Do you tap into a "steady stream" of traffic?

Donna, I know what you mean. I hear you. I would like that for Christmas.

Unfortunately I don’t think there is a solid, continuous and perpetual traffic stream or source. Things change, you saturate a given source by reaching the ones most likely to follow you, somebody changes the rules or another social media platform starts and MySpace and Frendster dry up. Twitter is a shadow of what it used to be for internet marketers. The body count keeps going up for effective social media and sources that dried up.

I decided on Google Adwords that I was effectively bidding against myself. My keywords went up in price over the run of a campaign and if I quit a month or two they came back down. The third time I saw that I thought this is crazy.

I can’t do the things I used to when I started 12 years ago and get any response, I don’t mean less, I mean not any.

I hear Sean talk about doing different things every month and testing them.

I am revamping everything I do and I am following Sean closely. I will need a magic traffic faucet when I open the doors.

He started with Ezine articles and I have got some subscribers from Ezine, but it isn’t like it used to be.

I know Sean did Warrior offers, but that platform split into two. May still work, but the playing field has to have changed.

I hear people doing Youtube and seeing results, but only after weeks or months of work. With Youtube changing their rules lately I am not sure anyone knows how long term that will affect things. I hear of people that put hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into videos and just as it was taking off, it fell off. Of course they still have the videos to use for other purposes, but you have to feel for them.

The last kindle book I did didn’t sell enough to cover the marketing and brought in zero subscribers. When I first got on the kindle platform it was my biggest internet source of income and subscribers.

Then there is Udemy, someone told me they have got really restrictive now in what you can do to promote you, they want it all to stay on their platform. Someone here does Udemy, you might search for them. I am still considering them.

I really like Sean’s method of signing up to forums and posting there to get noticed as you help people, but did you see him throw out the number of 200 forums? That has to be work. Small forums you will saturate with exposure and larger ones come and go. I belong to one forum that had hundreds of posts a day not two years ago and a dozen is a big day now. They changed a few rules, like you can’t mention anything in a post now, you have to buy advertising for anything that looks like promotion and they decided they would rein in the wild, wild, west posting, so they got more moderators and turned them loose. Pretty quiet now. You can hear a revenue drop.

I have never done a banner or solo ad, there I admitted it. I hear from those that do that they are hit or miss, could be good, great or a bust. You have to be willing to try them, spend the money and see what works and keeps working for you. I asked one “Guru” where they were advertising and he point blank said, do you think I will tell you? That told me that good sites were rare and protected, not to mention changing. I expect to try banner/solo ads anyway.

Joint ventures are a chicken and egg thing, if you don’t have a good list and are established they won’t fool with you and if you do have a good list and are established you don’t really need them.

Under the current structure of the internet I think we are going to have to bait a lot of hooks and keep a lot of lines in the water as things change. I don’t want to build my internet business on one source of traffic anyway. Bridgestone-Firestone was my biggest physical business customer in the real world when they had the largest tire recall in history and laid off 300 people in just one office building. I almost went bankrupt, I had borrowed money to be able to service them. They closed one entire office building.

I learned to like the “many sources that bring in a little each” model for my income. Sort of bite-sized income sources.

Not trying to be negative, don’t shoot the messenger. It is just in my experience, One, if you find something that works jump in with both feet because things change, get it while it is hot and Two, always be looking for the next good source.

Maybe Sean has charged the batteries in his magic wand and will post and tell us there really is a Santa Claus and an evergreen traffic source.
Who knows? It is getting close to Christmas…

Wishing you the very best!
Encouraging you to keep swinging,

Scott Hogue CChH

I tried Facebook ads. Not for me. I’ve used solo ads quite a number of times with a little success. By success I mean getting people on my list. Turning them into buyers has been a different story. Therefore, solos have left me wondering what kind of traffic I’m actually getting.

Someone I’ve known and followed for several years swears by Bing for qualified traffic. I’ve never used it, but it’s something I’m seriously considering checking out.

If I do, I’ll let you know my results. I’ll probably dive in later this week.

Also, I have my own blog, but it’s like other free traffic sources. You get traffic, but do you know what you’re getting?

One of the recurring themes is that you can’t build a business on someone else’s platform.

That’s because you don’t control the rules.

Scott, what you’ve described illustrates that perfectly.

The one place where you can control the platform is on your own blog.

I have a long ways to go on this, but 50 high quality posts seems to be the bare minimum, and not many people have that much content.

