021: Claim Unlimited Internet Advertising & Traffic (Free SEO and Paid PPC) to Deliver Hungry Visitors to Your Websites

Robert Plank 0:01 Robert Plank Show, Episode 21 how to claim unlimited internet traffic that's free SEO and paid PPC to deliver hungry visitors to your websites.

Robert Plank 0:20 Hey there. Welcome back to the Robert Plank show. It's nice to meet me. We're talking about building an online business and continuing to build it so that it makes money while you sleep. And so you know, if you're listening to this call, either you have websites. You want websites. Maybe you sell services, maybe you sell products, maybe sell ebooks, maybe you sell physical books and you sell home study courses. But either way, wherever you are, you need to get more eyeballs on your website. You need to get more people looking at your websites. And I mean, right off the bat, this is an idea that a lot of people don't get. I mean, I talked to some people, and even to people who are somewhat internet savvy, who have things like blogs. Okay, so a blog, for example. Let's, let me just use an example of business partner Lance Thomas. Sure, his wife is a runner. She has a blog where she tells stories and talks about updates about her running adventures. Today, I went 50 miles at this place. Today I went 22 miles at some hill. I'm going to tell some motivational anecdote about, like the runners mindset and so whatever kind of blog that you have, well, I talk to people, and they say, Okay, I've got a blog. No one reads it. I say, Well, what you need to do is get some traffic going, have an opt in form, build a list, email it. And they say, Well, why would I do all those things? And I say, well, to get blog comments. Why I want to get blog comments? Well, someone comes to your site, they see that other people are there, and they can read what you have, and they can continue to click over. And if you start recommending products or have links or make your own course, well then you'll have that established audience to then go and buy. And, I mean, this is just such a huge, you know, gap that needs to be bridged here is that, you know, I know people who they're like this, they have blogs, or they maybe they have a book out there, and they they want all this attention, but they don't know how they're gonna get it, and they just think that it's gonna fall into their lap. They just think that, well, if I just put a blog out there, it'll just spread from word of mouth. People will just hear about me, and I'll just get all these clicks. I'll get all these people flooding to me. And whenever I have to say, they'll all go off on the recommendation. And, I mean, that is completely a lie. The internet is crowded enough where I mean, and we'll go to, I mean, so many sites. How many sites you think you visited today, besides Facebook and Google? Maybe 1020, 3050, how many news sites, how many blogs, how many interesting videos, quite a few. And how many of those sites will you never be back to, also, quite a few. So when we have a website, we can't just put it out there and cross your fingers and hope people will find us. We have to use these traffic sources on the Internet, because that's really all the internet is okay. The internet is there are different web pages, and then people link to other web pages. And so we want people to link to our site so that people can find it. Because you've never just typed in a big, long URL, right? LIKE, Would you ever go to for example, Robert plank.com, forward slash strategy, dash vs dash tactics. No, you wouldn't. Chances are, when you go to most pages on the internet, you don't type in some big, long thing, some other site links you to it. You're goofing off on Facebook, and you clicked on it. You got an email and you clicked on it. You go to Google and you search for something like, I don't know, Turlock, California dentist, and you clicked on it and you ended up on someone else's website. So I mean, even if you are, you know, working on a website still, or you make websites for other people, either way, you still need traffic. And we're going to talk about some free and some paid methods of traffic and what to do and what to watch out for, and what you just completely ignore, basically the good, the bad and the ugly. So if that sounds great to you, let's get pumped up. And my first question to you is, well, how would you like it if I listed off 100 different sources of internet traffic, if I give you 100 different URLs, 100 different traffic tips. Some of you are already getting excited. Some of you already watering at the mouth. Some of you just perked up. 100 sites. Awesome. I'm gonna get my notepad out. Gonna write them all down. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not going to list 100 traffic sources. And I mean, I see this all the time. People say, you know, I'm gonna give you 22 ways of getting traffic in the next 30 minutes. Well, so you're gonna give me one minute per thing. You're gonna be giving me a list of URLs. And when I see things like that, when I see you know, here the 500 best way traffic. I'm thinking, well, out of these 500 maybe, could you narrow it down to the top four? So, so today we're gonna be talking about not every possible way of getting traffic, because I know that if. I listed 50 then someone else would jump in and say, Here's 51 well, here's some brand new ad network, or here's some brand new, you know, document sharing site, or here's some brand new social bookmarking site. We don't want to get too crazy. Let me just, I guess, just list off a few things, just so you know, we're in for we're going to talk about free traffic, paid traffic. Free traffic are things like mailing to your email list. Search engine optimization, which means, you know, publishing articles, doing a podcast like this one, free traffic an affiliate program, so like a way for people to recommend you to their subscribers. Social media, so posting things on Facebook or videos on YouTube and then forums, so message boards and things like guest blogging, those are the free methods we're going to talk about. And then paid methods. So usually this is where we do this thing called Pay Per Click advertising, and that's where you go on Facebook, and you don't face up there's ads on the sidebar, and you can say, well, I want to have one of those ads, and I want to target people who have previously liked LL Bean or Procter and Gamble, or Barnes and Noble, or, you know, Chicken Soup for the Soul. I'm going to advertise my, I don't know, Self Help Program, or I'm going to sell my real estate. Course, I'm going to target people who have already liked Carlton sheets, and I'm going to send my to all the Carlton sheets fans. Then we have things like AdWords and Bing, where when someone types in a phrase such as how to play the guitar, well then you have an ad on the sidebar, and if someone clicks, you might pay 30 cents, 50 cents, in order to get that click. But then when they get to your website, the idea is that you