The Truth About Traffic

I was listening to to a live video presentation by Sean Mize yesterday and the truth about traffic i.e. getting clicks to your content and landing pages, was revealed during the 2 hour plus talk.

Sean Mize seems to have had two principle traffic sources:

Ezine Articles, where is was the leading article submitter, having submitted thousands of articles
Warrior Special Offers, where he became adept at creating numerous offers based on his one hour audio format

Sean is now getting into YouTube videos as a traffic source. The presentation yesterday was his first foray into live YouTube videos and he had over 50 people listening in.

If live video interests you as a traffic source then you may also want to investigate Google Hangouts as Google gives good SEO ranking to Hangouts.

What became clear from the presentation is that Sean places an intense focus on one traffic source at a time. This enables him to master the traffic source and eventually dominate it within his niche simply because he is more hard-working and prolific than anyone else.

From his previous forays into Ezine Articles and WSO’s, he observed that a tiny percentage (say 3%) of his output was driving most of his traffic.

Once he identified where most of his traffic was coming from, he stopped creating content for the 97% and focused on scaling the 3% of topics, keywords etc that were producing the results.

Unfortunately there is no way around the hard work of identifying the 3% that will work in your niche. You must be focused and dedicated.

There are 3 keys to identifying this 3%:

tracking results using tracking links
grouping topics or keywords together initially, finding which ‘groups’ are working before then finding the gold within each group. (The analogy is panning for gold – most of your output is dross, with just a little gold dust sprinkled in! You job is to identify and extract the gold dust that converts to buyers from the torrent of traffic available.)
consistency i.e. systematically working over time to find out what works and, more often, what doesn’t work.

So the truth about traffic is that that hard work is unavoidable i.e. there is no easy button. You will need to test 100 to find the 3 or 4 that work for you. This means that most of your time and money will be wasted in order to find that sweet spot. You then need to scale the sweet spot and drop the rest in order to make a return on your work.

This truth is the same for affiliate traffic – out of 100 affiliates, you will find that 2 or 3 affiliates will account for the majority of your sales.

If you didn’t know this truth, it would be easy to get discouraged, and even give up, before you found ‘the gold at the bottom of the pan’.

Now that you know the truth about traffic, you need to get focused and work all-out to discover what will work for you.

Video Review Checklist

I stumbled across this video review checklist and thought that I would post it to my blog because it may be useful to my readers.

Below Are Some Questions Will Help Prepare for Review Videos or Interviews With Product Creators.

What Are The Unique Selling Points?

Who is the Target Audience? (ie Who is gonna be Really Benefit for getting Your Product)

What makes the product Stands Out or Different than competition? Real results.

What investment is needed?

What Are Your Proofs? ( ex: Income proofs, Ranking Proofs, Written Testimonial, Video )

Part 1:

What is the name of the product?

When is it launched?

Part 2:

What is inside the Front End offer?

Price?

Is it a Dime sale?

How long is the offer open?

The Benefits Of Video Marketing

Fixing Website Issues

This article is about fixing website issues using Google Webmaster Tools.

All websites that you want to be indexed in Google need to be set up on Google Webmaster Tools. You will need to verify that you own the site by going through their site verification process and it is also a good idea to submit an XML sitemap.

In the past I have used Google Webmaster Tools to primarily check my search traffic keywords, links to my site and that the pages were being indexed by Google.

I have not systemised these checks and it is certainly a good idea to make sure you check your site with Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis and here is the reason why.

From time to time you will get messages from Google flagging up errors on your website which you need to fix. I have just discovered 2 huge general errors and, because I was not checking Google Webmaster Tools regularly, was not aware of this until today.

Much of the content on my pages was blocked to Google because of a faulty robots.txt file which I needed to correct and re-upload via FTP. I discovered this using the ‘Crawl’ menu within Google Webmaster Tools which firstly flagged up the crawl errors. I was then able to see how Google was viewing the page using the ‘Fetch As Google’ function in the ‘Crawl’ menu. It is easy to use and very illuminating!

These errors were also affecting the mobile-friendliness of my web pages – 22% of my pages were flagging mobile errors including the fact that some of the mobile ‘touch’ elements on my pages are too close together. I may need to change my WordPress theme to correct these as Google has announced that it is de-indexing pages that are not mobile friendly as from 21st April 2015! As mobile related traffic accounts for roughly 50% of all traffic, sites that are not mobile-friendly will be at a serious traffic disadvantage.

This demonstrates why it is important to invest in a good professional theme which is tried and tested by a lot of users i.e. to make sure that all the wrinkles are ironed out. Errors like these will severely affect the amount of search engine traffic you and I will attract to our websites and therefore should not be ignored.

So I recommend that you check out your websites using Google Webmaster Tools and set about fixing website issues that this site flags up for you.

