Integrating Traffic Thinking Sales – Week 5

Overwhelm Sets In

Overwhelm is the feeling I have. A week of integrating traffic did that.

This cannot be right. The whole training program for the Quick Start challenge and Internet Profits has all been about simplifying things and focusing on getting a few key parts in place. They do not even have to be right – they just have to be in place and continually worked on.

Quite simple really

1. Set up a blog and write one post a week – tell the story of the week
2. Build traffic – one free channel and one paid channel.

Integrating Traffic All Week

I spent a lot of the week working through my existing social media connections and streamlining and realigning the way they work. You see I have a solid foundation of followers – 3,000 friends on Facebook, a Facebook business page (Mark Carrington Business Coach) with 200 followers, a LinkedIn profile with 1200 followers and Twitter profiles with 7,000 (@MarkSCarrington) and 24,000 (@Stratocharge) followers. That is a lot of stuff to keep one’s head around let alone finding time to actually engage with the followers as people

I do have in place a flow of automatically curated content. A flow that delivers videos on Internet Marketing and Copywriting topics to my Twitter profiles and to my Mark Carrington Business Coach page. I spent some time realigning those to give more weight to what I am doing with Internet Profits. A flow also delivers articles to Twitter. I have not gone back to check the curation trails on the articles – I am hoping I did a good job first time around.

Now the big idea is to use the Twitter followings to build engagement and to draw them across to Facebook (a page or a group = undecided. Groups work better because of the way Facebook sends notifications to Group members). To start that I have upped my engagement activity on Twitter – simple really. Follow and unfollow (I use Staged for that); say thanks for follow backs and new follows – good idea here is to engage with content from profiles or tweets; answer any direct messages; invite them to come across to Facebook because interaction is easier. A lot to do and quite overwhelming when there are over 30,000 followers. The next phase of the grand plan is to document the process steps and outsource it to a VA.

 Actions for Week 5

I laid out 6 task areas last week – the results are covered off in the video – 40 new opt-ins, one product sale (deposit paid).  Mote: Youtube took down my video on some stupid rules – this is hosted somewhere so the player is not as pretty

• Streamline existing email ads platforms – done. New solo ads and credit ads running. Getting clicks but not many opt-ins. Plan is to change copy on a regular basis to test conversions.
• Integrate mailing lists: I started working on my existing email lists. This is a little complicated. I have a list which was built on a copywriting lead magnet. It has double opt-in. Somewhere along the line my page builder software lost the integration with my autoresponder. Luckily it kept the email addresses but they are now only single opt-in and some could be in Europe from before the GDPR Privacy regulations changed. I did the work to split the lists into double opt-in (for which I have IP data and I can identify who is in Europe) and single opt-in. Next steps is to email them with one of 3 messages – confirm your opt-in; review your GDPR status; reconnect with a gift offer for those double opted-in not from Europe.
• Extend follow up sequences for emails: I integrated emails for blog posts from the start of the Quick Start Challenge into the sequence. I share the old posts every third day. For people who are already past the new timeslot I do catchup newsletters one a day until caught up.  This adds in 10 new emails to the sequence – gives me another week to work out how to add more.
• Start sharing blog posts written so far to my personal Facebook and LinkedIn audiences – doing those 3 days a week.
• Review new Solo ads: Solo ad is running and delivering opt-ins. These are encouraging but lower than I would like. I will set up a new solo ad and suggest the copy myself
• Tools for daily journalling – no progress other than making the review video.

Focus for Week 6

1. Integrate social media traffic – next level – Twitter to Facebook
2. Complete existing email list integration
3. Add a new solo ad.
4. Start studying another paid ads platform – probably going to be Facebook. I have a parallel project taking shape which will work well with paid ads – time to leverage the training

Thinking Sales

A lot of the week had this feeling of overwhelm. Normally I step back to my consulting training and write down 3 bullet points. Time to do that again

“overwhelmed” (CC BY 2.0) by libookperson

I studied marketing in my business degrees.

The dominant marketing model was

• find a need
• find a product
• find the prospect
• deliver to the need.

The Internet marketing model leaned to find a niche, find a product, serve the product into the niche. The affiliate marketing model tends to start with find a product (that someone will allow you to sell), find the prospects, sell the product (features or benefits).  You see what the Internet is doing is changing the way discovery happens. It is easier to find prospects. It is easier to explore needs (not as easy as finding prospects).

Where is this all going? The latest buzz word is the funnel. This goes back a level – Ryan Deiss describes it as a multi-step, multi-modality process that moves prospective browsers into buyers.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/296526 is a useful summary

Those Ryan Deiss words capture the essence of how to break through the overwhelm.

• Build awareness so that a random passer-by looks in the shop window
• Build interest so that the window shopper is poised to act
• Build the compulsion to act.

The best part of being an Internet Profits partner is the back end process is already working and in place. Someone else has taken care of the potential for overwhelm.  All partners have to do is build awareness so that random passers-by become interested. Well I have a very large following of random passers-by who already know me a little bit. Time to be integrating traffic

Resources

Solo Ads: Traffic For Me is a traffic brokerage service that finds the best solo ad providers. They do all the work to get clean leads to your specification. Explore Traffic For Me – it works

Credit Ads: Guaranteed Solo Mails offers Pro members 8 mailings a month for free with 200 unique viewers guaranteed for each mailing. It also offers range of advertising models which you can buy with cash or credits from viewing mails or ads. It does provide a way to build an advertising budget by reading ads. Use the reading time to learn what copy works to attract you to click a link. Sign up for free

Banner Ads: LeadsLeap works unattended to deliver ads to its members. One can build credits for free ads by reading ads or just pay for a Pro account. It works well for me and delivers a steady trickle of leads unattended. Sign up for free

Grow Twitter Followers: Staged provides a platform for growing Twitter followers, managing engagement with them and sharing content (called stages). Sign up for free to grow your following and try out the content sharing features