I must get 2-3 dozen questions a week from my blog subscribers and members over at InfoMarketer’sZone confused by the prospect of how to get traffic to their on-line business websites.
Typical scenarios are sending traffic to a sales page where you want to sell your own products or pre-sell a product on the way to offering an affiliate product OR sending traffic to a landing page where you want to collect opt-in information turning a visitor into a warm lead.
Some other instances you want the traffic to go to a specific piece of content (blog post, article, video, testimonial or case study, webinar, etc…) which is really just a gateway to turning that visitor into a lead.
The challenge people face is that you need traffic for anything you want to do on-line…it doesn’t matter if you want to test a market, build a list, engage around content, get someone to follow or subscribe or make a sale…it all starts with traffic.
Unfortunately this is where many on-line marketers lose perspective, become confused, get overwhelmed and often make decisions that either don’t work or that they regret later (like spending money on buying a list or ads and then getting NO response)
Having run businesses on-line for many years, let me assure you that getting traffic is simpler than that.
You still have choices, so stay with me as I try to simplify this down to just 3 options.
Content: You Produce It, They Consume It
Generating purposeful content is a wide-ranging approach to getting seen on-line. Lumped into this approach are: blog posts, articles (long or short), videos, social networking posts, live streams (periscope or snapchat for example), podcasts, interviews (written, audio or video), case studies, surveys, etc…
Also critical to the process of generating traffic through content are the methods of distribution used to get your content seen by your market, here we talk about things like:
- Uploading and optimizing videos on YouTube and Facebook
- Distribution of blog posts into directories and active work to syndicate or share content with other targeted blogs
- Linking to content as part of overall social campaign on Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, Twitter and Snapchat
- Syndication of podcasts onto Itunes and Google Play where they will have much higher chance of being found
- Using ebook or report directories such as Amazon Kindle as method to distribute free or low-cost content to hook prospects into your sales funnel
- Optimizing your content for SEO
As you can see, there are two very important pieces to effective content marketing: 1) Generating lots of high-value content and 2) Distribution of your content to maximize exposure and response
Paid Advertising: Focusing On Targeting And ROI
Paid advertising may not be something you are willing to jump into just yet, however it can always be a good investment to generate early traffic to your website and sales funnel in order to test both your products and your sales pitch (whether it be a sales page or an opt-in squeeze page)
When you are selling something like a low-cost report you should focus your paid ads on getting signup to which you can sell multiple products over time to get your revenue per subscriber to a rate where spending money on ads makes sense (ROI)
3rd Party Partner/Affiliate/JV/Syndication
Here, you go after revenue or content syndicate partners to either exchange content or earn revenue on each sale in exchange for pre-qualified traffic
Chances are, as you read your options, one of these jumps out at you as making more sense in the beginning.
It could be that you have a marketing budget to work with and want to put the pedal to the metal so you will jump into advertising OR it could be that you want to build up a reputation around content marketing and so that’s your first option.
All 3 methods work, the choice comes down to which one you believe you will work hardest at, your level of patience in seeing it through, your budget and your strengths in terms of skills and abilities.
Whatever route you take, knowing the options and then stepping into the method that fits your needs best is always the best approach.