make enough money to continue paying for those ads, like you make more money from the sales of your ebook or membership site compared to what the ad costs. And then there's, you know, smaller traffic sources like ad networks or this cool thing called retargeting, things like solo ads, but not in the way that you've normally heard, and then some offline strategies as well. So now that I've kind of looked peaked ahead a little bit, my question to you is, do you have a website, and are you proud of it, and does it get consistent clicks and traffic? Most of you can't answer all three of those things. A lot of you have no website, or what we call a test website. So you go to it and it says, Here's my test blog, here's my test WordPress site, here's my test sales letter. I say, Great, I want to buy it. Click on it. There's nothing to buy. Or, even worse, people who put a lot of time and energy into a blog with a lot of posts, or a shopping cart with a lot of things to buy, or a sales letter that does a does a lot of build up to buy. One thing, I go back and check in a year and the site's been taken down. So the first thing right out of the off the bat is, well, I guess maybe the third thing or so is, we don't want to throw away websites. I mean, I can look at my log, which is at Robert plank.com you know what someone wrote in? They don't like that. I sometimes spell out URLs, but I gotta do it anyway, just for you. R, O, B, E, R, T, P, l, a, n, k.com. Is my blog where, you know, I post this. I'm gonna post this episode of this podcast. I talk about a lot of things, and when you go back to the early stuff, sometimes I cringe. Sometimes, you know, a lot of my opinions haven't changed, but just, you know, I was thinking in terms of such small numbers. I was thinking in terms of, you know, making 2000 bucks, making 5000 bucks, which I mean for you, if you're brand new, that might be more of the the terms that you're thinking of. But I just, I cringe quite a bit thinking at just the some of the things that I thought at the time were problems. But either way, I'm still going to keep that website online. I'm still going to keep all that content online. I mean, the time looking into that site, we've got 570,000 words just in comments, 7500 comments, and I've written 172,000

Robert Plank 9:04 words and more by the time you hear this in that blog. I say that not to brag, but just that that's a site where there's always a handful people on that site against consistent clicks. And the point of that site is in the link back to my other products, and that's just one of many sources of traffic that I have online, you need to have an internet presence. You need to have some thing people can buy. You need to have a way of people to get on your list, and you need to have people consistently coming to your site. And so along those lines there, there are two things I always hear, and I think I'm always going to hear this, and it's kind of a disconnect. I hear on one end of the spectrum, people saying, you know, what you should do is you should make a site where you charge 10 bucks a month, and, you know, just get 1000 people to join that site, and I mean easy stuff, and then you'll get 10,000 bucks a month just from doing nothing. Well, thing is, you're not gonna ever get paid for doing nothing. You're gonna have a product for sale that solves a. Problem, or you're going to be bringing people together somehow. But either way, people aren't going to pay you for nothing. They're going to pay because they get something in return. And this whole idea that you're going to make a site and that people are going to join it and forget about it and just get billed 10 bucks a month and not mind it, I think that's really, really bad thinking. On the other hand, Euro people saying, well, all you have to do is just find 10 people who are gonna pay 1000 bucks a month. Just just find 10 people, and that way you don't have to have a big list. Just find 10 people. And those will be your 10 people forever, and then they'll just hire you, and then you make an easy 10,000 bucks a month. And I'm thinking, Well, you know, that's a good idea in theory, but I mean, good luck finding those 10 people with no list, with no credibility, with no traffic, it's just not going to happen. So, I mean, the money is somewhere in between there. And I mean, Lance and I have a coaching program. We have, you know, an ability for people to pay us on a recurring basis. We meet them with them, one on one. We have high ticket courses. But I also have low ticket. I mean, I also sell things for $7 I also do things for free, like my blog, like this podcast, like the emails I send out, because I know that I don't want that well to run dry. So on one hand, we do want to have some kind of big package, or some kind of high dollar thing, like coaching, for example. But we also want to keep in mind that we need to keep building Well, first of all, we need to have an email list, and we need to keep building the list. We need to get even a handful of new people on that list per day, because otherwise the business is not growing. If the business is not growing, the business is dying. So my question to you right now is, can you get 1000 clicks to your site? How about this? Let's make it simple. 1000 subscribers. All right, can you get 1000 people on your list? And I'm gonna throw out a couple numbers for you, just so this all makes sense, 2% so you have an email list, and you can count on about 2% of your entire list, clicking on whatever email you send. Now, when I make a new blog post, I open up my email and I say, All right, you got something new. Here is the link to it. Go click. If I have something for sale, I say, I have something for sale. Here's the reason to click. Here's the link. Go and click. If I have a membership site and I want to, you know, give something to people who've paid me money, I can say, go log in. Here's a link. Go click. But the whole idea of sending an email is get people to click. We did a podcast about it, episode four of the Robert Plank show, and that was all about sending emails, getting people to click. Okay, so if we have 1000 subscribers, which is, I mean, it's not a big number, but that means you're getting there. If you have 1000 subscribers, that means that you can send an email and get 20 people to click on your web page. And I mean, I don't know how things are going for you, but that actually might mean you might get a sale. Okay, so if you have a sales letter that converts at 5% well, then you might get a sale from that. Now, now, whether you charge 100 bucks or 500 bucks or 1000 bucks, it's up to you. And the other thing too is, if you email three times, you get 60 clicks. Email five times, you get 100 clicks. So now we're getting somewhere. We get 100 clicks. Let's say we have a sales of the cameras at 3% we get three sales. But we need to get 1000 subscribers. And I know that, you know, we don't like to think about these things, especially when they're in such small numbers, but