Category: Archive 1: 2012-2016

Can I tell you why you’re not a multi-multi-millionaire yet? Why you can’t buy that 2nd home or yacht with one single payment? Why your internet business hasn’t taken off? Why you haven’t retired to the beach yet?

It’s the lack of TRAFFIC!

This is the reason why SEO services, backlink services, courses on paid ad networks sell so well. Everyone knows the internet is literally flooded with traffic from all sides. The only problem is tapping into that traffic.

If you only had a million visitors to your site every single day, and you sold a $7 report that only converted at 1%… that’s $70K a day or $25 million per year.

This is where most “internet marketers” start when they first come online. They don’t want to create a real brand, setup a followup sequence, a blog or articles. “That all sounds like work, I just want to exploit the loophole!”

You thought, I’ll be an anonymous traffic broker.

I’ll find an underused site with lots of traffic and build a list. I’ll decide I want to teach people how to start an internet business and make money online, even though I haven’t done it. I’ll look up the 10 best ways to make money online.

I’ll give away a free report detailing a few of the ways, and ask for a name and email address in exchange for that report…

I’ll find an affiliate program for each step of the process (web hosting affiliate link, payment processor affiliate link, affiliate link for required software and reports) and put together a 30-day email followup sequence “reporting” or “reviewing” each and every one. I’ll create a squeeze page (forced opt-in page) sending all this massive traffic to it, some of it will convert, and I’ll become a multi-millionaire.

Once that’s done, I’ll decide “weight loss” is also a pretty desperate market. I’ll look up the top 10 weight loss methods or products, get affiliate links, assemble a follow-up sequence, send banner ad traffic. Next, how about dating? Top 10, affiliate links, follow-ups, create ads on sites like PlentyOfFish, wait for the money to roll in.

A Few Problems Here…

First, I’ve known REAL “traffic brokers”, basically affiliates on steroids, who game the pay-per-click networks who try to buy out all the Facebook traffic or stay at the #1 paid spot on Google. Guess what? They have to remain on TOP of any and all search engine news, change and tweak their ads daily, and sometimes spend five to six figures per day just to outbid and outspend any competition. If that sounds to you like a combination of day trading and gambling, you’re right! And there’s no way you’d keep up. Any loophole or arbitrage you discover, running an ad on this ad network into that affiliate product, is going to change on you and probably close up quickly.

Second, when you try to create a business like that, you’re forgetting that at least 100 other people have had that exact same “genius” idea as you just within the last 60 minutes. Try to rank in the top 1000 for dating, gambling, weight loss, or making money. Good luck! This alone will tell you that you’ll have to go for something less mass-market, more long-tail (i.e. “fat loss for high school reunion”), and more unique so you can carve out your own little niche in the process.

Third, if I do find you through the masses of traffic and land on your site, maybe even signup to your email list, why should I buy from you instead of your thousands of competitors? Even if I like YOU and trust YOU personally, why should I buy your PRODUCT instead of all the other ones?

As much as your insecurities are holding you back (sorry if that’s a little harsh) the first thing you need in place is a REAL product (membership site holding a fixed-term training course is the best), a real brand, and your own name selling that membership site on a sales letter. THEN create an opt-in page giving away a free gift (a free audio with a transcript as a report is great, a free software product is better), and use your e-mail follow-up sequence to sell them into the course.

When you create your own membership-based course, you now differentiate yourself from everyone else. You can explain why exercise doesn’t work, diets don’t work, pills don’t work, and how your personal 30-day diet plan is better than that.

If your personal “thing” is how to play guitar, how to learn a new language, how to save your relationship, conquer panic attacks, even better. Less competition. I sell WordPress plugins myself and teach “technology” such as how to setup membership sites, run webinars, record videos, and more.

If you make your niche something you already enjoy doing, then it’s easy to add your personality into it, and you’re no longer “that person” who randomly decided to teach dating one day.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get traffic to your website… here’s what you might have tried…

Option #1: Mass Traffic (Don’t Do It!)

The most dangerous question you could ask about your business, “Who wouldn’t want it?” You’ve decided to create a weight loss product because… almost 100% of the population wants to lose weight. The only problem? You’re not unique. You don’t have your own hooks, your own spin OR your own personality in the game and you’re just like everyone else.

You want to sell an internet marketing product and your attitude is, “My target market is anyone with money, or anyone who wants money.” That’s a big problem.

