What works.
What ranks.
What earns.
Multi-channel growth tactics for small online publishers — SEO, AI Search, social, paid, and owned audience. Tested across a real portfolio of sites, written up the way I'd actually want to read it.
Live across the portfolio.
Every dot is a city with someone reading one of the five sites in the last 30 minutes.
- PhotoWorkout
- Mappr
- RankingHacks
- SampleShots
- AirportRoutes
What grew last month.
Top traffic sources across the portfolio for May 2026, ranked by year-over-year delta. Numbers from a self-hosted Plausible. Direct traffic excluded — channels only.
- 1Google
- 2DuckDuckGo
- 3AIChatGPT
- 4Bing
- 5Brave
- 6Yahoo!
- 7Ecosia
- 8AIcopilot.com
Five channels. One playbook each.
Every post on RankingHacks fits into one of these channels. The thesis: a solo publisher in 2026 should pick three of these well, not all five poorly.
- Channel
SEO
Search rankings that still pay in 2026 — schema, internal links, content depth.
Read the playbook → - Channel
AI Search · GEO
Citability for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
Read the playbook → - Channel
Social
Pinterest, Facebook, and the long tail of social referral.
Read the playbook → - Channel
Paid
PPC and paid social for affiliates who actually have margin.
Read the playbook → - Channel
Owned Audience
Newsletter, video, and podcast — audiences that subscribe, not strangers who land.
Read the playbook →