Week 5: Talking Traffic For List Building

Traffic Frustrations

Week 5 webinar on the Quick Start Challenge was all about traffic for our list building.

Traffic for list building is a topic that has really frustrated me at the hands of the so-called Internet Marketing gurus. I have heard so many ideas and implemented a mishmash of them. Maybe I should go back to all my notebooks and try to condense everything that has been said and try to distill my own strategic framework out of it all. These are some of the things that stick in my mind:

• Build a clear image in your mind as to who you are targeting
• Tighten that image up into a customer avatar (whatever that word means)
• Focus in on a narrow band of customers fitting an age and sex profile (e.g., women between 30 and 40) – 10 years was the suggested bandwidth from one guru
• Hang out where your customers hang out – e.g., Social Media, YouTube
• Identify the leading edge players in your niche and follow their followers
• Find a product, work out its niche, and seek where the prospects are
• Find a niche, find a product, write about that niche and then pitch the product
• Use advertising, especially on Facebook
• and, and, and

All I know is that I have been pulled in every direction by shiny object syndrome chasing a lot of these ideas. Now is the time to step back and see what is in place and focus on things that are working. Or I can just do what Dean Holland suggested and start from list building basics until I can see a way to leverage the things that I have already done and tools I have bought.

Free Traffic and Paid Traffic

Dean talked about two main threads of traffic, free and paid:

Free Traffic

The focus of free traffic is to create content and then get people to look at the content. In my early days in Internet Marketing all the gurus talked about keywords and search engine optimization as the holy grail of free traffic. At one level this is easy to do – write your content in a keyword rich way. At the full level, this morphed into a complicated area of backlinks and private blog networks and the like. This very quickly becomes a time sink of effort and expense.

As Social Media has evolved, social media has become the free traffic home for the content one creates. What is really neat about Social Media is it is not that hard to profile the people you want to reach and to reach them. The platforms provide tools to make that easier and one can get away by just following what other people in a niche do. Follow them and craft better messages and better content than they do and you can grab (or leverage) their prospects.

The Quick Start Challenge highlighted 5 primary arenas of free traffic

Blogging – we just made a blog. I have quite a few and I have been blogging extensively on Steemit.com as well

Social Media Marketing – choose your own favourite but Facebook is the obvious place as it has 2 billion users. Facebook is permission-based contact. Other platforms like Instagram and Twitter are not. This makes them a powerful place to start – follow people in a niche and find a way to migrate them to a place where you can build a dialogue.

Video Marketing – people love video. Personally I find it too slow and I avoid it to get my content BUT I do use it.

Podcasting – it seems that in busy lives people like to fill their empty time with earphones and words.

Forum Marketing – this was the grand daddy of the Internet. Dean Holland certainly started there. And there are variations on this that do work quite well – e.g., Quora, Yahoo Answers, Wikihow. Maybe these are best thought of not only as sources for backlinks but also qualified prospects who like your stuff

The best advice from the Quick Start Challenge – pick one and start to build a following there simply sharing content that one is creating already for blogs and email autoresponders. The good news is I am well ahead on this arena, though I must say it is somewhat spread over a lot of niches.

Paid Traffic

Until recently the gurus stayed away from pushing paid traffic, maybe because they were wary of the horror stories. It is very clear that the easy days of cheap paid traffic are long gone. Cost per click is rising especially in popular niches. Paid traffic is also easy to get wrong. Quick Start Challenge view though is that paid traffic properly done delivers more consistent results especially when conditions change. The ad platforms always have a vested interest in keeping their ad revenues flowing. The same cannot be said on keeping your content presented on free platforms.

What is really cool about paid traffic is one can start small to test things out and you can then scale it up and down as needs dictate. Scaling free traffic is much more complex.

The Quick Start Challenge highlighted 5 primary areas for paid traffic

Social Media ads (Facebook and Youtube specifically) – I have already had some good results getting Page likes through Facebook ads. This provides a way to combine list building and content sharing

Banner Ads – Buy advertising space that can be placed in front of where your targets hang out

Google Ads – Google ads provides a way to combine keyword research and advertising. Find the keywords that work for your target prospects and run ads

Solo ads – where you pay someone to mail out your lead generation pitch to their list.

A Suggested Battleplan

Dean Holland mapped out a suggestion to get going.

1. Start with a free traffic method and keep working it. The most likely is on Facebook Groups. Join a few groups in your niche area and find ways to get people to volunteer when they need help. Then offer your help. This siphons traffic away from Facebook rather than directly taking it
2. Save any earnings you make and allocate some of it to paid traffic
3. Learn one paid traffic channel
4. Start with a small amount (say $5 per day) and build up from there using a test and learn approach.
5. As paid traffic begins to work, progressively scale it up to replace the free traffic flows.

Traffic Strategy summary:  Use cash to find  prospects and use time to focus on content and nurturing.

My Traffic Shambles

My traffic model looks like a complicated shambles. I use a number of Social Media platforms, mostly Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, with several profiles in each. I have some sizeable followings in niche areas, like Bitcoin and Affiliate Marketing.  I have a bunch of tools that automate the flow of content. I know it is a shambles because it is not producing consistent subscriber or sales results. The only thing that works well is my charity fund raising. Weird that as I can get people to give money away more easily than I can get them to buy something of tangible value to them. Now there is a big lesson in there for me. 49% of my donations by number come from former colleagues. These are people that I know and who have grown to know, like and trust me.

Dean told us to nurture our audience. I now know, it is time to build that consistent nurture your audience into my traffic model. Free traffic models do that directly from the start. Paid traffic models do that after the first contact is cemented. It is time to step back from my IT geek model of the world to a nurture model.

My Paid Ads Story

I have dipped my toes into paid ads in 3 broad areas

Ads on Facebook to build likes for niche pages. That works well for a low outlay. The idea then is to nurture the audience with good fresh content and entice them to supply an email address on an opt-in page.

Solo ads and Banner ads. One of the platforms I have been using for 3 years now, called LeadsLeap, combines solo ads and banner ads into a single platform. It is essentially an ads platform that includes a mailing element. They email a digest of ads to all members and progressively rotate ads through the mailing. They also provide tools for placing a LeadsLeap ads widget on websites. They present ads on their own website. Each one of my ads generates 10 or so clicks a day, day in and day out. Actively managed by testing new copy regularly will increase this rate. The platform also includes a 10 level deep downline for referrals from which one can earn commissions and ad credits. I have referred fewer than 20 people yet I have over 500 people in my downline.

I like the way that I do get traffic every day with little work on my side. This video walks through some of my results and some of the features of the platform.

The best part of the platform is it has a free version which one can use to run your own ads with credits from reading and rating ads. The free way to start is to use the ads surfing as a way to learn how to write good ad copy (headline less than 25 characters plus a message less than 60 characters) and good landing pages. Just follow what the 5 star ad writers do and build that into your free credit ads – keep doing this over and over until you are ready to go Pro.  I use the paid Pro version at $19.95 a month which gives me 10 Pro ads which I can deploy without needing credits. Any credits I collect are applied to Credit ads that I run as well.

There are many other features and tools which I am not using yet. Maybe the place to start is to download a free One Signup A Day report which lays out how to start – no opt in required.