you gotta get 1000 subscribers. If you don't have 1000 subscribers, if you do have 1000 subscribers, or, you know, 10s or hundreds of 1000s. Need to be thinking about, where are my next 1000 subscribers coming from? So we said there's this thing like 2% so that means that out of our hole is we send an email 2% click, and the other number I want to give you is 50% which means that if you go to forced opt in page, a good example is at member genius.com, hey, dude who doesn't like me to spell things out, here it is, M, E, M, B, E R, G, E n, i, u, s.com, member genius.com. Another good one is backup creator.com. Forward slash, cash flow. That's C, A, S, H, F, l, O, W. These are both web pages where there's nothing else on the web page but a place to enter a name and email address. By the way, these sites are powered by paper template.com, p, A p e, r T, E, M, P, L, A, T, e.com, so you send people to a web page like this, and if it's in this format that we show you where it's like headline three bullet points call to action, and you send targeted traffic, you can expect a 50% opt in rate, which means that half the people who come to the web page just leave, the other half actually sign up and claim what free gift you're offering. I like to give away software and plugins, but I mean, if you have video report things like that, very simple to do. So by that math backtracking, we need to find. A way to get 2000 clicks? So that might be a huge number or a small number to you, but that's the challenge I want to put forth today. Is, where can you get 2000 clicks? So that you get 1000 subscribers, so that every time you mail out, you get send 20 clicks, which might mean you might make a sale, which means that if you email every day for five days, you get 100 clicks. Okay, so the way to measure this is if you have a C panel web host, which you might the way to find out is to go to whatever your website is, slash, c, p, A, N, E, L, there is icon that should be somewhere, called a W stats, a W S T, A T S and that will show you how many unique visitors you get per month to your website. And you can get an idea of how many per day. And then you can get an idea of, well, if I am sending this traffic to a four Stockton page, then, and I converted 50% then how can I build that list? And I mean, in a previous, previous podcast, we talked about this idea of an income machine. So, I mean, I don't want to repeat myself too much, but you can get an autoresponder at AWeber, that's a, W, E, B, E r.com, and then use paper template to give away a free gift, like a free report, and then send traffic to it often page. Half of them opt in. Now you build a list. Now you have an audience to tell about your blog posts and your things to buy, your sales letters. Okay, so, aw, stats. And then, if you are a more advanced user, Google Analytics will also, you know, give you a little bit more details. But if you're just doing the basics, aw stats, and then there's a tab in there called referring sites, and you can click on that, you can you can find out, out of all your traffic, how much of it comes from YouTube, Facebook affiliates, or even from search engines, and what people type in to find your site. Can this is huge because and getting back to, let's say that you're you're running a site for someone else, and you're their webmaster, and they are a lawyer in Modesto, California, and you see that you get a lot of traffic from someone typing in divorce lawyer Modesto. Well, then you can do things like make sure to write articles about which contain the phrase Divorce Lawyer Modesto, or make YouTube videos about divorce lawyers in Modesto. And, you know, even to get a little advanced register the domain name Divorce Lawyer modesto.com and actually, I just looked that one up, and someone owns it, but it's not in use. So I'm glad that's not like a porn site or anything like that. So

Robert Plank 17:54 getting back to the point, if we, if we find out what path people are already taking to find us, then we can just do more of that, and that's a huge boost. And a huge mindset you need to have is that people don't just look upon your site. They are looking for a solution to their problem, and they search around, and they find sites that end up ultimately sending them to your website. And for most of us, we need at least some traffic. For the average person that I see, at least they don't even have a trickle of traffic. I mean, they have a couple of drops of traffic, and they're spending all this time making the web page look great, you know, running webinars, doing articles, sending emails to the list. I'm thinking, well, you need to have a couple 100 people coming to your website per day just to find out if your web pages are even working. So 2% of your subscribers will click, 50% of your visitors will opt in. And so once we can have a flood of traffic to our site, then we can start to get somewhere so traffic methods, like we said, I listed them all at the beginning. I'm not going to give you a laundry list, just the most important ones, free traffic. We said we're going to talk about an email list, SEO affiliate program, social media and forms. So I don't care who it is, anyone who tells you about traffic, they're going to start with the best source of traffic is your email list. And anyone who is making a lot of money online, they're probably also going to tell you that their number one traffic source is their email list. So don't even think about it. Get an account with AWeber, set up an opt in page, that way you can have you know a set of people that already know, like and trust you and will are already ready to click over. Now, if you sell anything online, already, make sure that after they buy from you, that they sign up to an email list. That's why I like membership sites, because someone can register for a membership site, and now they are one of my email subscribers. So if they bought one thing, chances are they'll buy something else, even if not. Not they'll go and log in for updates. They'll go and read and click and comment on my blog post. But you need to build an email list, otherwise you're just losing traffic otherwise. I mean, let's just say someone sends you 10,000 clicks tomorrow. Well, tomorrow, that whole thing is going to be gone unless you save some of them in an email list. You can have these things called sub lists, where you can give away different things for free, and then they can sign up there, and you can sell different things. And then you can basically talk to just one segment, just people who bought, in my case, backup creator, people who just bought paper template. But I can also broadcast to everybody, everybody who is paid, everybody who hasn't paid. And that's usually what I do, is I have something new to say, and I just sent it to the all the 10s of 1000s of people, because that is my biggest money maker right there. I don't want to get on a tangent about list building, but these are fully opted in people, people who want to hear from you. So