How To Get Your Offline Business Noticed Online

In this video I briefly cover the burning issue ‘How To Get Your Offline Business Noticed Online.’

In the video I cover:

how potential customers find your business online
an example of an actual client
the importance of keywords and keyword research
on page optimisation
off-page optimisation
paid advertising
the importance of having a clear call to action and value proposition
the importance of optimising your website for mobile devices

If you need any help solving the problem of how to get your offline business noticed online, then please feel free to contact me

The Compelling Case For Retargeting Ads

There is a compelling case for retargeting ads and this article will explain exactly why every business with a website needs to implement retargeting in my opinion.

When I started out as a business consultant, I learned that there were just 4 ways to grow a business:

increase the number of customers of the type you want to have
increase the number of times that customers come back
increase the average value of each sale
increase the effectiveness of each process in the business

Retargeting has the potential to impinge on all 4 ways to grow a business but, more specifically, it brings customers and prospects back into the business.

But let’s look a little closer at the true benefits of retargeting…

The Benefits of Retargeting

In overall terms, retargeting reduces the RISK of doing business online. Let me explain why I say this.

Getting traffic to your site costs money:

either you have to create content (and get it ranked in the search engines) to drive organic or (as it is sometimes referred to as) ‘free’ traffic (- it is not free because someone had to spend valuable time creating the content and time is money!)
you paid for the click
or someone referred the visitor to your site and you may have to pay for that referral to incentivise further referrals.

The sad fact is that most of that traffic will visit your website and leave it and never return – some say that this figure is 98% on average – but it all depends on the source and quality of the traffic and the ability of the page you send them to convert the traffic e.g. if your traffic is going to a squeeze page with a compelling free offer you may convert 50% of the traffic or more if your traffic is targeted.

Nevertheless, for most websites let’s assume that 98% of visitors that visit the average website leave without taking action and never return. That’s a massive waste of traffic.

This is why top marketers try to persuade their website visitors to optin to their list by making a compelling free offer – once on their list it enables them to send emails and bring them back to whatever web page they wish.

Even this strategy is far from efficient as much depends on your email reaching your recipients inbox, then them opening it and then clicking on your link. With the amount of emails flying around the internet, email clicks are expensive assets to accumulate and require a degree of marketing and copywriting skill to capitalise upon.

Retargeting enables the website owner to ‘capture’ 100% of unique visitors to their website and gives us the ability to follow up with those visitors via paid retargeting ads.

This is truly beneficial as these website visitors are HIGHLY targeted – they have already shown an interest in your website and what you have to offer.

It’s a well known fact that most potential buyers will not buy on their first visit but require 4-8 ‘touches’ or contacts before they know, like and trust you enough to buy.

Retargeting ads enable you to follow-up efficiently with these potential buyers and convert them into buyers and sales revenue (which is the whole point of the exercise).

The important point to realise is that you can easily monitor the cost of your advertising versus the sales return from that spend and also tune your advertising to improve your return so you can be sure that you are getting a good return on your investment.

Perfect Audience (a well-known retargeting company) reckon that they create $10 of sales revenue for every $1 spent on retargeting ads – that’s a 1000% return.

If that is true, can your business (or mine for that matter) really afford NOT to do retargeting?

I think that that claim is at least worth investigating, don’t you?

How Retargeting Ads Work

This simple diagram explains simply how retargeting works. You prospects visit your website, a cookie is added to their browser automatically, they leave your website without taking action, they then see your adverts wherever they go on the internet. When they click on your retargeting advert they are sent back to whatever web page you wish.

You can also segment your retargeting lists. For example, if they visited your website, opted in but did not buy your paid offer, you would not want to send them back to your optin page again. Your ad would need to take them back to your paid offer – you can segment your retargeting lists and set up your campaign so that only visitors who did not optin are sent back to your optin page and those that did optin are set to your paid offer.

This can get quite sophisticated if you have a long sales funnel!

How To Implement Retargeting

You can implement retargeting for your business in a number of ways:

sign up with Facebook, Adroll or Perfect Audience and follow their online training
buy a third-party training programme – this what I did
hire someone else to implement this for you if you have no inclination to get technical.

It is my intention to provide a retargeting ads service to any business that wants to set this up – please contact me if you would like a free intial consultation and quotation.

Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies

This article is about effective affiliate marketing strategies – it is being written because I inadvertently stumbled onto an affiliate marketing strategy that I think may be unethical and it gave me pause for thought about the whole game of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is where you recommend someone else’s product using your affiliate link to link to the sales page of the product. If someone clicks on this link then you get a commission as a reward for your recommendation.

This raises some ethical issues:

should you reveal that you are getting a commission in return for your recommendation? After all it is hard to be entirely objective if you are being compensated.
should you reveal the shortfalls of the product as well as the good points – to do so may jeopardise the sale!
should you only promote if you own and use the product? i.e. that your recommendation is based upon personal use.
should you only recommend when you can either give a demo or show a result with the product – e.g. in the ‘make money online’ niche, show how you have made money with the product?
should you compare this product with those of competitors products before giving your final recommendation?

Some affiliates do hold themselves to these standards but unfortunately the majority do not and I include myself in that because I only tick some of the boxes above. It is just too easy to make a recommendation via an affiliate link because you like a product without holding yourself to a higher standard.

Some affiliates also offer a bonus in return for clicking on their affiliate link – sometimes the bonus can seem more attractive than the product they are promoting!

Personally I try to recommend only the products that I like and use. The exception would be new product launches where I trust the vendor and the product is being offered at an attractive launch price – it makes sense to bring these to my customers attention so they can get in at the lowest price if they like what they see.

This brings me to the point of this article.

I inadvertently stumbled upon an affiliate marketing strategy that is very effective but I don’t think I can easily adopt.

Following our last product launch, I have been approached by a number of product creators to promote their product with my list. There is nothing unusual about this and normally I would ask for a copy of the product so I could see if this is something that would benefit the people on my list.

However, one of the buyers of our product went further and tried to create a closer relationship by offering a video testimonial for our product, commenting on social media and generally trying to make friends with us.

I subsequently noticed that he was commenting on every WSO thread, was everywhere on social media, handing out testimonials every where, interviewing people, offering positive encouragement, thanking people by video and writing comments like confetti.

His recent WSO has just gone to WSO of the Day and he has made over 1,000 sales.

Now I don’t believe his product or his experience online would necessarily warrant that success at this stage so I can only speculate that he is using the above as a highly effective marketing strategy for gathering affiliate support.

But is it ethical?

If I was to create a WSO product which set out this strategy and everyone jumped on board then the forums and social media would be filled with bull-shit comments, testimonials and spurious recommendations promoting various products. Activity that could easily influence others to make a buying decision that they might later regret.

(Having said this, product quality or value is difficult to quantify. Most products have some sort of value within them although, in my opinion, many are of poor quality overall.)

All I am saying is that if we all pursued such a strategy in order to get other people to promote our product it would get very tiresome and could devalue our recommendations and the integrity of the marketplace because we would cynically just be saying nice things in the expectation of being rewarded by someone else promoting and recommending our product in return.

I noticed the above marketer following this strategy recently and I inadvertently (yes, it was an inadvertent comment that had no premeditation about it) touched upon his strategy, I received a furious response in return which quite took me aback.

I was really asking him whether he put his success down to buying and commenting on multiple WSO threads and in social media. Prior to that I had mentioned that the reason I had not launched any products recently was that I was looking for a traffic source other than affiliates because I was questioning myself about the integrity of affiliate marketing.

I think that he put the two things together and thought I was questioning his integrity.

His subsequent response makes me think that I touched on a raw nerve and the penny dropped that perhaps I had inadvertently revealed his whole strategy and perhaps he had his own doubts about the integrity of what he was doing which is what elicited his furious response. (I don’t know but it just seems that way to me in retrospect.)

Perhaps my subconscious twigged what was really going on because, as I say, I was shocked by the fury of his response to my comments.

Nevertheless, a policy of creating relationships with other people – helping them and getting help from them in return – is a very effective affiliate marketing strategy. I may have misinterpreted this marketers strategy but it was only his unexpected response that gave me pause for thought.

Having stumbled upon this strategy, whilst I like helping other people, I would find it difficult to implement because I would question my reasons for doing so i.e. the expectation that they would reciprocate in return. Once you take action with this expectation then the integrity of what you are doing is a little questionable in my personal opinion. Perhaps I am being too ‘nice’ about this?

I know that several of my coaching colleagues feel the same way that I do about these issues and they are looking to PPC rather than affiliates for their traffic.

What do you feel about the ethics and integrity of these affiliate marketing strategies – I would love to know your opinion.

How To Target Long Tail Keywords

This is a brief article about how to target long tail keywords when doing keyword research for seo purposes.

Long tail keywords are a good option for getting good search engine rankings for your content because the competition for keywords is very intense.

However, always bear in mind that the most important strategy for ranking your content is to ensure that it is of high quality i.e. that it is well-researched, well written and the on page seo gives the search engines a good steer on how to index your content by using on-page SEO strategies such as:

having the keyword in the title, first and last sentences and used in headings and scattered naturally through your article together with relevant LSI (related) keywords.
that images and video titles etc are titled or tagged with your keyword
that you link to other relevant content both on and off your blog as appropriate to maximise the value of your content to the reader.

So how do you target long tail keywords?