Instead, if your niche was Facebook traffic… you’re targeting people who (probably) have an established online business, and are already convinced that they need to use Facebook for traffic. Smaller crowd, but you can actually have a message, and they’ll actually buy from you!

Plus: narrow yourself one step further into a sub-niche and create your own unique system that’s better than the alternatives, that no one can copy. And even if people copy you, absorb their updates and move on.

Option #2: Targeted Facebook Traffic
(Great Once You Get it Optimized)

We said that mass traffic won’t get you anywhere, so we need to create TARGETED Facebook traffic. Paid traffic is a great way to get 1000 or more eyeballs onto your optin page or sales letter in a hurry. The “old” way to advertise pay per click was on search engines like Google.

You can advertise for a keyphrase such as “stomach fat loss” or “wordpress backup plugin.” You adjust your bid to control how expensive your ads cost, and how high you rank, and you can narrow down based on geographic location, but that’s about it!

Facebook is a completely different story. Not better or worse, just different. The problem with advertising on Facebook is that not everyone is in a buying mood – they’re probably in a socializing, sharing, surfing mood.

The good things about Facebook: first of all, the average Facebook user is online at least once per day. With search engine advertising, you basically have one shot to get someone to your website. With Facebook ads, your prospects aren’t going anywhere. You can bid a little less than the average person, so your ad only appears once per day for 30 days, and THEN someone might click and you get your sale.

The way most people advertise on Facebook (the wrong way): they target a keyword. They target anyone who’s entered “fat loss” as one of their interests, or “wordpress” as one of their interests. Chea traffic, lots of traffic, but it’s nonresponsive and doesn’t convert.

The secret to targeted Facebook advertising: target celebrities and competitors in your niche that already have a huge following.

Hobby Niche vs. A Real Businesses

You know those courses that promise 100,000 fans overnight? I’ll tell you how to do it:

• Create a Facebook fan page called “Fans of Eminem” and create an ad targeting anyone who has listed Eminem as an interest on their profile, or has liked the official “Eminem” page (he has 66 million fans already)
• Create a Facebook fan page called “Fans of The Simpsons” and create an ad targeting anyone who has “The Simpsons” listed in their profile (11 million), “The Simpsons” official fan page (88 million) and “The Simpsons” franchise page (60 million)
• Create a Facebook fan page called “Fans of Gun Rights” and create an ad targeting people who have liked the “National Rifle Association” fan page (4 million), The Second Amendment (2 millon), Glock (1.7 million), AK-47, M1911, MP5, AR15, Uzi, and now you’re marketing to millions of gun nuts
• Create a Facebook fan page called “Fans of Weight Loss” and run an ad targeting Jillian Michaels (3.8 million fans), Weight Watchers (3.6 million fans), The Biggest Loser (2.6 million fans), Jenny Craig (1 million fans), Bob Harper (1 million fans), Suzanne Somers, any other weight loss system or weight loss celebrity you can think of
• Create a Facebook fan page called “Fans of Jimi Hendrix” and run an ad targeting not just Jimi Hendrix, but The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Gibson Guitar, Martin Guitars

Limit your ad to only show to people who have NOT liked your fan page (that way you stop advertising to that person once they’ve “liked” your fan page), only advertise to people age 20 and up, and limit your country targeting to the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

I guarantee that if you advertise your fan page to 20 million plus people who have already liked a similar fan page, you can easily get lots and lost of likes to that fan page. There are other things I don’t have time to get into where you basically “split test” your demographics and ad copy to narrow down your cheapest traffic, and then advertise to friends of people who have already liked your fan page, but let’s get back to the point…

If you build up that fan page of fans of a sports team, or weight loss, or fans of a musician, what do you sell them? The answer is usually affiliate links and Amazon links. You’ll make “some” money, but you’ve just built a HUGE list that you can’t monetize.

What will actually improve your business?

Create a fan page about your company or your “flagship” product. Then target your competitors in ads. For example, I sell a WordPress plugin in the internet marketing space. I target other WordPress themes and plugins like OptimizePress, ThemeForest, WooThemes, Sucuri, WP Engine, and so on.

I’m only advertising to a few THOUSAND people now, so my fan page base grows slower, but they’re people who will actually buy my product… get it? And once they’ve “liked” the fan page, they’ve in a way subscribed to my list, but it’s a 1-click subscribe on Facebook instead of over email.

The next time I have something to say to those people, I can post it right on the fan page instead of paying for every single click.

