Selecting the right ad-platform can seem daunting at first. Should you post on social media, or should you focus all of your content on your own website? Answer to this question has multiple parts.
First, there is something very important to consider when thinking about the platform that you will publish on. The number one thing you should think about is who holds the traffic that will see your content and your advertisement? in the marketing world there are three types of traffic. Those that you buy, those that you earn, and those that you own. Let’s talk about each one individually.
Customer Traffic That You Buy
During the 30 day business framework, the majority of the traffic that will be exposed to your products and offerings and will be traffic that you pay for. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if you don’t already have a large following online.
If done correctly, paid traffic can be a very lucrative way to earn a lot of money and very little time. But, there is a trick to it and a risk associated with it. The trick is finding the right ratio of advertising money spent to money earned from sales.
For example, if I pay one dollar to get a customer to purchase my product that cost three dollars, and I’m getting a return of 200% on my advertising money spent.like we discussed in previous sessions, your cost structure is very important to keep in the front of your mind. If you have high product costs as well as advertising costs, you will need to sell for more product at a much higher price to be profitable.
But we don’t need to cover cost models here. We already discussed that any previous section and you can go back and read it if you need a refresher.
Currently some of the most popular places that you can pay for customer traffic our Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the less popular option is Bing which is Microsoft search engine.
The traffic is sold to you via an automated bidding system that measures how many people you will be able to advertise to as well as how many advertisers would like to be in front of that audience. After those two metrics are measured, a price is assigned to the advertising slot.
So, you can imagine that the best strategy when you’re just starting out is to find a niche that doesn’t have very many competitors in it, but has high enough volume for you to make meaningful sales. All of the extremely high volume search terms and high volume of customers are very likely already occupied by the big name brands that can outspend you $1 million to one.
But, this shouldn’t deter you. All of the planning and strategy that we have been doing up to this point was meant to prepare you specifically for a scenario where are you find the niches and customers that are not served or underserved by bigger brands.
The final thoughts on customer traffic that you buy. At the end of the day this traffic is not owned by you or even earned by you, because you had to pay for it. And the harsh reality is one day you will be having wild success and the next day some algorithm will change that takes your advantage away completely. And your left to the mercies of the platform owners and their discretion dictates the futureof your company. Not the best place to be in long-term. So, having other strategies in place to drive traffic to your offering is the best way to avoid his scenario that is out of your control.
You’re probably wondering what other ways you can drive traffic. That’s great! The next two sections talk specifically about that.
Customer Traffic You Earn
Customer traffic that you earn is different from customer traffic that you buy in that you don’t have to pay for it. However, it’s similar to traffic that you bye and that you are still relying on a third-party platform to constantly feed you new customers. I don’t think these platforms will be going away anytime soon, but it’s good to be aware of your reliance on them so that you canplan your business appropriately.
So, how do you earn customer traffic?there are a few ways that you can earn customer traffic one of them is through search engine rankings. Knowing how certain things work to help you rank higher.
There are a lot of tactics and strategies and other mindbending techniques that people employ on the Internet just show up first in the rankings. But, these tactics and strategies are we coming less successful as the search engines are becoming better at reading websites like humans do. So what does that mean?
Let’s use Google for an example. Googles stated objective is to organize the world’s data so that it is accessible by everyone. Basically, do you want to be the best search engine in the world that provides the most relevant answers to their customers questions. So, thinking about that stated objective as a human would think about it helps us really understand how to give Google what they want so they will give you what you want. Hey number one ranking on their search engineso that it is accessible by everyone. Basically, do you want to be the best search engine in the world that provides the most relevant answers to their customers questions. So, thinking about that stated objective as a human would think about it helps us really understand how to give Google what they want so they will give you what you want. A number one ranking on their search engine.
It might sound counterintuitive, but figuring out how to rank at the top of the search results on Google has only become easier to understand the longer Google is around. And that’s specifically because of what I just mentioned above. Their data aggregation algorithm is getting better all the time looking at your website the same way humans would like at your website. In fact, you might be surprised to know that it wasn’t until recently I had the Google searchEngine crawler was able to view images and animations on your website in their appropriate context. Meaning, Google didn’t know the difference between a rich user experience and a bland one the incorporated text only. At least Google’s search ranking algorithm didn’t know this until recently. Fortunately for all of us, that is something of the past. And now we can make content rich websites with images, animations, videos, and text without worrying we will not be recognized for our hard work and creativity.