Well here are 3 suggestions – the first two are completely free to use and the third is a paid tool that takes your research to the next level:

use Google Suggest to find related keywords
go to http://keywordtool.io and do a search on you main keyword
use a software tool called Long Tail Pro

In the video below, I demonstrate each of these methods to show you exactly how to target long tail keywords for your website using these tools:

GET LONG TAIL PRO HERE

Early Ranking Results – Proof That Targeting Long Tail Keywords Works…

Let the rankings settle down and I expect these rankings to improve over the next few days.

Tynt.com – Backlink Attribution

Tynt.com has a free product entitled ‘Copy & Paste’ that is effectively a little snippet of Javascript that you add before the header tag on your website (-if you are not sure how to do that Tynt show you how-) and if anyone then copies and pastes your content then it will automatically add a link back to the web page from which the content was copied so that you get backlink attribution.

Potentially this is a good way to get more backlinks to your website from content curation i.e. other people copying and pasting your content onto their own websites or social media sites.

Did I mention it was FREE!!! Go to Tynt.com and do this now! The video below shows you how:

3 Excellent SEO Tips

Here are 3 excellent SEO tips that you may wish to adopt for your websites in order to generate more search engine traffic.

1 Keyword Research & Site Structure

Prior to setting up your website do some keyword research using the Google Keyword Planner to ensure that the keywords that you are optimising for have a reasonable amount of searches.

I prefer to use a silo structure for keywords i.e.

– choose a primary keyword and 4 secondary keywords for each website and each web page on the site

– these are chosen using the Google Keyword Planner to ensure relevance i.e. input your primary keyword and choose your secondary keywords from the relevant keyword ideas listed

– the website landing page is optimised for the primary keyword of the website and then create articles for the 4 secondary keywords i.e. they become the primary keyword for the article with another 4 secondary keywords chosen using the Google Keyword Planner

– this creates a pyramid structure of relevant articles all linking back to the primary keyword at the top of the pyramid.

– hypertext link between the articles

– ideally you also need to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and add an XML Site Map.

– ideally your chosen domain name should include the primary keyword for the website

If you are looking for website ideas Digital Trends is a great way for coming up with ideas for trending topics that you can rank for.

2 Install the ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin

Install the above plugin into your WordPress site and configure this plugin as per this article: https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

3 Install the Transposh translation plugin

Install the free Transposh plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/transposh-translation-filter-for-wordpress/) and configure as follows (- you will need to tick the upgrade box on the xyz settings page and then update the plugin to enable you to select all languages -):

Then add the Transposh Widget to your sidebar

Summary

Now let’s summarise what we have achieved.

We have chosen keywords that get a respectable amount of traffic (because it is pointless ranking for keywords that don’t get much traffic.)

We have structured our content so that it is relevant to the primary keyword and, if we then create high value articles, we should get lots of relevant keyword rankings. (If you would like a tool and training to help you with your keyword structure and creating silo websites then Peter Garety’s P1 Traffic Machine is an excellent tool for this purpose.)

We have added the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin and followed the instructions so that our site content is correctly configured for the search engines.

We have added the Transposh translation plugin so that our website appeals to searches from almost any source on the planet – Google will like this!

These 3 excellent SEO tips will put you a long way ahead of your competition.

SEO Resources

Here are some more SEO Resources to help you:

How to Write an SEO Article – Part 1
How to Write an SEO Article – Part 2
SEO Copywriters: Don’t Let Awkward Keywords Defeat You

What Is Retargeting?

If you are asking yourself ‘what is retargeting?’ then this article will hopefully help you.

You may have heard about retargeting from other marketers or you may even have noticed those annoying adverts following you around following your visit to a particular website.

Traditionally ‘retargeting’ was (and still is) carried out via email marketing i.e. you opted to someone’s list and they followed up with you via email to persuade you to buy the next product in their sales funnel.

The business case for doing this is that only a small proportion of visitors to your website will buy on your first visit but if you follow up with your visitors you will substantially increase the number of buyers once they get to know, like and trust you.

Nowadays retargeting is much more sophisticated.

When you visit a web page that has a retargeting pixel on it (a small snippet of code), it drops an anonymous browser cookie so that when the cookied browser searches the web it lets the retargeting ad provider know and they will then serve your ads to people who previously visited your website or specific web pages.

This means that you can build ‘custom audiences’ either for people who visit your website as a whole or you can create separate audiences for each page they visit or category of page they visit. This means that you can create extremely targeted audiences.

For example, if your visitor visited a page about video marketing and left without purchasing you can follow up with them via retargeting by serving your video product advert.

How will your retargeting provider know if someone purchased your offer or not i.e. only serve your ad to people who didn’t buy? Well you can set this up in your retargeting by excluding people who who landed on your thank you page or whatever page you identify.

You can also select how long the retargeting ad is served for – you may only want to serve up your retargeting ads for say 3 days after their initial visit but you can opt for up to 180 days if it is cost-effective for you to do so!

The technology is extremely simple and logical to set up – as I said, you just need to paste a piece of tracking code in your website page header and then select your settings when you set up the retargeting ad.

If you are setting up retargeting ads to push your website visitors through a sales funnel, then this post by Ryan Deiss’s team may help you to understand the process.

If you are not using Facebook then you can set up banner ads in SiteScout.com for visitors that come to your site from places like Google – it is free to set up an account on Sitescout – presumably they are rewarded through your advertising spend via their site (- when you have tested their site you need to deposit a minimum of $500 with them for your initial advertising campaigns so they are effectively deterring the minnow marketers!)

Of course, you really need to test how cost-effective paid retargeting ads are by tracking your retargeting advertising costs versus the additional revenue generated and then perhaps to seek to increase your returns by split-testing for better conversions.

You may say to yourself that it is more cost effective to use email marketing but with low open rates and dummy email accounts, this may not be the case any more – you need to find out by testing this for yourself.

Hopefully this article helps you to answer the question ‘what is retargeting?’ If so, please optin to my list in the sidebar to keep yourself ‘in the loop’!

Click Management – Solo Ads & How To Manage Clicks

In this article I’m going to briefly discuss click management and how to manage clicks – why, because clicks are currency!

This is a concept that I read about from Solo Ad Black Book by Matt Bacak, who currently purchases $250k of solo ads per month. He is therefore buying and managing many thousands of clicks per month.

He has also developed a system that enables him to delegate and even outsource part of the job, leaving him to manage his business based upon the data that is flowing back to him.

I learnt a number of key concepts from reading Solo Ad Black Book, which is basically a recording and transcript of a live seminar with a pdf of recommended solo ad vendors based on Matt’s scoring system. The transcript was not easy to read because Matt has a breathless type of delivery that leaves sentences incomplete as he starts off on a different strand of thought to explain what he is thinking.

Nevertheless there was a lot of good stuff in this product that confirmed a number of my own conclusions about internet marketing.

A Lead Often Has A Short Shelf Life (i.e. Watch Your Attrition Rate)

Matt operates in the Business Opportunity / Internet Marketing niche and he separates the market into opportunity seekers (90%) and the more serious players (10%) and his promotions reflect the type of traffic he purchases. However, overall the vast majority of leads are ‘on heat’ (his words) for just 30 days. This means that he aims to turn a profit from each lead within 30 days of optin… but of course he tries to do this much quicker – even instantly from his front-end sales funnel.

(TIP: This is something I noticed from our recent launch of Hangout Cash Code. We really over-delivered on this product but the drop-off of email opens and clicks surprised me after the initial month – we were seeking to create a long-term relationship but, for the vast majority of customers in the make money online niche, this is not easy to achieve, so aiming to be profitable within 30 days in our niche is an important goal!)

His Sales Funnel

His sales funnel has a range of products priced at different price-points up to very high prices to maximise his initial EPC. After free optin, the prospect is sent to a 3 second meta-refresh page which says that the free report will be delivered by email and then the prospect is sent to the front-end product which is priced at $47 (which is relatively high in my opinion but he has clearly tested this price point.) Suffice it to say that he has a sophisticated sales funnel to squeeze out as much income from the visitor as possible. From the $47 offer they go to a $197 offer with a downsell of $97 and then to a $497 offer

His Approach To Split Testing

When split-testing he initially takes a quite radical approach. He will offer either a complete ‘Make Money Online’ product or a ‘Traffic’ product and exit pop to whichever product he is not offering on the front-end. Only once he has determined the ‘radical’ test does he start trying to ‘optimize’ the sales page through further tests. So effectively the initial split-tests are radically different offers before he settles into optimizing the sales pages through further split-tests.

A Data-Driven Business

Matt believes nothing that anyone tells him. He believes in HIS numbers only and he gets those from running his own tests and monitoring the results i.e. his business is driven by data. This is a very sensible approach because there are many half-truths and lies in our marketplace. If you only get one thing from this article it is that should run your business by the numbers i.e. that you measure your performance by the key performance indicators on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Tracking

He uses Hypertracker to monitor unique clicks (in preference to AdTrackz Gold which has a small deficiency in the way it counts clicks.) Each link has an ID which includes the date, name of the solo ad provider and price e.g. Nov14Bailey100for30 (- this means that in Nov 2014 he bought 100 clicks for $30 from someone called Bailey. (I thought this was a really clever way to track his links and will be adopting this myself!)

Paid Traffic -Why Solo Ads?

Because Matt believes in managing clicks he is a great advocate of paying for his clicks. He does not like Google Adwords because of their restrictions, changes in policy and his lack of control i.e. they can shut down your Adwords account overnight. Organic traffic is just too unreliable and time-consuming to pursue and difficult to scale. He has therefore turned to buying solo ads – this is where you pay someone who has a list to send an email to their list driving traffic or clicks to your chosen squeeze page.