we're not talking about, you know, buying or renting a list or scraping emails, none of that shady stuff we're saying. I've got a force opt in a page where I'm giving away something for free. People land on this page. They film their details to get it now they're on my list. And on the flip side of that, I have something that I'm selling, maybe as an affiliate, or I'm selling a book a membership site, and after they, after they buy that, they're on my list. Now, once again, even if you're an offline business or like a chiropractor or a dental practice or whatever that is, if you can get your customer list online somehow, or get the list of email addresses, then this is going to be your most powerful source of traffic. All right, so number one traffic source is your email list. Now, number two is this thing called SEO, search engine optimization, content marketing, the idea that you you get a little free boost from sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing, and what you do is you make it No, make you make it known how to find you. So if you are an Italian restaurant in San Diego, California, well, then you have information on your site explaining that and this awesome, okay, first of all, it means that you have, you know, if you can get a domain name that says something like that, if you can name some of your web pages, if you can have this text, and you know, if you're a business Establisher, and you have the name of your site, your address, your phone number, things like that, just so that if someone is searching for how to find you through Google, for example, then you will give them that answer. Now, what's really cool about how things have played in recently? And I mean, I guess we'll kind of, I guess we'll talk about SEO and social media kind of interchangeably a little bit, because the game has changed with this thing called Local Marketing. So here's what I mean, is, if you're an offline business, search for your business in Google. Searching Google for the type of business you are, plus the city. So like we said, like chiropractor San Francisco, search your business name in Yelp, search it in Facebook, and look at your competitors. And so the cool thing about especially Google, is that you can register with what's called Google Plus or Google Places, and actually list pictures of your establishments,

Robert Plank 23:28 phone number, link to websites, even videos, address things like that, and outrank a lot of other people. The other cool thing is, even if you're not an online business, and let's say you're like me, and you have a blog, okay, like I have a blog that's Robert plank.com and you can claim ownership of that blog. And then when you add people like business colleagues and stuff like that, and customers as friends on Google plus, which is Google Social Network, well then my search result, my blog posts will outrank a lot of other people's results because I'm friends with these people on Facebook, so think are on Google Plus. So think about this, if I have 5000 friends on Google Plus, and they're all people in the same niche as me, and I've claimed ownership of my blog Robert plank.com and someone is searching for things like internet traffic, copywriting, WordPress plugins, website backups, whatever kind of things I'm trying to rank for, I might not rank high for these at all because they're so fiercely competitive. There might be 100,000 results for website backup, for example, but because I'm friends with this person on Google Plus, I might actually be listed on page one because they give a higher priority to people's friends on Google Plus. So there's, you know, and the rules change, and by time you listen to this, they'll have changed again. But if you can figure out, you know, if you just, if you just play the part of a curious customer, how do I find this answer or this business? What comes up and now, how do I get ranked on those kinds of things? So that's why I recorded this podcast, believe it or not, it's for selfish reasons, because I want to get extra traffic, and I want to get extra free traffic, so I record this podcast. Now, what do I do? Well, I post on my blog. It gets listed on iTunes. It get listed on other podcasting directories. I get it transcribed, and now Google picks that up. Google picks up the original blog post. If people link to my blog from that that I get link juice that way. So I have all these ways of getting free traffic just by doing the work once I get it from iTunes or blog from search engines, from Facebooks and the post up there too. So SEO, search engine optimization means that we want to figure out what people are searching for and then catch some of that traffic. That's why I think that, honestly, you should have at least 10 articles and 10 blog posts with your name on it with links back to your site that way. Those are 10 extra ways people can find you. And you know, if you take those 10 articles and submit them to 20 places, that's now 200 ways people can find you. You post that article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus, all the usual places, and now you have all these links back to your site. And by the way, a site where you can get these articles made is FiVER, FIV, er, that's Fiverr with two R's. People are writing an article for you for five bucks. So just try a few people out. Once you find someone, then 50 bucks, you get 10 articles. That's 10 pieces of content that give links back to your site social media. So with that, what we do is add people as friends, create a Facebook fan page, create a Facebook group, and then post things about how our business is doing, or advice or blog post is for me, I just look at at it as like a reverse search engine. So normally the search engine people type in something to find an answer. With social media, it's kind of like I pump things out and now they appear in front of people, and that's just one more way of getting traffic. YouTube videos are another great form of social media, because if you have something to talk about, you know, if it's five minutes or 20 minutes, you can show it on a screen, whether that's live action or screen capture. I like screen capture, because if I want to go and make a video about WordPress, multi site, I can make a one hour tutorial, put it online on YouTube. Now people can like it, share it, comment on it. I can post on my blog. People can post it on their blog, and it all links back to my site. So SEO and social media and So, speaking of, you know, Facebook, YouTube, things like that, we get traffic from other people posting to Facebook and YouTube when we made that is an affiliate program. Early on in my online career, I had a problem of First of all, traffic and sales, but also people giving away my books and my products because, you know, someone really likes my report on how to increase your Website Conversions. Well, they're going to share with their friends, but to stop that dead in its tracks, I added a thing called an affiliate program, which is where