You should definitely have a “flagship” fan page, and if you have a hobby fan page that works alongside that (fans of guitars, fans of organic gardening) then you should use both.

Option #3: Free Traffic (Slow and Steady)

And finally, many people discount free traffic like SEO, article marketing and social media as being too much work or too slow for their purposes, but you need to have at least “some” free traffic.

The answer to free traffic is basically: create a lot of content that people want.

Here’s what I mean:

1. Write 10 articles and schedule them to your blog as blog posts, one per month
2. Install a social media plugin for your WordPress blog (I use Jetpack’s Social Sharing) and retweet it, Facebook it, Google+ it, promote that Facebook post for $7, and repost every blog post to your fan page every time you create a new piece of content
3. Pay an article rewriter on Fiverr or oDesk to take your 10 article, deconstruct them, and rewrite them so you have unique articles to post onto article sites like EzineArticles
4. Take the three best posts from your blog and compile them into a single PDF (using Google Drive you can just create a new document, paste in your articles, then save to PDF… no software required!) Signup to an email autoresponder service like Aweber and place the download link to this free PDF report behind a forced optin page – with a link to your blog or sales letter at the bottom
5. Think of 10 easy things you can explain about your niche in video, with a call to action pointing back to your website URL. If you HAVE to explain these things using a live-action iPhone camera, fine. If you can explain it on your computer screen using screen capture software like Camtasia (paid) or Screencast-O-Matic (free), even better. Record these ten 3-to-5-minute tutorial videos and post them to YouTube
6. Like and share those YouTube videos, then post them back on your blog as additional content, like and share those blog posts as well
7. Send whatever email subscriber list you’ve built, and whatever Facebook following you have, back to every single blog entry you’ve posted (sometimes with multiple followups) to encourage comments… which equals even more comments for you
8. Take those 10 best things you’ve ever said (at this point from your articles, blog posts, and videos) and organize those into ten 20-minute audio podcasts. Install a podcasting plugin, post the podcast episodes, and submit your blog’s feed to iTunes for even more backlinks
9. Get your podcast episodes transcribed on oDesk into PDFs for additional blog comments and ethical bribes for your forced opt-in pages
10. Contact 10 other marketers in your niche and use a tool like TimeTrade.com to schedule a time to meet on Skype, record those 20-minute interviews on Skype and post them to your podcast or blog
11. Take the best content from your blog, format it into a Word document, get a cover made on Fiverr and upload to CreateSpace to create a print book. Also upload that Word document to Kindle to create a digital book hosted on Amazon, and run a free “KDP Select” promotion to give away free copies and drive up sales
12. Find a few good discussion boards in your niche by searching “(your niche name) forum” and only register for the ones where you see posters who have signature links going back to their websites. Register, create your signature link and then respond to 10 forum threads per day contributing to the discussion and solving peoples’ problems, without drawing attention to your signature link
13. Login to your cPanel and checkout your Awstats “search keyphrases”, then search those keyphrases in Google to find out your top-ranked keywords, and create more content along those lines
14. Find other blogs in your niche that are hurting for content, and offer to write guest blog posts for them, and deliver this 100% unique content with a link back to your blog, or even better, your product with that blog owner registered as an affiliate
15. Register your sites with a retargeting service such as AdRoll so your ads can follow your visitors around the internet until they buy

There are lots of free traffic sources that are hit-or-miss such as traffic exchanges, classified ads, press releases, social bookmarking sites, blog networks like WordPress.com, that I won’t get into.

I know that seems like a lot, but if you just choose one of the 15 free traffic methods to apply every day, that will add up to a LOT of free traffic in the long-term.

Basically:

• You need traffic (a lot of it)
• You need to see where your traffic comes from
• You need to pay for TARGETED traffic and tweak your campaigns every couple of weeks
• You need to create lots of content that solves the problems of the prospects that eventually come to your website and buy
• You need to have something for sale, using your OWN personality, and have your own optin pages and followup sequence in page to build a list and keep in contact with your customers until they buy
• Affiliate marketing is fine as long as you have your own product(s), and your own BASE SYSTEM in place to solve peoples’ problems

That’s the real way to market and make money online. Instead of being a full-blown “internet marketer” you are a business owner who happens to market on the internet. I hope that makes sense, I hope that course-corrected your business and I know that if you apply even a fraction of what I’ve shown you today, you’ll have all the traffic you’ll ever need to convert your prospects into subscribers and buyers.