The Email Swipe

He insists on providing the email swipe copy so that he can say in the email copy something like ‘Click here to optin in’. This warns the email recipient that if they click on the link they will be asked to optin and this increases the quality of the clicks and conversions and makes the solo ad vendor work harder to fulfil their side of the contract.

Money/Traffic Leaks

Matt studies his numbers to see where there are ‘money leaks’ in his sales funnel and back-end marketing system i.e. where visitors are not doing what he wants them to do. By studying these areas closely, he tries to close down these leaks as far as possible to improve his numbers. He is not concerned with numbers on his list or open rates – he is purely monitoring clicks and revenue i.e. EPC. He is looking to increase his ‘click line’ i.e. the number of clicks he can send to an offer.

For example anyone not opting in on his squeeze page will trigger an exit pop with another offer and if they optin be recycled back to the front-end offer – he has two exit popups in an attempt to plug the leak on his squeeze page .

Buying Solo Ads

He initially buys 100 clicks to test the vendor and then grades them – see ‘Scoring Solo Ad Vendors’ below. If they meet his criteria of prompt deliver and 30% or more optins then he will wait one month for the vendor to refresh their list and in month two buy the maximum number of clicks that he can from the vendor. If they continue to meet his criteria, in month 3 he puts them onto a monthly order system handled by his assistant. He buys through his credit card rather than a Paypal balance because he then has recourse through his credit card company for non-delivery of clicks as he doesn’t want the hassle of going through Paypals process. He also likes his traffic to come mainly from the top 5 countries – USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (although Singapore is also acceptable.) He expects to pay between 30-90 cents per unique click.

Where To Buy Solo Ads?

If you buy Solo Ad Black Book you will get a list of recommended solo ad providers but I also recommend that you take a look at http://solochecker.com . (Here is another site where you can buy solo ads – http://www.soloadmarketplace.com/). You can also find solo ad vendors on the Warrior Forum.

Scoring Solo Ad Vendors

Matt scores solo ad vendors based on speed of delivery, under/over-delivery of clicks and % optins. The vendors score determines whether he purchases again or not.

Systems

Of necessity, because of the amount of solos he is buying, he is very systematic about running his business – he first sets up and tests the system, then delegates to his own office staff and when they can run the system, outsources parts of the system to staff in the Philippines who are managed by his office staff who have already proved that they can run the system. This allows him to scale his business safely because he gets comprehensive management information that allows him to step in and fix the system when the numbers dictate.

Affiliates

Despite holding the gravity record on Clickbank for a launch, this is what Matt Bacak has to say about affiliates: – he regards them as ‘bonus’ traffic because he wants to always be self-sufficient and be in a position to make things happen for himself. (Once again I find myself in sympathy with his thinking because I believe that affiliate traffic has the unhealthy expectation that you will promote in return whether you like a product or not – there is a sort of unspoken expectation of reciprocity which clutches at my integrity – I really want to have the freedom of deciding whether a product is worthy of promotion without that ‘I mail/you mail’ obligation!)

This is a brief recap of what I learnt by listening to Matt Bacak’s Solo Ad Black Book yesterday and I think that it provides a good framework for buying solo ad traffic – it’s all about click management and how to manage clicks.

Seven Secrets To Dominating Google’s Local Search Results

My new ebook is entitled Seven Secrets To Dominating Google’s Local Search Results.

Seven Secrets To Dominating Google’s Local Search Results will be your guide to taking your static webpage and making it a dynamic business portal.

These seven steps range in complexity, but some are incredibly simple and can be incorporated into your business website in a matter of minutes! This means that after reading this manual, you will be well on your way to being at the top of a Google search.

Of course, you need a URL (your website address) and access to the design. If you have hired a web developer to create your website for you, hopefully he or she has already incorporated some of these strategies. Otherwise, you will want to work with your developer to make sure that you are setting up your site for success on Google.

If you can get to the top of their charts, everything else will be smooth sailing and Seven Secrets To Dominating Google’s Local Search Results is a blue-print to do just that and it will shortly be made available as a free download for my subscribers.

Push Button Google Friendly Silo Structured Websites… Yeah Right!

Push button, Google friendly, silo structured websites – sounds like a load of marketing hype doesn’t it?

I would certainly think so if someone else had written that!

In fact, I have studiously avoided all products that have claimed to be ‘push-button’ and automated simply because they serve up low-quality generic content.

I’ve also given up on SEO as a primary source of traffic – it just takes up too much time and, with the frequent changes in Google’s algorithm, it is almost impossible to establish a reliable source of traffic with SEO.

I’ve therefore stopped trying to outwit Google and have concentrated on creating high-quality content that is not really keyword orientated but more content orientated and authentically records what I am doing in my business – just like the content in this post!

For traffic, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that it is better to buy traffic but only on the proviso that you can measure your ROI and split-test for improvements.