someone can sign up, get a special link and then recommends my product to others, and if that leads to a sale, they get a cut. They get a commission. So you can use clickbank.com for the C, l, I, C, K, B, A, n, k.com, and you sign up there, they give you an instant affiliate program where they handle, you know, the sales, the payments, all that good stuff. And then if you have a how to play guitar course for 100 bucks, people recommend it. Now. You keep 50 bucks. They keep 50 bucks. And that's money that sales, that subscribers, that you would not have had otherwise. And so affiliates register, you know, as your affiliate, and then they send an email to their email list, they post to their Facebook, they make YouTube videos of your product in action, and then, you know, a lot of them will only send you a few clicks, but the idea is that a small minority of affiliates will be the ones that make you all your extra sales. And so I love this because all the new, Goofy, latest and greatest traffic methods I don't have to learn. My affiliates are the guinea pigs, and they try it out. Then good old reliable traffic source are these things called forums, discussion boards. They've been around since the internet began. They'll always be around. And so what you just do is search for your niche in the term form, guitar. Form, real estate. Form, fat loss. Form, exercise. Form, running. Form, motivational form, hypnosis. Forum, Wordpress, forum, whatever it is, copywriting. Form, you just take your niche name, you type you type in the word form you get yourself registered, and what appears to be the top one, look around a little bit and make sure that's still active. It's still being posted on. Make sure that you can either run ads on them, or that you can have this thing called the signature link, register and make a handful of posts per day, answering people's problems. So if people you know. To make posts about. You know, I can't figure out how to make my car run faster. Well, then you respond with your advice. You know, some of our best students made a ton of money and continue to on forms because it's their, it's their, their passion already, and they're probably out there somewhere giving advice and giving opinions. So you register on these forms, you contribute at first, that's the number one thing. I know it sounds hippy dippy, but you make sure to post at least 25 replies over the course of a few days without mentioning your products, without having a link or anything like that. Once you've built up trust and credibility, then these forms will allow you to add a link at the bottom of all your posts. And that means that now, when you continue to help the forum, then you'll have a link underneath the message you just posted. So if you get to the point where you've posted to this forum 3000 times, now you have 3000 links back to your site. Some of these forms are really high traffic. I mean, some of them have, you know, 5000 people online at the same time. So you actually get a small, small, small fraction of that. Then that's a lot of free traffic to your site. Once again, keeping in mind that that content is available forever. So you make 3000 posts over the course of a few months, if you're, you know, dedicated or something, and now that's 3000 pages that are all over the internet, 3000 you know, posts with your name and your link on them, they get picked up by Google, being in Yahoo, that gets shared by social media. It's all pretty cool. Then, this is kind of similar to forms guest blogging, where, you know, if you can find, so you know, discussion forums, or where, like, anyone can post and get lots of traffic. Now, blogs are sites where maybe one or two people post or a team post, but it's very moderated, right? People have new journal entries. So, I mean, like, you know, Tech Crunch is a popular blog, but even you know, CNN, Yahoo News, Google News, these are basically blogs. And so what you do is you find some of these high traffic blogs in your niche, like, I don't know, off road racing blog, and if you have a product that has something to do with off road racing, then you contact the owner of this blog and you say, Well, can I write a post about this subject? And I'm not going to post anywhere else. I want to have my name on it. I want to have my link in there, but it's completely yours. Now, most website owners are hurting for content. They just don't have enough content. They don't have enough ideas so they would welcome you as fresh blood of their site, so you can make a post and get all this extra traffic back to your site. I've done this a few times, and got you know, 1000s of extra sales and commissions in just a few short weeks just from one site in particular, guest blogging. So to recap, free traffic, email

Robert Plank 33:01 list, search engine optimization, social media, affiliate program, forms, slash, guest blogging. So those are all things where, you know, it's good to have it set up, and it's good to have at least a handful of each thing, at least 10 to 100 things, right? It's good to have an email list with 10 automatic follow up messages. It's good to have 10 articles, 10 podcast episodes, even if they're shorts, 10 blog posts. It's good to have a handful of those things. It's good to have 10 YouTube videos. It's good to have an affiliate program with 10 active affiliates. It's good to have an account on 10 forms, or 10 posts on a form, it's good to have 10 blog posts out there. The only drawback to free traffic is that it is so competitive that it is kind of slow. Because, hey, anyone can publish articles, anyone who can put out blog posts, anyone can have an affiliate program, anyone could put out YouTube videos. So it is kind of hit or miss. It is luck of the draw. You know, I have a few 100 YouTube videos, and a handful of them get me all the traffic. The problem is you just don't know which ones are going to get you the traffic. Once you do, you can make more articles and videos and blog posts just like that. So free traffic, if you want to turn up the juice, we have paid traffic. Now, the problem with paid traffic is that, well, it is also competitive, but the good news is a lot of people don't know what they're doing, and they waste money. So paid traffic, it is a little takes some more skill, but I mean, that's what we're stuck with. I mean, I hate to be the bleak marketer here, but when we're talking about internet traffic, first of all, most people don't know that their problem is traffic. They don't know that they have they need more people coming to their site. They can survive with 10 people or a $10 a month membership site, and they just think that people are just gonna magically find them false. So we need to have. Of a steady stream of people coming in and finding us, and paid traffic is how you do that. So paid traffic, well, most of paid traffic is what we call pay per click. And there are these Pay Per Click networks, Facebook, AdWords, Bing, blog networks and retargeting. And then as far as paid