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Quality Website Traffic

The two most common questions business owners ask about the internet are:

1. How do I get more traffic to my site?
2. How do I get more people on my list?

Very few of them ask a much more specific question…”How do I get quality buyers to my site and on my list?”

Which list is more valuable to you: a list of 10,000 untargeted subscribers or 500 buyers of one of your products?
I know which one I’d pick.

If you want a successful promotion, here are 3 key elements:

1. Audience
2. Offer
3. Copy

And while I’ve spent a lot of time lately talking about 3, the copywriting, most experts would agree it’s the least important of those 3. The audience for your offer is the most important element. A great offer to the right audience with poor copy will outproduce world class copy to the wrong audience. Of course, it’s best when you get all 3 lined up.

So let’s talk about the audience a little.

Rule #1: You always find a market for a product before you create the product.
Rule #2: You make sure the audience is easy to target for your advertising.

Here are some of the ways my sites generate traffic in order of how high quality the traffic is.

#1 – Your Own List

This is the best type of traffic to send to your site. Your customer lists (people who have given you money at some time) are the most valuable lists followed by those who’ve subscribed to your free lists to hear regular information from you. That’s why I focus so much on building the list here. Notice the name and email address box to the top right of the blog. If this is one of your first three visits, you also see a subscribe box at the top of every single post. If you go to any of my sales pages, you’re likely to see a popover box asking for your name and email. Do you get the hint here? My whole course on Email Mastery deals just with building your list and marketing to that list.

#2 – JV Partners

This is the second best type of visitor. It’s also the best way to build your list #1 (but that’s a topic for another post). Who already has your audience in the market? How can you make them an offer they can’t refuse? Sometimes they’re most interested in who can pay them the most. Other times it’s because they want to give their customers a special deal. For example on a recent product offer, I let 5 JV partners send out an email to their list during my preliminary special before the price went up.

Did they partner so they could get the most money? Not from the way I know them. They partnered because they knew the product was good and wanted their subscribers to have a chance at the special.

#3 – Offline Leads

Offline lead generation hasn’t been a majority priority lately, but the leads you generate are excellent. This would include speaking at seminars (some of the best customers), renting lists to mail postcards to, advertising in magazines, etc. You’re going to spend more for leads you generate off the Internet (either in money or time), but you can expand into a lot more advertising here.

#4 – Affiliates

Often I setup my JV partners as affiliates (when they’re promoting a product), but now I’m talking about more general affiliates. I go after the JV partners because they have lists or they have access to a large audience in another way (blogs for example). If you have an open affiliate program you also have affiliates you don’t know who sign up and promote the product. As a blog reader, you can signup for my affiliate program here…

I’ve had times where one of my JV partners promoted, and then customers from their list signed up as affiliates to promote as well. It takes on a little bit of a viral effect. As affiliates keep promoting, others find out about the offer and promote as well.

#5 – Bloggers

While some bloggers may be joint venture partners at times (#2), the majority of them simply link over when you provide great content they feel their audience would learn from. These links are some of the best incoming links you can get, especially from high traffic blogs. Write great content and link to other blogs. Many of those incoming links will build naturally from these other bloggers. And they generate some good quality traffic.

#6 – Search Engines

The traffic coming here from the search engines has been increasing every single month. You write for your human audience first, but you also consider the search engines. You’ve probably noticed some of my post titles are targeting search engine phrases. Because of the nature of blogs, you’re able to generate incoming links easier and get those top rankings.

Here’s an interesting note. It’s not any single search phrase that drives a majority of search engine traffic. The majority of my search engine traffic comes from a large variety of over 1,000 search terms that each send a small number of visitors (sometimes only 1 or 2). For the last 30 days, Google Analytics reports 1,587 different search phrases were used.

#7 – PPC

Targeted pay-per-click advertising is very effective (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). The key here is the landing page. I found it wasn’t profitable to send PPC visitors directly to any page on this blog (even one specifically created for them). There are just too many pages and links around. My favorite option is to go with a squeeze page to get he email address or a low cost product offer (under $20) to get them to become buyers. Be careful here and make your advertising very targeted.

#8 – Content Submission

I submit articles, press releases, etc. Many people write guest blog posts for others as well. All of this is a form of content submission. You produce content in exchange for traffic. This method can generate a lot of very targeted traffic for you, but you’ll notice I didn’t refer to it as Free. That content takes time to create or you need team members to create it for you. Or you could run an intern program like I do as well.

#9 – Social Bookmarking

After testing I’m basically at the point where I look at social bookmarking sites as incoming links for the search engines (#5) and ways to find more bloggers to link to your content (#4). The direct traffic generated from most social bookmarking sites has very little direct response. They subscribe in lower numbers, purchase less often, and don’t click on ads. Stumbleupon has been the best of these sites, so you’ll still see my content recommended there regularly. I don’t spend a lot of time on any of these sites now.

#10 – Low Quality Paid Traffic

There are a lot of ways you can generate low quality paid traffic. For example I advertised on Stumble for 5 cents per visitor (very low quality). You can use co-registrations to build your lists. Understand that low quality doesn’t always mean unprofitable. It’s quite possible to profit with co-registration leads because of their volume and low cost. But don’t count them at the same level as leads you generate yourself. Keep them on a different list. The math is totally different off these leads (if you’re averaging $1 per month per subscriber you may only do 10 cents per subscriber or less with coregs).

Note: I didn’t cover referrals (when a client or peer recommends you), but those would easily fit in and often be more qualified than the JV traffic sent to your site. I’ll cover referrals in another article.

Related Entries:

• Great Blog Reading to End Your Week
• Quick Money From Your Internet Skills
• Terry Dean Monthly Mentor Club for July
• Traffic From Blog Comments
• 10 Ways to Advertise Your Website For Free

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