But – we’ve all been given a gift; a rare opportunity.

This forum.

It’s early days, but I believe, as does Sean, that the scope for getting qualified and needy people to come to us for help here is huge – unfathomable.

That’s because he is a master of finding and attracting people like that, AND we’re making the rules.

Bruce you are quite right about the rules. In the traditional model they are always changing and we are at their mercy, which they have none.

We are chasing clients and subscribers. We seek them.

In Sean’s platform model they seek you. Your platform is a beacon. They see you and follow your light to the shore.

There is your evergreen traffic source. You build a free source of information that is almost like a free membership. Then you market products, including a paid membership option there.

You seed it on forums and guest blogs and solo ads on other sites and maybe Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and Ezine.

When it reaches critical mass, you don’t care if Google changes its rules and logarithms.

You are your own Google. A place people go for answers.

I was struggling with this in my post: platform vs membership. I think I see the light now.

Best,
Scott Hogue CChH

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Mark Rhodes, Bruce Hoag

@Scott – “You are your own Google.” Now, there’s something to think about. It’s a high aspiration, but being the place people go to for answers is really what we’re aiming for, isn’t it?

Things definitely do change. I used to do a lot of crochet and spent a a lot of time wandering aroucn crochet sites. This Christmas money is tight so it is a case of making as many presents as possible. Mum asked for a particular type of scarf so after a failed hunt round my pattern files I went online.

There always were free patterns as giveaways but now there are not just hundreds but thousands probably even tens of thousands. There are some people with hundreds of videos on crochet techniques and patterns. Some people have a hundred or more free patterns you can print out and a YT video explaining how to use the majority of the patterns. Yes there are still some paid patterns but I cannot see how they sell that many because there are so many free ones. The people who make money are those who sell the yarn and the hooks. There again I have heard of people making their own hooks and yarn. There again YT will make a penny or two from the advertising.

There is no certainty in business. Many years ago my ex used to be involved in the import of coal and the export of coke (the kind you used to put on a fire in a smokeless zone). His job disappeared when his boss failed to persaude a big customer overseas to buy some coke. He came home at 5 pm one Friday saying he was almost certain to lose his job. At 10-30 pm that night the local TV news had a report that the works was closing. We were one of the few families that had any warning before that TV broadcast. BTW in case you think that government support helps places like that survive that is not necessarily the case. That works was run by a wholely owned subsidary of the National Coal Board which was set up to run all the coal mines the UK government had taken control of shortly after WW2.

There is no absolute security in economics, only in faith but that is not this site’s primary purpose. We got married thinking he had a job for life but 15 years later not only had his job disappeared but the entire industry was gone without trace. Even the earliest economists such as Adam Smith said that the market works by people making constant adjustments. Something changes and there is a response. In his day it was the Corn Laws and subsidies for herring fisheries that stopped the markets making the necessary adjustments. He argued for less regulation so that the market could adjust by itself.

The idea of a steady stream of traffic that you can tap into is one of those impossible dreams. The market is adjusting. Cast your mind back to 2000. Web sites used web safe colours and if you used an image the advice was to keep the file size to 10k or below. No wordspress so sites were handcoded as text files in notepad, no social media, video was just a dream. Yes I created my first website in that era.

Today WordPress can do in a couple of hours what it used to take me a week or so to do. Then I wondered how on earth to set up a subscription based site. Today it is as simple as adding a plug in and changing to settings so that it does what you want it to do. The barriers to entering the online world have lowered so more people have jumped on the bandwagon. More competition. More opportunities.

If you have not guessed there is one thing that has not changed about running a business since the days of Adam Smith and that that it is necessary to adapt to the changes that are happening in the marketplace. Finding traffic is one of thse contstantly changing factors. The thing is that the market changes faster today than it did in Adam Smith’s time so it has become harder to make the constant tweaks and changes to keep a business running profitably.

P.S. Just to give some perspective timewise Adam Smith was born 52 years before America was.

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Norma Allen, Mark Rhodes, Roger Rakestraw, Bruce Hoag

@Norma, yes it is a high aspiration and I know you get it, but for anyone that doesn’t, you don’t have to become the Google for everything, just the Google for what you do.

You can’t out Google, Google across the whole internet and every word, topic and subject, but if you are here I am betting you are an expert on your topic, you are passionate about it and you have a heart. Google certainly doesn’t have a heart and how passionate are search results?