traffic goes, there are some more advanced strategies, like solo ads and offline traffic, but that's the majority of traffic on the internet. I mean, that's it. And you can list all kinds of new fangled schemes like traffic exchanges, safe lists and things and giveaways, things like that that don't really work. Never really did work. So let me just say paid traffic. We've got Facebook, AdWords, Bing networks, retargeting, solar, ads and offline. And let's just say that's it, just for today's conversation. So paid traffic, well, the way that PPC networks work, and I mean, the biggest ones, I would probably say are Facebook and AdWords, is that there's a bidding system. So you do, you tell them what keyword you want to bid on, and then how much you will pay per 1000 impressions, or how much you will pay per click. So there are a few strategies. And I guess I would say the biggest one is to to create. The advice I got was to create 10 ad groups and then create 10 long tail key phrases within those ad groups for a total of 100 keywords you're bidding on. Okay, which sounds like a lot at first, but you just have to think of say, 10 ideas and then 10 variations within that idea. So let me use the example of what did we say early on, divorce attorney Modesto. Okay, so you've been hired to get more traffic for a divorce attorney living in Modesto, California, so you could have your first idea be Modesto, divorce. Okay, so when you're bidding, well, you might want to run ads for Modesto divorce, and then maybe neighboring towns around there. So near Modesto, there's towns like Turlock, Tracy, Stockton, maybe Fresno. So you might bid on Fresno, divorce, Tracy, divorce, Stockton, divorce. So you can easily come up with 10 things like that. Now there might be, might be, like, I'm sure there's different kinds of divorce, right? Like, I don't know if there's like, a, like, a hostile divorce, or, like, a simple divorce, or a divorce with alimony, divorce with child support. And so we have 10 of those. And so what we want to do is cast a wide net and run a lot of long tail keywords, because if you just try to run an ad, I don't care where it's at, if it's Facebook or AdWords or Bing or somewhere smaller, if you try to advertise for divorce, well, you're going to pay a lot of money because that's a popular keyword, and you're going to get an untargeted click visitor. We want instead is to have a low cost and a target visitor, not a high cost and an untargeted visitor, if that makes sense. So you have these 100 keywords, and then you just let the thing run and you narrow down what are my top five to 10 keywords. I pause or delete the rest and just focus on those handful of things. So that's the strategy, no matter what Pay Per Click Network you're using, I mean, and on AdWords and Bing and Yahoo, the keyword is something that someone types in to the search box. But on Facebook, the keyword is usually the interest in their profile. So what you can do on Facebook is, if you're a divorce attorney in Modesto, well, you can run and add of people. I mean, if there's like some kind of book on relationships, or if there are marriage counselors or anything like that, where you can target people who have liked or have an interest in their profile of that particular doctor, or that particular, you know, therapist's office, or that particular book. Okay, like so, for example, you could target someone who liked the book. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, who live within 50 miles, Modesto, California, and then there you go. Or you can target anyone who's married and is a particular age. So you can basically figure out, well, you know, what's the average? What's my average person like, right? And you might have heard this term like customer avatar. So you know, is my average as my deal prospect is that my average buyer, certain age, certain location, certain interests and likes? Well, then cool. Now I can, I can make a few guesses on Facebook and then see what actually gets clicks, what get conversions? Pause. Most of them keep the rest. Now, all these ad networks, they once again, want you to give the answer. Give the best answer. So if you have an ad that converts very highly, they will reduce. Your ad cost. I mean, this is true on on Google, Yahoo, Facebook, doesn't matter. So they will reduce your ad cost because they see that a lot of people click on this ad. Now I'm gonna, I want them to run this ad more. Okay, so that's the reason why we create all these different, you know, key phrases, and then see which ones convert the best. Okay, that's Pay Per Click advertising. Now you can use the same logic on different ad networks. So what you can do is search for your phrase. So we search, I mean, let me just do it right now, divorce. I don't know why I'm I mean, I'm not getting divorced, so I don't know why I'm focusing on divorce attorney, but you can search divorce attorney Modesto, and I get like, Yellow Pages, fine law.com and, you know, someone's blog. So what you can do is click through those that first the first couple of pages of search results in, you know, free search results, and then on those pages, we want to see if any of those pages we land on are running ads. Why? Because we want to have the ability to run ads on those websites. And so, for example, one so the top result was Yellow pages.com and there's an ad, and when I hover over it, I can see that it's an AdWords ad. And so we can, you know, and many of these ads say like, ads by blah, blah, blah, ads by being Ads by Google. So we can click on whatever ad they're running. And some of them have you know, are using like, Text Link ads or double click, but we can figure out, well, what service is this website using further ads. And then we can just get an account under this ad network and then run our own ads to display on this website. Okay? So you might end up searching, you know, like divorce, turning mode esto, or, you know, WordPress cloning plug in, or you know how to make money from real estate short sales. And you wouldn't have been able to, first of all, rank organically because it's too competitive. You wouldn't have been able to get a paid ad because it's too competitive. But we can get the next best thing. We can click on the top results, see what ad so they're running, and then get ourselves listed on those ads. And many of these ad networks will allow you to create an ad and say, I only want to run my ad on Yellow pages.com for this keyword. Or even, I only want to run my ad on this exact page of Yellow pages.com, so you can get this narrow down quite a bit so ad networks. And then the other thing that it's still, I mean, I don't think it'll ever overtake any other kind of ad style. It's been around for a while, but a lot of people don't notice. It is thing called retargeting. So here's what it is, is, have you ever had a some ad just follow you around everywhere on the internet,

