When it comes to challenges new online entrepreneurs experience, generating traffic to their website, blog, or product sales page is right up there at the top.
In fact, when I surveyed my list last month it ranked as #1 challenge you were experiencing in getting to the next level in online business.
That alone was not particularly surprising, traffic generation has always been one of the 4 key pillars of achieving profitable success with an internet business along with having the right mindset, identifying profitable markets and product/service ideas and being highly effective at marketing (all topics covered in detail within InfoMarketer’sZone for those of you wanting to commit and make a massive surge in your business over the next 30-45 days)
What was very interesting though is that most people expressed their challenge as “Getting FREE traffic” when the reality is that there are no techniques for generating traffic that are completely FREE.
The reality is that you would pay for traffic all day long if it generated substantial profit wouldn’t you?
If it cost you $100 to get 100 visitors to your site and on average that led to $200 in sales or more, you would be all over that traffic source.
In fact, if you examine any strong, profitable, growing online business you will see that they are investing in traffic (whether it be with content to generate organic traffic or whether it be buying ads) and closely tracking that investment in terms of ROI (Return on Investment) so they know if their effort and investment is resulting in profit versus losses.
The first secret to getting enough targeted traffic is to STOP thinking of getting FREE traffic and start thinking about how you will get targeted leads you can turn into profitable customers so that your ROI on traffic generation is positive.
Let’s look at two specific examples…
Content Generation, SEO and Social Marketing
You’ve come across them on podcasts (Tim Ferris, Gary Vaynerchuck, Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas…) and Social Networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat (Grant Cardone, Tai Lopez) who have become masters at generating a mass following via blogging, articles, podcasts, video content and social networking.
You may THINK of this content as FREE given they leverage free platforms that do not charge for their content posts, however when you factor in the hours each day they spend, the investment in equipment, the support staff they end up using and constant actual cost of time spent you realize that there is significant investment in the so-called FREE traffic they generate using these methods.
In fact, in many cases, buying leads for $1 each or less can be less than the investment made in branding across a wide swath of platforms – especially when you are starting out.
For these methods to work they require…
- Incredibly deep understanding of their target market
- Well thought out daily content and stories that directly appeal and engage their target market
- Discipline to commit to a multi-month campaign regardless of how many early engagements they have
- Well planned campaign to grow influence via guest spots, product releases (books, ebooks, etc…) as well as generating their own content
- Often a cross-promotion plan that involves speaking, coaching and other forms of interacting or promoting your brand to your marketplace
None of that sounds FREE does it?
What is important is that you leverage your strengths, track interest and engagement and track conversions (over time) closely to know if/how well your content generation and social marketing plans are working – only then can you truly assess if they are profitable or not.
Finally, this method takes months of faith, belief and trust in your approach as these types of campaigns are never profitable in the beginning. Instead you want to see early evidence of views, engagements and signs of conversion on free or low-cost promotions to get a sense of effectiveness.
Paid Advertising
We cover both PPC (Pay-Per-Click such as Adwords or Bing) and Social Networking Advertising such as Facebook Ads in detail within InfoMarketer’sZone, but let’s quickly cover the advantages of a well-run ad campaign here:
- Fast – you get near instant feedback on your ad and landing pages
- Deep analytics – when you run paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Microsoft or other platforms you get very rich analytics not only telling you overall engagement and conversion rates, but also details on keywords that generated the interest, details about the lead that can help you further improve your advertising in the coming campaigns
- Test Entire Sales Funnel – not only can you test ads, but you can split test headlines, landing pages and ad variations along with landing page variations that will help improve your overall sales funnel leading to higher profits in organic or content marketing campaigns as well. In fact, many online marketers build both paid and content oriented campaigns simultaneously so they can apply what they quickly learn from paid ad campaigns to their organic and content marketing efforts
- Leverage Winning Formula – although it may take you a few hundred dollars in initial investment to find the right combination of ads and sales funnel, once you do arrive at a consistently profitable state you can then ramp up your paid ad formula to scale your profit higher AND place those campaigns largely on auto-pilot allowing you to further expand your business (though someone does need to keep a consistent eye to make sure your campaigns remain profitable)
For many new online entrepreneurs paid ads seem scary and out of reach for them in the beginning.
The truth is that paid ads can often be a very worthwhile early investment to help you scale your traffic faster, tweak and improve your business marketing and can often become one of the most profitable forms of marketing available to you.
If you have been banging your head against the wall trying to understand make FREE traffic work for you, try flipping your mindset into a different state where your objective is to grow and scale your business fast by using traffic generations that help you refine your online business into a profitable state where you can then expand and grow quickly.