I have some ideas and when I get to my laptop, I will post more.

@Susan, I have a similar story to your husband. I became the leading expert in this part of the US in something that went overseas and is done by robots.

I made two house payments on a house we bought when we moved for the job and then I came home and told my wife it is over. We got bought out and I have seen robots making robots. It is over.

Your story resonated with me.

After years of frequent disappointment in Internet marketing I have to say I think I am excited.

Together we just might be dangerous!

Scott Hogue CChH

First, I have to say that I think this is largely what Sean is thinking and working on, but I have had my personal “I got it” moment and how it applies to what I am doing and maybe what you are doing. Give credit where it is due.

To become the platform for everything on your topic will take a lot of work, but if you have been working for years then, how much work have you done already on things that never worked or are not working now?

How much work will you do in the next years? If you don’t give up you will do plenty of work to keep up with the changing winds of the internet.

You might as well work on something that works and no one can take away from you.

You know, I might just teach a course on this.

What would it take to “Become Your Own Google?”

First, you would have to be a one stop location for everything in your topic.

Jay Abraham teaches the strategy of preeminence, your goal is to become the preeminent source for everything in your topic. For years in industry I had to buy IBM computers because they were the preeminent choice in the market. IBM clones were cheaper and often had the same hardware, but we all know you are going to have a problem with a computer sometime and when it happened I knew my superiors would say, “Why didn’t you buy IBM?”

I stuck with the preeminent brand. My superiors were sold on it. Magazines were playing the role of Google in those days saying “Clones are as good as IBM, look at these brands” but IBM in those days overpowered the noise in the market that said, just as good.

Talk about leverage, I saw an IBM ad that said, “When cheap computers say they are just as good as another brand, it is always IBM that they claim to be as good as. IBM, the standard everyone tries to attain…” They turned around the good as claims to their advantage. Marketing Judo.

You want people to say, “Why didn’t you go to Norma.com?” (more likely what don’t you try Norma.com) or whatever your website is, when they do you will have something. If you want it make it a goal.

Here is how things work now, people search for answers and information, Google (or any search engine) ranks the sites that somehow correlates with the search terms. You are probably in there, but it could be page 33 or 58 based on a machine you will never see and how it ranks you based on a program you will never understand and how it decided to rank you and perhaps the worst part is, if you figure out enough to win today, the same approach won’t work tomorrow or next week or sometime soon and you don’t know when it won’t work, just that it won’t. When the account you make your living on goes dry, that could be your first clue things changed. “Oh, we can’t pay the house payment this month, I guess Google changed something again!”

You are also ran. Not first place, not second place or even third, but also ran, but be truthful, how many pages of search results do you go through? I seldom get past the first and the third page doesn’t exist as far as I am concerned. Sad, but true. When I started I remember bragging that I made it to page five, but honestly page five doesn’t exist in your prospect’s world.

If you aren’t a big company with a big budget you aren’t going to make it to number one and if you somehow through clean living and blood, sweat and tears do make it to number one, any fad or cat video can knock you off, off number one, off the first page, off anything people will see.

I worked and worked and created content, answered questions, wrote kindle books, even was on a few guest blogs and became number one on Google for my search terms and someone that put those search terms on a tee shirt and made top heavy women jogging wearing the tee shirt videos knocked me off and when I started falling I never made it back up.

I had worked hard at driving traffic, but not on getting people to stick, to belong, to invite others, to participate. So when the traffic dried up, it got lonely.

I had a financial website and was knocked off number one search results for my terms and my domain name actually had those terms in the domain name by women jogging in a tee shirt.

It was like people not finding Ford.com when looking for Fords. Want information on Fords? Well here are some nice cat videos and one of the cats is named Ford, one is named Focus and another one is big, fat and fluffy, we call him F-150.

A domain name that was made up of search terms was beat out on those terms by women jogging in tee shirts. I began to wonder if I was the only sane person in the world.

Back to the traffic process. So they return this list of search results and you might be seen on it and you might not and they click one and go back to the search results, they click another and go back to the results and they click another and somewhere in there they may find something that interests them and go through the content there. I call it circular search engine traffic. They keep circling back to the search engine.