Robert Plank 42:55 like you went and I'll give you an example. Lance and I were running an event one, one time, we ran our events called product University, and we were looking on the website, staples.com to get these things called, like, these name tags lanyards, like, name tag, you hang it over around your neck. And I was, you know, on staples.com trying to find one. And I was, like, looking at price, or looking at, you know, how we would, what we would go because, you know, sometimes, like, you check the website, like, you might look up, like the website for Old Navy, see if they have the pants you want, and then actually, physically go to Old Navy to go get it. Well, you might go to Old Navy, you might go to Staples, and then click over back to Facebook, and then you're like, wow, what are the odds? I was just looking up name tag lanyards and staples. Now I'm seeing those ads on Facebook, and then you click over and go to TV guide.com and look up what's on TV tonight, and on TV Guide, you see, whoa, there's an ad for staples lanyards. Now, what are the odds that I happen to be on TV Guide and I see this ad? Well, it's not a coincidence. It's called retargeting, and you could do it for your websites too. What happens is, and we use a site called add roll A, D, R, O, L, L, and you sign up and they give you what's called the tracking pixel, Geek terms, right? Geek stuff. Well, they just say, add this to your website. So add this code to the bottom of your website, and that will tag anyone who comes to your website. So someone comes to, in my case, backup creator.com and for whatever reason they don't buy, I can't imagine a reason why someone wouldn't buy backup clear, but let's just say, you know, they're not ready quite yet. And then they go over to Huffington Post to go read the latest news, and they see an ad that says, hey, check out backup creator, and then they might click back over to the site and buy. So that's what retargeting is, is, is you can only and that's the thing, is, you can only target people who have actually visited your site, and not a box. So they come to your site, they don't buy. They leave the site, and then you can just show ads to them forever, as it'll follow them around on Facebook or on a bunch of other websites, and they'll just always see your ads. And then once they buy they can give you another tracking pixel to turn those ads off. So pretty slick, how that works. So this is the kind of advertising where it's really hard to tell if it's paying off, but it's something that takes a few seconds doesn't cost you that much. So the cool thing also about most retargeting is someone might see you at 1000 times, but you only pay for the times they click back and go to your website, so pay per click. Facebook AdWords, being ad networks and retargeting, and then, as we're writing down today, there's a few advanced strategies for getting traffic now. The first one is this thing called solo ads. And I mean, solo ads is one of those bad words, and I'm pretty sure that, you know, it'll go out of style, and it'll come back under a new name. And you know it what people teach is the wrong thing. People teach this idea of where you buy all these ads, you build up a list, you start selling ads on the same list. It's called churn and burn. But the old school style, and I mean, I'm even thinking back to the late 90s, what we call for a solo ad is you find someone who already has an email list. So let's say someone has an email list of 50,000 subscribers. They send it a newsletter, and maybe you pay them 500 bucks, and you say, here's this email that you send out to your subscribers. Just copy and paste this. There you go, 500 bucks. So, I mean, let's run those numbers. If someone has an email list of 50,000 people, and it's an email list of real estate enthusiast. You have real estate course, so 50,000 people, well, you can expect to get 1000 clicks back to your website. Pretty cool, right? And now, if the ad is compelling, and if the ad is what people want and encourages them to click, and you send you a squeeze page, well, there you go, 500 subscribers. So you just paid 500 bucks for 500 subscribers, and that's basically what Lance and I like to pay. We like to pay about $1 per subscriber on our list, because now they get a follow up sequence. Now they get this free gift. Now they get this paid thing in front of them, and we know that a certain percentage will convert so that we will break even. And I mean, if you break even and you're building a list of buyers, then you're making money. You're building your business. And so even if we make just a little bit of money here, or we have an upsell, make a little bit of money here, it's worth it, because we're building this list of hungry subscribers, which is what it's all about. So one second, don't go nowhere. We're not done with the Robert Plank show just yet. But I want to mention a couple mention a couple of names here. We've got Marco bevit, Christian Masek, Tracy grant you really Robles, Callie Orkin, Stefan Klein Schmidt, Don shank Doug, Hogan, Jack Watterson, ethanol, Brunson, Marlene, Giordano, Tony Lorenzo, Rob Wilson, William de temple, Evelyn bonds and Kim Hathaway. Are all fans of the Robert Plank show to go. So go right now to Robert Plank show. Calmk, click the Like button. I'll mention your name in a future episode. Now, now that we got that out of the way, that's what I'm talking about when I'm saying solo ads, okay, where we find an untapped traffic source, an untapped email list, and we say, I'm gonna pay you this amount of money to run an ad to your subscribers, and then they send traffic to my site. So that's a really great way of getting new, fresh leads and buyers, solo ad and then offline methods. Now there are a bunch of advanced strategies that, you know, I've done a little bit, but I'm no means an expert. I mean, for example, there's a service called Send Out cards.com and you can actually send out postcards. So if you sell a product, you have a membership site, then you can create a postcard or, you know, send people cookies or brownies or things and send them a message saying, well, thanks for being a member of my site. Here's this other website you should go to, and it's, I mean, if you see the prices, it's pretty darn cheap. I think it costs like seven bucks, including shipping to send someone brownies, costs like, under $1 to send someone a postcard. So if you have 1000 really good buyers, 1000 bucks sends 1000 postcards. I have some friends who do things like the rent physical mailing list. I don't know too much about that, but I mean, the specificity you can get on these is crazy. You can target people who, apparently, you know, who make over $200,000 a year, who bought, you know, McAfee antivirus, and then, you know, live in a certain town, you can just send a mailing to all of them to go back to your site. And I mean, the only problem with offline methods is that they're expensive, and I would rather use the internet. To get a lot more traffic for free or for a lot lower price, and get a lot more than because, if you think about, I mean, offline always sounds cool. I'm going to send them something in the mail, but think about it, you're already in their junk mail. They have to open up this letter decide they want it. They have to go to their computer. They have to type in an address. I mean, you know, take that with a grain of salt. But the most effective methods of traffic. We talked about freewise email list, SEO, social media, affiliate program, forms and paid Facebook AdWords being ad networks, retargeting and solo ads, those are some really great ways to get your 2000 clicks. And I mean, we mentioned what are those? 123456789, 345, 678-910-1110,

