One of the ways Ellen has grown her audience and network so quickly is through a concept she calls “borrowed traffic.”
Borrowed traffic is essentially getting in front of other people’s audiences. When you don’t have a large audience to start with, it can be hard to get going. It can take a long time to build that flywheel of growth.
But by getting in front of other audiences, you’re short-circuiting the process a bit.
Ellen has explained borrowed traffic with a lemonade stand analogy that I love.
Let’s say, you’re selling lemonade. If you set up your lemonade stand in front of your house, you’ll get some sales from people you know who want to support you.
But after a while, those customers are going to dry up (or have a sugar rush) and your sales are going to dry up as well.
So maybe it’s not the best place to have a lemonade stand all the time.
But there is a summer festival happening across town, and it’s a hot sunny day.
What if you instead move your lemonade stand to the parking lot outside that event so that people coming into and leaving the festival can get a cold drink?
Do you think you’d get more sales than your 3 neighbors and your spouse? Probably.
Putting your lemonade stand where the thirsty customers are is a much better strategy, and that’s essentially what borrowed traffic is.
You are finding the people who have audiences that would be interested in your content/products, and getting in front of them.
You do need to be consistent and build your own audience, but that takes time, so you shouldn’t be just hanging around waiting for that to happen.
Ellen used this strategy in the early days when she was getting started. She didn’t have a big audience, so she went where the people who she wanted in her audience were.
Here are some types of borrowed traffic: