So I have been building an ad network for over a year now. I first started because I was obsessed with AI and was building all kinds of cool new software. I realized very quickly, hey—I can make all of these amazing tools, but getting them in front of people is really the hard part, and then getting enough people to see it to actually make a sale was even harder.
I have personally scaled 3 businesses before this to over $1–3 million per year, and for each of those businesses, I did it purely with Facebook ads and some organic content—and all of those were selling high-ticket coaching.
Long story short, Facebook ads have stopped working as well as they did in the past. They have gotten more expensive and send worse quality traffic. When you combine the fact that anyone can now make amazing products and the old methods of getting users just are not working, the obvious problem to solve became distribution.
So I set out to build my own ad network. I wanted to generate traffic so I could sell it to businesses and help companies grow. Great idea, but hard to figure out because it is literally like hunting for the holy grail that every entrepreneur dreams of.
We have run hundreds of tests, and these are the 4 methods to generate traffic that are working now and what we use to drive millions of clicks to businesses' websites.
#1 SEO farms
We have found that SEO is still the best for long-term, consistent traffic, but just making regular websites doesn’t work anymore. What we did instead was start building free tools and free games.
Tools and games rank well, and people get hooked. Free games attract people who are bored and want something to do, and there are millions of searchers every month for games that we now make for free. Combine that with making new games that people actually like playing, and they get hooked—and we simply place our ads in the games or on the page, and boom, lots of traffic.
Tools are even better. We simply make free tools that people use for their life or business, and it’s the same thing. While most people are charging for tools, we switched the model to ads and are having great success, driving millions of clicks from high-quality traffic.
We are also ranking these in AEO, so ChatGPT is recommending our games and tools to people, and it’s been an unreal traffic source. But it’s harder to get that authority than most people think to get recommended by AI.
#2 Clipping farms
Short-form content is still a great source of traffic. Basically, we find videos that have already gone viral and either copy the video or re-edit it and publish it on our channels.
We also follow top content creators and streamers, clip their long-form videos, and repost. This is a lot of work and usually does not take off until the 2–3 month of posting every day, but once you find a niche + format that goes viral, it is undeniably a great way to drive traffic.
It is not the best source of traffic, but the sheer volume of having videos hit millions of views is amazing, and with the right offers, can generate great sales.
The bottleneck is editing and time—it takes so much work that we have to hire multiple clippers, and we try to pay them a livable wage, but it’s a grind. We post the shorts on YouTube, IG, and TikTok, and it’s very random what videos and what platform will go viral.
We try to post 2–5 shorts per day across multiple niches, but again, once you find a niche + format/style of video that works, it drives great results.
#3 YouTube SEO
Using a tool called vidIQ, you can find specific keywords that people are searching for on YouTube, and it’s a great way to drive real traffic—but it requires lots of work.
You really have to understand how to make good YouTube videos + keyword research, but once you crack the code, the videos will compound and drive tons of traffic to any business.
It is great because if done right, you can sell your product directly to people searching for exactly what you sell, and then you just keep providing value + brand awareness until you become the obvious choice.
Basically, allowing you to get traffic for the price of production and the time it takes to plan, record, edit, publish, and promote (which is still cheaper than ads).
#4 Paying other content creators to promote you
This has been a great way to get traffic. You can’t pay too much to people that don’t have a lot of followers, and it takes a lot of negotiating—but once you find real content creators that are willing to work with your brand at a fair price, this can really work.
You will be supporting real people who have been making great content and building a great audience. The way we do it is 50% upfront for ~5 videos, newsletter promotion, and whatever else they have an audience on, plus part of the revenue generation.
That way, if they do a good job, they can make some great money. We also ask that we get to use the content they make on our platforms later on (usually just repost their videos a month later on our platforms).
A lot of these content creators are great at getting attention but not at making money, so we provide brand deals. They promote us and our customers, and we have gotten some amazing results and a lot of traffic we would never have gotten without it.
The hard part is finding good partners and negotiating deals so everyone wins.
This is what we have found is driving the most revenue right now. If you can still run ads profitably, then great—keep doing it. But for most people, the game has changed.
The biggest shift we’ve seen is that distribution is no longer about just “running ads”—it’s about owning attention in multiple places and finding creative ways to get in front of people consistently.
None of these methods are easy, and all of them took time to figure out. But once something starts working, it compounds fast and can drive a level of traffic that paid ads alone just can’t match anymore.
Curious what other people are seeing right now—what’s actually working for you when it comes to getting traffic?