Robert Plank 50:44 or 11 ways. So even if, over the course of the next 30 days, if each of those traffic sources only got you 200 clicks, if you got, you know, 20 clicks from Facebook, 20 clicks from YouTube, 20 clicks from a podcast, 20 clicks from registering a domain, 20 clicks from articles, 20 clicks from blog posts, and you had, you know, out of those categories, 200 clicks times 10, you got your 2000 clicks. You've got your 1000 subscribers. And if you make even just a handful of sales, then you're well on your way to monetizing that list of people. But I mean, that is what the internet game is all about. It's about building the biggest targeted list, keeping it alive, keeping it entertained, giving them value and getting them to buy. I mean, I can't tell you how many stories I've heard and seen about one hit wonder people who they get online, they screw around with things, they make a product, or they have something to sell, and they get lucky, and they make a good connection. They They network with the right people. They get everyone to mail for them. They get this flood of traffic, you know, a million dollar launch day. They build a list of 10s of 1000s of people, and then what do they do? They party. They celebrate. Nothing wrong with party and celebrating. But they take a year long vacation, they come back and their list is gone. Okay? Their list hasn't bought from them in a year, their list hasn't heard from them in a year. Their list forgot they even bought, and now they're starting again from scratch. Now, what about the people who do make it well, I've talked about in earlier episodes, they treat this internet thing like they're building an actual online business with assets, with traffic. I mean, if you were running a pizza place and no one was coming in the door, you know there was a problem. But, yeah, I see people set up a website no one's coming in the door, and they say, I don't know why I'm not making sales, because no one's seeing your website. So I think that at least 20% of your income should be recycled into paid traffic, and at least 50% of your I guess your thinking and your activities on the internet should be to get traffic. Because let me just leave you with this, this thing called 250, 33 okay, so I don't know if you've run these things called webinars. I do sometimes it's where you run an online events. People can come to your live training session. You teach a little bit, you make some sales at the end. Well, everyone thinks that I'm gonna get my 1000 subscribers, I'm gonna email, I'm gonna get 1000 people on this call. I'm gonna make all this money. Well, false, because we said, well, you if you email to your list, you're gonna get 2% of people to click, okay, and we said that with a four stop that page, you're gonna get 50% of people to fill in their information. Now this is true with webinars as well. Kind of scary, right? Even if they're on your list, only half of the people you send to a webinar registration link will register for the webinar. Don't know why that is, but I've stopped trying to figure that out. It that's just how it is. So the other thing too is that out of people who register, only a third of them will show up, even if you keep reminding them. So 250, 33, 2% of percent of your list will actually click on a link. The good news is, though you can email, you know, 10 times, 50% of people who click will register for webinar, and a third of the people who register will show up. So you might have thought that 1000 subscribers was a lot, but you email to your webinar, let's just say five times, right? So you email, you get 20 clicks each time. You get 100 total clicks to your webinar registration page, only 50 people are going to register, and then only 16 people are going to show up. Now if out of those 16, you make one set of 1000 bucks, then it's worth the one hour. Then you record it, and you put out a webinar replay, you can keep milling of that, then that's worth it, but we need to start with a much bigger number. Okay, so if we start with, let me just add two zeros to be crazy, a list of 100,000 subscribers. Okay, now if we email to that once. Will get 2000 clicks, huge. I mean, you're, you're a player, if you got 100,000 subscribers, so 2000 clicks, if you email all week, you got 10,000 clicks. But that means you'll now get 5000 people registered and 1600 on the call. So, I mean, now you're really cranking, but you have to start. So even starting with a huge, huge number, like 100,000 opt ins. Now you're only down to 1000 or 2000 people on this live call, but that's just the way internet works. And I mean, it's just from from progress, from consistent daily action getting 10% better every week, every month, that gets us there. So I don't want to discourage you by sharing huge numbers here, but if you don't have a list, go right now. Run, don't walk to aweber.com that's not my site, but it's an autoresponder service. Get a list started and try to get your first 100 subscribers. Once you've got 100 try to get 1000 once you got 1000 try to get 10,000 and talk to those people and keep them today with whatever you're doing, you make a blog post telling about it a few times, you run a webinar, tell them about it a few times. You have something for sale, tell them, you know, several times this month, because we want to build that list of people, and that's the name of the game on the internet is building a list and getting consistent traffic. So I hope that today helped you. I'm Robert Plank. You can tell I'm passionate about you building your online business, and I want to do everything in my power. So make sure you go to Roberts plank show.com and like our page so that I can keep you up to date with the things we have to sell, like backup, creator, paper, template, membership, cube and others. And so that I can share with you my latest blog post, my latest podcast, there's lots and lots of cool stuff that's at Robert Plank show.com this has been episode 21 of the Robert Plank show, how to claim unlimited traffic, which is free SEO and paid PPC to deliver hungry visitors to your websites. Join us next time for show number 22 how to set up a legitimate online business. I'm super excited about that one. I can't wait. I hope you can't either. So Robert Plank, show calm. This has been Robert Plank, it's been very nice talking you and have a wonderful day, won't you? You.