Everyone in internet marketing always seems to be fixated on traffic. I need more traffic! How do I get more visitors and page views?
To be honest, I could care less how much traffic I get, as long as I’m making money. The quality of the traffic is really more important. But before I go too far down that road, let me answer the question in my own way. I know there are hundreds of experts out there with their own answers, but this is how I like to put it.
You get traffic through these three Bs:
- Buy
- Borrow
- Build
No, it’s not the Better Business Bureau… It’s your traffic formula. Buy, Borrow, and Build… in that order.
There must be a reason this simple formula is not enough for most people. If it were, there wouldn’t be 10,000 traffic-generating eBooks and software programs out there.
So look out… Here comes the realism that most internet marketing pros won’t tell you.
1. Buy - Advertising
You can buy traffic through pay per click, banner ad insertions, and other similar methods I’m sure you’ve heard about. The bad news here is that it can be quite expensive, especially when you’re testing your conversion or ad revenue generation. This used to be an easy method, but Google has made ad pricing so quality-specific that in competitive markets you can really spend a lot of time optimizing your landing page just to get reasonable per click prices.
By the way, when you’re thinking about buying traffic, stay away from junk traffic. Don’t buy email lists or email drops. Don’t buy pop-up or pop-under traffic or any sort of forced advertising. Just don’t do it. You may eat up a lot of bandwidth on your server, assuming the company doesn’t just rip you off (which is what happens in most cases), but the people will never buy anything. Save yourself the money, and do NOT do this.
2. Borrow – JV Partners
You borrow traffic from joint venture partners. This is often the way that internet marketing trainers try to coerce you to go. I hate to be the bearer of bad news again, but this method is not as easy as it sounds. If you aren’t set up to make money, you don’t have a known reputation, and you aren’t in the internet marketing circles already, you will probably have some difficulty recruiting quality affiliates.
The other problem is that most internet marketer want-to-bes aren’t outgoing people and don’t really want to go out and recruit a ton of partners. Just sticking an ad for your affiliate program on your site or on an IM board is not unlikely to win you more than a few fleeting partners.
3. Build - SEO
Finally you build traffic through SEO, link by link, article by article. You may think buying AdWords traffic is expensive, but when you really understand how SEO works, you’ll find that building the same traffic through SEO usually costs more at first because it takes a lot of time and effort. The bad news here is that you can’t do this by yourself.
I suggest you spend your time learning how to do it, and direct others to do it for you. That’s how it gets expensive. But in the long run, this method pays off because if kept up, it produces month after month without big advertising bills.
So What Should I Do?
Sounds like I just killed all the traffic methods. That is bad news! Some of you can identify with this scenario.
But here’s the bright spot. The traffic is there. It really is, and you can really get it using these methods. So despite the tidbits of bad news, there are ways to overcome these things.
First thing is simple. Don’t jump to Build right away. One of the biggest mistakes you can make (I speak from experience) is to spend a lot of time and money optimizing a site for the wrong keywords. There is no greater let down than the week after you realize you’re winning a tough keyword to realize that absolutely no one is buying and hardly anyone is even clicking your ads. Ouch. Time to start over.
How about you just do it right from the very beginning? Test your site, sales letter, and keywords using paid traffic. If you can score some affiliates, that’s good too. But on an untested site you’re not likely to recruit quality affiliates. If you get junk affiliates it’s often difficult to really measure conversion from their traffic.
So start with the Buy model. Buy some adwords and see which keywords convert. If none of them do, maybe you should check your call to action, your sales copy, your headlines, and all that conversion stuff (that I can’t get into now because this article is already way too long).
Once you get some sales, you can begin the Build method. And once you can show some solid conversion metrics over time, you can more easily woo the potential JV partners. The more consistency you can show in your campaign, the easier it is to scale up using all of the traffic B-methods.