Paid traffic can easily rack up big losses if you do not keep on top of the numbers. But if you get it right, it is easy to scale up quickly.

However, after seeing a demonstration of a product called P1 Traffic Machine by Peter Garety, I have for the first time glimpsed another possible way to leverage SEO to make money.

Peter and his partner, Andrew Fletcher, have created a piece of software where you can pick your top-level keyword, enter it into the software and it will automatically create a silo structured website and automatically fill it with relevant content from a wide variety of sources.

Here is a diagram of a silo structured website in case you are wondering:

The speed of deployment and implementation is astounding, giving anyone the opportunity of quickly creating niche related sites filled with relevant keyword-orientated content that can be customised. It is not 100% hands-off as some editing is required, but nevertheless will remove 85% of the time and effort of entering a niche.

Most importantly, the site is properly structured with the correct redirect links in place for maximum SEO leverage.

Furthermore, it is easy to monetise the site with affiliate links and affiliate related content in a variety of variations and formats.

Because of the TIME involved in researching and creating niche sites, I have never created a website outside the internet marketing and make money online niche. Now, for the first time, I can see how I can quickly create a variety of niche sites that are silo-structured for each keyword and that will make total sense to Google because the content is all relevant.

These can be deployed on domains that you already own and have not yet been developed, or in offline niches or simply in any niche where you think there is an opportunity to rank well in the search engines.

Peter even has a tool which you can purchase in the P1 Traffic Machine sales funnel where you can quickly check how easy it will be to rank for a keyword thereby enabling you to focus on building out the content for that keyword.

My thoughts are that I will test this software in a variety of fairly focused niches that interest me – for example, lawn-care is a niche that interests me and I have some expertise in. I would love to create a niche site for this and cross-sell all the products related to lawn-care.

Also, growing vegetables is another niche that I would like to enter. Or how about trying to rank for some of my favourite pieces of software or themes?

All of this becomes possible with the P1 Traffic Machine software.

At present there are 3 packages – I have invested in the top-level package which is the ‘Enterprise’ package because the price is currently at a large discount and it will give an opportunity to create up to 100 niche sites – with developers rights – so I can sell this as a service too!

The software is a plugin so it can be used with any WordPress theme – so site design is also flexible. I have developers rights on a number of themes so I can easily create some nice looking niche sites.

So in essence P1 Traffic Machine created push-button, Google friendly, silo structured websites really fast enabling you to quickly rank sites in almost any niche – a handy tool to have in your locker.

Solo Ads Assassin Released Today

Solo Ads Assassin has been released today – one day after releasing Easy Web Page Graphics.

Two video training products in 2 days – that’s a new experience for me!

In truth, Solo Ads Assassin has been ready for release for some months and just needed finishing off but my partner in the project, Daniel Madeira, got distracted by his solo ads coaching programme that is currently yielding him big bucks and some stellar results.

He is now making a lot more than the $100 per day he was making when he started making Solo Ads Assassin!

I therefore approached Daniel and asked if I could release Solo Ads Assassin and put a link to his coaching programme in the product. He generously agreed to this given that I have put a lot of work into creating the membership site for his training.

This product is based on his actual experience of building a solo ads business. By all accounts he is taking his business to the next level – he can now get over 4,000 subscribers to sign up in 48 hours. That is truly impressive.

With results like that, his coaching programme is rising in value and price – here is one of their results posted recently:

So if you want to build a solo ads business like Daniel’s, then he would be a great person to coach you. He is completely genuine and is actually running a very profitable business.

The product funnel for Solo Ads Assassin is a $9.95 eBook (with an exit popup offering the first module for free as a taster), then a $27 video training comprising of 23 videos. Inside the membership site is a link to their coaching programme.

This makes the release of Solo Ads Assassin a very valuable product – a genuinely profitable business blueprint taught by someone who is crushing it.

How To Setup A Warrior Special Offer (WSO)

I created a new ebook today entitled ‘How to Setup a Warrior Special Offer’.

I created the eBook as a result of launching my product ‘The Way of the Warriors’ as a WSO yesterday.

I had a few problems because it is a long time since I set up a WSO and I didn’t notice my payment button wasn’t working for the first few hours – no wonder the sales were slow in coming!!!

As a result of this experience, and whilst its fresh in my mind, I created this new eBook. If you are looking for a good bed-time read, then this is not for you. It is simply a 7-Step process for launching your WSO with lots of screenshots and tips.

I include an explanation of how I created a simple sales funnel and how I integrated Warrior Plus with Membersonic, my membership plugin.

I will be using this little eBook (only 20 pages or so) as a desktop guide when I create and launch my next WSO.

[testimonial2 author=”Paul Langham” + pic=”http://mark-salmon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Paul-Langham.png”]“Hi Mark, Just to say many thanks for your guide, I read it and put in place what I had missed. Thanks again.”[/testimonial2]

In the past I have been reluctant to launch WSO’s because the process seemed so convoluted but I am hoping that this Ebook will make it much easier to get the process down to a system that is easy to use.

