Will Driving Web Traffic Kill Your Business?

I’ve seen it over and over again. You maybe spent weeks if not months working to create a beautifully optimized website with the most amazing information for your market found anywhere on the web.  You wanted your users; employees, customers, clients, and leads to have a great experience at your website. However, you’re getting no leads, and/or no sales and only you and your employees know it exists.

In nearly 99.9% of all cases like this, it’s because you forgot to install the engine.  You have no web traffic.  For nearly everyone wanting to start an online business, this is the case.  It’s true for existing big corporations, non-profits, retail stores going online, existing small business, and the brand new entrepreneur who thought this online business stuff would be easy.

What’s amazing is, people will spend 5 to 10 thousand dollars designing a website.  Yet they will be clueless that what they just got designed has no chance of ever being loved by search engines, and will actually cause loss of sales.  You’ll have none of the coveted search engine traffic, and you had no plan for buying traffic.

Since website traffic is what fuels your sales funnel or conversion funnel it is the egg giving birth to the sale.  The website is a platform, and on its own it’s worthless.  No matter how great your sales copy is, and how perfect your sales funnel is; without web traffic, you have nothing.  You’re empty, you’re useless, you are squat!

The good news is (once you get over realizing your slip up), there is more web traffic available than any of us can imagine.  The bad news is, you never considered where and how to get the quality, highly targeted traffic.  The fact is, you must be at the top of your “marketing game” to get the right traffic, at the right time, and the lowest cost.

Before we go too far, there is one thing you must understand.  There is no such thing as free website traffic.  If you think there is free web traffic, then you would likely believe governments can save the economy by creating multi-trillion dollar debts. Basically, if you believe either of these things, there is a reason your business is struggling!

Let’s look at where you should go.  There are many paths and sources and resources for quality web traffic.  All take time and all take money.  They just vary with how much time, and how much money, as well as where the money goes to generate the traffic.

So I agree the traffic in the organic search itself is moving about the web without you  or your company paying for it.  However, for you to get it will cost you time and money.  Even if you do it yourself, it will cost you money because all the time you spend doing the search engine optimization, could have been spent paying for traffic that arrives in minutes and starts paying you immediately, instead of taking weeks or months to arrive.

You should also be aware that only about 9% of all web traffic available comes from search engine marketing.  The remaining 91% comes from elsewhere.  So if your traffic strategy is to just go to Google without considering how much traffic you simply pooh pooh away without thinking about it… well folks like me love you for it!  So let’s take look at what you should be considering.

The Magic of Search Engine Traffic

There is no doubt you should be including search engine optimization in the plan.  Experience shows that a solid SEO plan generates 20 – 35% more revenue, then a traffic strategy that does not include SEO.  There remain many so-called “industry web traffic experts” who will still tell you SEO is exclusively dependent on the marketers labor.  Well, that is pretty short sighted, and lacks any understanding of what the labor time costs.  Nonetheless, it is highly effective, and if you seriously, no kidding, really have no money to spend (which I doubt since you bought the web hosting, and website), then it would be the sole focus of your starting efforts.

You will have to learn how to do SEO correctly and effectively.  You will have to figure out who is giving good information and who is sucking you in to the world of total B.S.  This isn’t too difficult to determine.  If someone says they are selling you software that brings you search engine traffic at the drop of hat and touch of a button, they are lying.  If they are offering you backlinks and won’t say from where, they are ripping you off.  Any good SEO company provides full reporting like my company, ThinkBigandGrow Media.

The bottom line is, you should build SEO in from the start, and you should let an expert do it for you.  This why now, in our online training course the “Instant Traffic Cash Flow System,” we teach the mechanics, however we build the site for the students, we provide the first content and optimization, and we do the first month of formal SEO services for them.

Your company should be leveraging SEO, but you should be seeking an expert service that does it with a team of human experts like my company, ThinkBigandGrow Media.  If all they offer is work done by computer bots, your SEO may work for a short time, but you will be doomed to loose what you gain when Google, Bing, and Yahoo update.

Fixing Bad Sites for SEO

Fixing bad sites can be done.  However, don’t accept a simple computer evaluation of your website.  There still remains no computer analyzer that can do better than, I would say, an 80% job of analyzing your site.  Have a full website audit done that includes both computer and human revue.  Otherwise, you may once again see some success, but in all likelihood, it will be lost when Google updates.  My company requires a full audit to validate our guarantee, because you may actually have to scrap the existing website.  It is that important, and is not done simply to make a buck.  In fact, we only cover the cost of labor with the audit, but our audit is both man and machine executed.

High Converting Fast Traffic

Email marketing is where you should be looking to start your traffic fast, and get the highest conversions.  The idea that email marketing is dead is total hogwash.  It is a phrase used to sell you on some other product that they probably used email marketing to get you to see it!

Email marketing is fast and very high converting, and very low cost.  According to Attachments.me, there are 3.3 billion email accounts worldwide, while there are just 2.7 billion social media accounts.  Peoples habits still have them going to email for communications and updates, particularly with business.  So don’t fall for that “email marketing is dead” crap.

A 2012 Nielson study shows that 50% of consumers trust their email information from emails they signed up for (ie. they showed personal interest in).  So the traffic coming from email has a high degree of trust, and thus converts very well.

There are many list brokers available for large scale emailing, and you should be building your own in house email list at the same time.  No matter how big or small you are, you must start building a customer and lead email list the day you turn on your website.  It will be the most reliable, highly profitable source of web traffic you will know, and you totally control it.

Small, and home business entrepreneurs can find sources for paid emails as well.  They are commonly called solo ads and many small list owners in various markets will allow you to mail to their lists for a price.  The expense typically ends up costing around $0.35 per click and is well worth it.  You get a customer on your list, and you boost your sales by 3 to 5 times or more over cold traffic.  Some will do a mailing for as low as $25.  This is $25 dollars well spent.  This strategy is so important, it is one we teach in “Instant Traffic Cash Flow System” early on, so students can see results fast.

Pay Per Click Fast and Targeted

For cold traffic, pay per click or PPC is one of the best.  However, most do-it-yourself PPC marketers loose a lot money before they ever see success.  In fact, most get so frustrated, they quit.  This happens often with large companies as well.  They try to do these things in-house, and they would have saved time and money by outsourcing to an expert.

Pay per click marketing is offered by search engines like Goolge, Bing and Yahoo.  But also realize there are endless other sources for pay per click, including social media like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.  PPC evens extends way, way past this.  So you are walking blind if you continue to think only of Google when you think of PPC marketing.

The mechanics of the actual pay per click set up are very simple.  The problem lies in knowing what to do before your start your campaigns, and knowing how to optimize the campaigns and keywords.  This is a science.  It does take skill.  You can learn it, and we teach our students lots of ways to do it in Instant Traffic Cash Flow System.

It is also true, most will fail, which is why the Instant Traffic Cash Flow System now includes our professionals creating the first campaign and running it for a month.  It is a thorough campaign development where ThinkBigandGrow Media experts help develop and optimize the landing page, and research and optimize the keyword choices.  Then they do the same for creating the ad groups and ads.  We do this for Google, Bing, and Facebook.

This covers the essentials of where you should look for creating your traffic strategy.  There are many, many more options.  Hiring a professional consultant like Wayne Sharer to work this directly with your company will save you time and money.

If you want to start an online business from home, then using a course like Instant Traffic Cash Flow System will save you time and money because your taught everything you could possibly want to know about getting web traffic, plus…

Your entire website is built and optimized for you, your Facebook business page is fully built, customized, and optimized for you.  Your first month of external SEO is done for you.  Finally, your first pay per click campaign is created and optimized for you.  I remember paying $15,000 for this when I started my business.

Then the company that was supposed to deliver went out of business.  It was a total loss.  That’s why we do it with proven team, and for about one seventh of what I lost when I started.  I want everyone I work with to have the utmost, top notch chance for success.  I recognize that this is still business, and marketing and everything can’t be guaranteed to be the next mega-winner, but I sure can reduce the pain, and increase the chances of success by about 80% simply by getting your business started with the proper platform, fuel and engine in place.