(took a break and checked, I am back to number five, I think making a page and posting on facebook did it, but five isn’t number one and the guy with the tee shirts is nowhere to be found, so don’t consider that a permanent strategy, you can tell I am still smarting and a bit touchy over the tee shirt incident)

Here is what you want, they search for something, see your website and you capture them, they are trapped in your huge, plenty of answers, plenty of content, plenty of resources, they can interact and participate, interesting looking website, with contests, balloons, hot dogs and a band and Taco Tuesdays and you take them away from Google. They don’t go back.

You also seed (or breadcrumb if you prefer) your website through forums, blogs, Ezine, youtube, facebook, instagram, twitter, the whole gambit of places you can post and someone see it on the internet, maybe even for some people post on craigslist.

I call it Google Judo. You use their strength to take the traffic away from them.

You work with their process and you punch holes in it by becoming your own search engine.

Someone, somehow winds up on your website, well people are lazy. If you have a way to search the zillion articles, videos, free content and stories on your website that connect with what they are interested in, why go back to Google, just search on your site, it is standing out right there in front of them. You could give them a hint, just say, “Search for everything _____ here!” and you fill in the blank with your topic.

Come to think of it, if they came through google or bing or yahoo or startpage or duck duck go, they are in search mode. If you don’t offer them something that aligns with that mode, it is like you have a sign on your website that says, “GO BACK TO GOOGLE!”

You have got to spell it out for them “Welcome to the platform for everything ______”

Oh, it says they are the platform for everything __________, I guess they must be the platform for everything ________.

Now, what about this group? We could cross promote. You could have “Be Your Own Google” and also have “We Are Our Own Google” and the we would be us!

I actually think that is a direction Sean is working on. We need to find his address and send him pizza so he doesn’t have to slow down to eat….

Best,
Scott Hogue CChH

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Mark Rhodes, Roger Rakestraw, Sean Mize

Here is an example of “Being Your own Google” : Badger and Blade https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/

They have over 79,000 members, over 9 million posts, over 39,000 items for view in their media gallery.

If I want to know anything about shaving, anything: blades, razors, soap, history, brands, reviews, superstitions, contests, stories, metallurgy, restoration, old advertising, beards and mustaches, father-son traditions, even women’s shaving for my wife I go there and search for it. Google can’t compete and just gets in the way.

Scott Hogue CChH

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Jan Sandhouse Hurst, Mark Rhodes, Roger Rakestraw, Sean Mize

Great example and insight Scott,
I have though about something like that for ages, but the magnitude and complexity simply scares me
My mind set now is that I’m willing to do what it takes to reach my goals.
39,000 items for view statrs with one post at a time. – B.

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Roger Rakestraw, Scott Hogue, Sean Mize

Can’t say it’s steady as in every day, but over the years, I’ve found our contest to be the most consistent, as my many of my target audience (writers) are always seeking new writing contests. So when a contest promoter sends me the info (and it meets our criteria), I post the basics on the page, then use Buffer to send a notice of a new contest being posted to Twitter, our Facebook page, and LinkedIn. I also have a separate Contest Alert list (Aweber) sign-up form on that page, so I also send out an “alert” that a new contest has been posted. On those alerts, I can add a link to our member sign-up page, affiliate offer, etc. Contests are aq natural for a writers website, but other niches might be able to come up with some other type of regular “news” that would be of interest to the target audience – and not available in one place elsewhere. (I can add the URL for this, if any interest in seeing it – just don’t want to appear to be promoting 🙂

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Norma Allen

Here’s the thing, I love the concept Scott is getting into . . . this idea that folks can come to YOU instead of going to the search engines . . . .

The thing is, you can’t BE a search engine for ALL THINGS like google and bing . . . but you CAN be the ONE PLACE where folks go in YOUR NICHE !

And the thing is, BECAUSE of the recent fragmentation of the market . . .I believe in nearly EVERY niche out there . . there is a place to have a site that really links to EVERYTHING better than ever before . . .

If someone could find the origin story for Houzz and post it . . it’s hugely inspirational, but it’s a story of how a woman was looking for home improvements and had to go to 100 sites to see everything . . .so she decided to start Houzz . . .and now businesses come to HER to advertise and get in HER site . . . because SHE aggregated it all . . .

dig a little, post a link to her story . . .

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Norma Allen, Roger Rakestraw, Scott Hogue

I am a huge fan of building your own platform or at the very least have a say in what goes on (like we do here).

I have been slapped by Google so many times that I have lost count.

I haven since moved into product creation and coaching.

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Roger Rakestraw, