3. Diversify where your traffic comes from

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“I sell specifically to hunters,” John said. “By doing that, I found that it was a lot easier to talk on a deeper level to one demographic than trying to be everything to everybody.”

John isn’t a hunter, but he learned their needs for a heavy-duty e-bike and found that there weren’t a lot of other stores targeting that demographic, particularly in search results. He started removing those little foldable e-bikes that are better for city streets from his inventory. He changed product photos and descriptions, and started writing content like “Top 11 Electric Hunting Bikes.”

“And while it was very scary in the beginning doing that and deliberately being polarizing and cutting out over 90% of my potential customers, it was absolutely game changing for me because everything became easier, marketing, email, the messaging on the website, everything became about how an e-bike is going to elevate your hunt. And then hunters really were drawn to it,” John said.


John originally got all of his customers through Facebook and Google austria phone number data ads. But he was banned by Facebook and Google in the same week because e-bikes are considered vehicles, which are not allowed to be sold through the two platforms.

“I was ready to quit my job. And then when the suspensions came down on my accounts, all my traffic went away overnight,” John said. “I went from getting 10,000 visitors a month, 100% from paid traffic, to then something like 15 or 20 visits a week to the store. The idea that I may not be able to ever quit my job was a hard pill to swallow.”

Since he couldn’t advertise, John shifted his focus to organic traffic instead. He started imitating affiliate marketers, trying to get his site to rank high in search results with search engine optimization (SEO) tactics.

“I started creating content like theirs but tweaked so it would be more effective to get people to the product pages,” John said. “And then there was a whole lot of things I had to learn, how to get backlinks and how to do all of the things that would then support the content I was writing so it would be more likely to rank on page one. It’s a slow process, it takes a long time to write good, helpful content and then get it to rank. But it definitely worked, because it kept me in business.”