On the internet as in life, you’ll need more than a better mousetrap to find the world to conquer a path to you.
You could have the best product ever invented … the most brilliant product ladder every structured … probably the most compelling sales copy ever written … probably the most inviting sales pages ever designed … and also the slickest shopping cart ever engineered …
… But there is little happen until someone clicks a hyperlink and winds up in your website.
No doubt about it: For entrepreneurs and business owners, knowing how they are driving copious amounts of prospects to your website is like getting the combination towards the richest bank vault on the planet.
So if you feel a copywriter or marketing pro, knowing how to drive web traffic can make you worth your weight in gold.
Why? Because having the skill set they are driving website traffic is like owning your own tollbooth on the Web – you are able to just sit there and collect money for every click and conversion you create.
How much are you able to make? A LOT! Right now, Yahoo! and Google are the Internet’s two largest toll booths and it is no coincidence they are also two of the richest businesses anywhere.
Want proof? Take a gander at this: In September, 2004, you could have bought all the Google stock you desired for just $100 a share. Today, that same stock may be worth a lot more than FIVE TIMES more!
Why? Because every Twelve months, Google rakes in a staggering $10.6 billion (nearly eleven thousand million dollars!) – mostly for sending traffic to other people’s websites!
So if you would like your stock to rise … if you wish to rake in huge bucks … a good thing you can possibly do today is: Learn to drive web traffic!
THE WIDE END OF THE FUNNEL
I figure a minimum of $ 30 million folks should be reading my ezine, The Total Package, every day. Heck. There are 25 million smaller businesses within the U.S. alone. Throw in several million more marketing folk, copywriters and designers – and a few more million business opportunity seekers – and that 30 million’s a slam dunk.
Furthermore, I calculate that if I possibly could just get all 30 million of the people that would make money from The entire Package to read our opt-in page just once, the vast majority would sign up. I mean, why not – it’s free, right?
That would provide us with 15 million subscribers. Because the average Total Package reader spends $6 around each month, that would make us nearly a $1 billion company.
Now this may surprise you; but despite the fact that we’ve been carrying this out for two whole years now, we do NOT have 15 million subscribers.
In truth, most our target audience still doesn’t have a clue we’re for them.
… Yet.
It’s my fault. I insisted that we spend the final Two years focusing almost exclusively around the back end: Building our site and online store, adding reams of valuable content and creating world-class products to help you get bigger winners, more often.
Luckily, a large number of good folks found us anyway. Most by person to person, a few through various affiliate and joint venture arrangements and a tiny trickle through some pay-per-click stuff we did (badly) in 2005.
But now that we’ve built our home and also have tidied up, it’s time to begin inviting those 30 million prospects over to look into the place out.
To achieve that, we have to begin attracting BIG traffic – and to begin investing Big bucks to do it. Because probably the most valuable things we’ve learned in the last 2 yrs is the fact that when it comes to traffic, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
I understand – there are gaggles of Internet gurus claiming you may make instant millions on the Internet with almost no out of pocket investment.
Maybe which was actually true once. However nowadays, the traffic-building strategies that everybody lets you know are “free” require a substantial investment of skull sweat, money and time.
NEVERTHELESS, Still it MAKES SENSE TO DO The least expensive STUFF FIRST …
1. Structure lucrative arrangements with affiliates and partnership partners, and they’ll drive tens of thousands of new leads and customers to you.
Our recent Confessions from the Info-Publishing Superstars teleseminar series brought us hundreds of new subscribers in a tidy profit: Not just did we make money selling the live call series, we’ll continue selling the recordings in our online shop.
We just recruited nine information publishers who themselves have substantial subscriber and customer lists … featured each of them on a single teleconference call coupled with them share their most profitable suggestions for building a successful information publishing business … and gave them a chunk of the sales in the live event which incentivized them to publicize it to their house files.
In fact, the wedding am successful, we’re already planning for a second series on the different subject – and something of my major clients can also be borrowing this concept to construct their own file!
2. Search engine optimize your web pages and thousands of leads and customers will discover you organically.
Make no mistake: Even if you become an SEO professional, making your internet pages impossible for that search engines to overlook will take armloads of your scarcest resources: Time. You will need reams of content – each page featuring the optimal URL, Meta-description, Meta-tag and of course, text that’s lousy with the keywords you’re trying to win on.
Plus, SEO isn’t a destination – it’s a process. An ENDLESS process that requires you to definitely stay on surface of exactly what the search engines like google are looking for and just how they’re changing their parameters – after which making the timely adjustments essential to remain in the spiders’ sights.
Imagine doing everything every day for every one of the 300-plus pages on this website. That isn’t only a full-time job – it’s a full-time job a whole battalion of SEO experts could work on until Judgment Day and never complete.
And even if you might get everything right, it generally takes months for that search engines like google to start finding you consistently.
… However, you GOTTA DO IT!
3. Become a master of co-registration and you’ll get more traffic than you’ll know what to do with.
Co-registration (Co-Reg) is a deal in which you get someone else to offer a free subscription for your e-zine when folks are signing up for their e-zine.
Sign up for The Wall Street Journal Online, for example, and you’ll be given a webpage inviting you to definitely subscribe to a gaggle of other free e-letters – some financial anyway, some less.