So, to answer the question how can you earn customer traffic. It’s easy. Create something useful on your website that other people can use. obviously you will want to create something that you are good at making. Quality matters a lot. If you are an expert photographer it wouldn’t make sense to fill your personal website with longform journal entries about the locations of your photo shoots. Your website should be filled with original photography with some contextual text to help explain what people are looking at.
To take a photography website to the next level, you might include answers to questions that people might have about locations for a photo shoots. Or photo composition. Or perhaps how to make money as a photographer. Questions like these are asked online all the time not just about photography.
Think about the last search you did on Google. Where did the answer come from?The website that Google referred you to earn your traffic. They earned the right from Google to be placed in front of you in response to a question that you typed in.
This applies to us as we work through our 30 day business framework because it’s better to have traffic that you have earned from your hard work than traffic that only comes to you when you pay for it.
Customer Traffic That you Own
The final type of customer traffic but we will cover is the customer traffic that you on. This is the type of traffic that turns online businesses into multi million dollar companies. Customer traffic that you own is exactly how the big names in marketing can have $20,000 weekends. Or even $1 million in a single week. They aren’t doing those impressive things through paid advertisements or even through organic ranking that they’ve earned on the search engines. They are leveraging customer traffic that they own.
If that last paragraph got you excited about customer traffic that you own, then I don’t feel so awkward with all of the butterflies in my stomach. It’s a very exciting prospect to imagine being able to reach people and provide them value in a way that can financially change your life overnight.
You’re probably wanting to know how you can home customer traffic. You’re also probably wanted to know if you can offer your product or service to people this weekend so that you can also have a $20,000 weekend. Well, it does sound nice, doesn’t it? The customer traffic that you phone takes a lot longer to grow. So I wouldn’t expect a $20,000 weekend anytime will be super near future. Maybe give it a few weeks.😉
When we talk about customer traffic that you own we are talking about email lists. Specifically, list of emails that people willingly gave you because they wanted you to continue to reach out to them as you created and provided value to them. There are plenty of ways to trick people into giving you their email. However, those people who feel tricked by you are very unlikely to ever become real customers. They end updo you do emails on your list that unsubscribe or never open the email. There’s no reason to add them to your list if doing so was a violation of trust. Not a great way to start a relationship.
So, how do you grow your email list? And how do you grow it with the type of people that want to hear from you on a regular basis. Better yet, how do you fill it with The emails of people that want to open their wallet because they find your products and services so valuable that they want to pay you for them?
The answer is pretty straightforward. You shouldn’t be asking for their email. Your goal is to have them accept your offer for more value sent to them through email. The difference between asking for their email and offering more value to them via email is worlds apart in principle but nearly identical in practice.
So, what does that look like? Imagine you are having a conversation with your favorite author. During this conversation you felt like the luckiest person in the world having the opportunity to speak to someone and hear new and fresh ideas from someone you respect. Now, imagine what you would think if at the end of the conversation the author turn to you and said “can I have your email so that I can add you to a list of people that I make money off of?“
Obviously those words wouldn’t be used. But you have been asked for your email online so many times from people with those exact intentions that those are the words you heard even if she didn’t say them exactly that way.
Now imagine a different ending to the conversation with the author. Imagine the author returned to you and said, “I’d love to send you some of my latest work. I have a very small group of people that I share some of my draft writings with on a regular basis. Does that sound like something You would be interested in? How would you like me to share this with you?”
There are a couple of important points I want to make about this second ending to the conversation with the author. First, the author wanted to provide more value., Which tends to me the other person feel important. Second, the author mentioned that she is not engaging in a mass marketing campaign to boost future book sales. He actually introduced the idea of exclusivity and scarcity. Third, he didn’t ask for anything. He made an offer. The only thank he asked for was clarification on how he should deliver his offering.
As you can see, and principal those two approaches couldn’t be further away from each other. However, the end result is identical. The author will walk away with another email of a raving fan. But the email address captured in the second scenario far more valuable than an email collected from the first scenario.