Plug the leaks first. Then, and only then, pour in traffic.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the uncomfortable truth about online traffic for most websites?

The uncomfortable truth is that most online traffic does not convert and was never going to. Bot visits, accidental clicks, and low intent browsers can account for half of every analytics dashboard. The real number that matters is the visitors who landed, stayed, and took an action. That subset is smaller than founders want to admit.

Why does more online traffic not always mean more sales?

More traffic does not equal more sales when the new visitors do not match the buyer profile. Cheap social clicks, off topic search terms, and broad ad targeting inflate the visit count without changing revenue. The conversion rate falls as quality drops. Quality traffic from buyer intent searches outperforms ten times the volume from curiosity clicks.

How can you tell if your online traffic is real and worth pursuing?

Real traffic shows three signals. Time on page above sixty seconds, a click rate to internal pages above twenty percent, and a visible lift in email signups or sales when traffic spikes. Anything else is noise. Track those three numbers monthly and rank your traffic sources by them, not by raw visit count.

What is the safest way to grow online traffic without wasting money?

Grow traffic from sources where the visitor types a buyer intent keyword on purpose. Search, podcast mentions, and YouTube reviews of competitor products outperform broad social. Spend the first ninety days ranking for ten exact match queries that show purchase intent. Those visits arrive pre warmed and convert at five to twenty times the rate of cold scroll traffic.

About the Author

Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches , from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms , while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

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