To do co-registration, you point your browser to http://www.listopt.com … or [http://www.newsletternetwork.com] … or http://www.newsletter-directory.com … or http://www.innovationads.com/coregistration.htm …
Now, co-registration is not free – you have to pay as much as $1 or even more for each new subscriber you receive. That means bribing all of them with valuable free reports is likely to break the bank – so it’s smart to keep the description of the e-zine or product fairly low-key.
Plus, you need to know that there’s no guarantee those new subscribers will be qualified to purchase your products.
One study I saw online established that 68% of marketers surveyed say Co-Reg names are less responsive than subscribers gathered through other channels. So anything you do, DO NOT think that Co-Reg names can make as many purchases from you as your current leads and customers do.
4. Stick your content on all of the social and business networking sites and they’ll drive web traffic for you free of charge.
… Maybe this would work great for you – if you’re selling zit cream – but the great majority of the people that visit UTube, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and the rest of these websites are usually considerably younger than our prospects are.
And judging in the type of content I see on those sites, seeding all of them with our content may not be the best use of our money and time at this time.
On the other hand, you will find all those forums and blogs about small company, copywriting and direct response all around the web – and for us a minimum of, they’ve sent us armies of new subscribers in the last Two years.
So, if you have an e-zine or perhaps a creation that has potential on most of these social and business networking sites, a great initial step would be to try them out … see what kinds of things your competition do there.
Seeding these sites with links to your website will not bring you a million leads or sell a million dollars-worth of product for you. But they can bring a steady trickle and depending on what you’re selling, that may allow it to be worthwhile for you.
(NOTE: There are other ways to attract traffic for little or no cash outlays, of course: You could utilize one of the many Web PR sites to issue a press release any time you post a new article online … or make your content open to other sites via a content-sharing broker.
We’ve tried both with limited success – for all of us a minimum of, it was hardly well worth the effort.)
Require more TRAFFIC? Prepare TO UNLIMBER YOUR CHECKBOOK!
The problem with the low-cost reely traffic drivers above is the fact that each of them is passive. Every one of them asks you to count on another person – affiliates, JV partners, the spiders, Co-Reg users and others – to bring you leads.
Worse, every one of them asks you to invest tangible, quantifiable assets – your employees’ time and your company’s money – with the hope that you will reap some kind of vague, unmeasurable, ethereal reward somewhere down the line … maybe … if everything goes based on plan and also you hold the mouth area right.
Me? I’m a classic direct mail guy. I wish to look at every dollar I purchase list-building and know – towards the penny – just how much that investment earned me in new subscribers, new customers and new sales revenues.
That means I wish to test a promotion for a few bucks, then leverage the homestead to roll it out big-time … and FAST. That’s how I’ve sold 100,000 newsletter subscriptions for $169 each in a single year – and it’s generate an income wish to build The entire Package!
Now, if you want to do this on the Web, you’re pretty much talking about four kinds of campaigns – because both versions we’ll cover in detail within the next few editions of this column:
Offline Campaigns (TV, radio, print, direct mail) la Geico.com yet others:
PLUSSES: Capable of driving massive web traffic fast …
MINUSES: Under ideal for niche marketers … national campaigns can cost big bucks … on television, spot availability can be … er … “spotty” … a rapid, relatively high-ticket sale necessary to offset media expense.
Renting e-mail lists and sending an offer to them:
PLUSSES: Massive amounts of names available … selectivity allows you to target your niches accurately … leases have become more reasonable in recent years.
MINUSES: List quality is often spotty at best … prospects’ inboxes are stuffed and e-mails from people they don’t know are the initial to become deleted … response could be abysmal.
Placing banner advertising on sites inside your market niche:
PLUSSES: Lots of people visit the larger sites … banner placements not prohibitive … animated banners can work well …
MINUSES: Competition from almost every other banner on the page … prospects exist to get that page’s content – NOT necessarily searching for that which you have to offer.
Placing ads in e-zines subscribed to folks within your market niche:
PLUSSES: Ads are cheap and easy to create … placement is fairly simple and not too expensive … some been employed by quite well for our clients …
MINUSES: Limited numbers of relevant e-zines, most with relatively small subscriber lists …
Pay-Per-Click campaigns:
PLUSSES: You control how much you spend … you can look at your wazzoo off and shift your financial allowance to keywords and landing pages that produce the best ROI …
MINUSES: The price you pay for many popular keywords can be excessive … requires constant monitoring and ingenious application of PPC strategies.
That which you MUST KNOW BEFORE YOU SPEND Anything ONLINE
Make no mistake: Buying eyeballs – driving website traffic – is definitely an investment. And also the secret to smart investing is knowing the numbers.
FIRST, if you are doing a straight lead producing campaign – an offer in which no method is offered available – it’s important to know what a professional lead (an inquiry or perhaps a subscriber to a free e-zine, for instance) is worth for you. And to know that, you need to know just how much your average lead ends up spending along with you each month, each year, and over their lifetime.
Now, as mentioned earlier, each Total Package subscriber spends typically $6 monthly around. Of this $6, the price of delivering an item runs about $1 (at most). That leaves me with a $5 net per month, per subscriber.