Of course, you could make your life a lot easier by having no funnel and just deliver your product direct from Warrior Plus or a simple download page. In the former case, you are leaving money on the table and in the latter case you are leaving your product unprotected and losing many of the cross-selling and presentational benefits of a membership site.

If you would like your own copy of ‘How To Setup A Warrior Special Offer’ then simply register below to get a free copy:

Where To Get Traffic From?

This week I have been reviewing the thorny question – where to get traffic from?

This is one of the most pressing questions that I have at the present moment.

I have plenty of products and I now need to start promoting what I have created. A number of my sales letters require a bit of improvement but I am guessing about this until I start sending traffic to them and monitoring the conversions.

With my first blog at http://businessrenegade.co.uk, I had quite a bit of success in attracting SEO traffic simply due to the quantity of posts on that blog. However, conversion of this traffic to actual money was disappointing.

Why was that?

I think that without making a personal connection with the reader, whilst the information on that blog is valuable, the information in and of itself is pretty dry.

I therefore need to concentrate on a number of factors to make my content more attractive:

try to make my content entertaining as well as informative
introduce more of myself – probably in the form of audio and video
keep the quality of information extremely high
to differentiate the presentation of the information – perhaps through higher quality copy, images and outstanding presentation

I also need to state the intent of my business with greater clarity and passion so that subscribers to my blog and content know exactly what they are subscribing to i.e. how to start and grow an online business that generates an income of at least $100,000 p.a..

I also need to target a segment of the market and speak directly to an ‘avatar’ in order to make a connection. In my mind, it only makes sense to target people exactly like myself who have left a job in order to find freedom and independence through starting their own online business.

I understand these people’s feelings, and the problems they are facing, with intimacy and can empathise with their journey.

Having first sorted out exactly what I stand for, and will be delivering in the way of content and products, and exactly who I want to help, I can turn my attention to methods for driving traffic.

I have in mind 3 or 4 alternatives:

#1 Facebook Ads

Advertising on Facebook makes perfect sense to me:

it is where my target market is on a daily basis
I can target my market very, very precisely with my advertising
I can build an audience and add them to my list over time using strategies such as surveys ( a strategy set out in List Liberation)
done properly, you can scientifically measure return on investment

With this in mind, I have spent 1 day this week going through some excellent Facebook Advertising Tutorials on Learn to Blog (formerly WP Classroom)

#2 Webinars

Webinars have the highest potential of converting attendees to buyers (apart from perhaps Live Events). With the advent of Google Hangouts on Air, the technology is no longer a barrier and it will enable me to make an instant personal connection to my audience.

Google Hangouts also rank very well in Google if I optimise the title of the webinar with keywords.

I invested in Webinar Alchemy by Stephen Renton this week – done properly, webinars have enormous potential. (This was another day of training.)

Again it is important to monitor traffic, registrations, attendance and sales conversions to understand my ROI.

As I also own a copy of Evergreen Business Systems, which enables me to automate webinars, I have all the tools necessary for this strategy.

It will also be possible to get webinar registrations, by leveraging Facebook Ads.

#3 YouTube Marketing

I also think there is enormous potential for creating short videos and placing them on both Facebook and YouTube. Then using both Facebook Advertising and YouTube PPC to promote them to drive traffic to a landing page. The PPC stats will enable me to measure advertising ROI precisely.

(I am moving away from SEO as a means of driving traffic (although I will still do some optimisation for keywords from force of habit) because ROI is not as easy to measure – it requires that you convert your time to a cost. I suspect that if everyone did this, they would abandon SEO. Also, the changes in Google algorythm pretty much place your business and traffic at the mercy of Google. For this reason, I now regard SEO traffic as a bonus rather than my main source of traffic.)

Creating short videos is easy with tools like Camtasia 8 and Easy Video Suite – both of which I own. I have also updated this week to Microsoft 2013 – this gives me the potential for creating Powerpoint animations.

#4 Recruit Affiliates

Marc Milburn, my coach is a great advocate of recruiting affiliates to drive traffic. I agree but initially it is difficult to get them to promote for you if:

I am relatively unknown
I have no previous track record online
I cannot show that I have a sales funnel that converts

This is why it is important to get some initial traffic using the other means available so I can approach affiliates with a professional and well thought-out proposition.

However, none of the above should deter me from connecting with potential affiliates and persevering. For this purpose, approaching them for an interview and getting to know them, and how I can connect with them, is a smart strategy

Conclusion

In answering the question – where to get traffic from – I’m going to start with Facebook Advertising and mix in the other strategies if I have time. It is important for me not lose focus by attempting too many strategies at once.

Mark Salmon

Post Category → Traffic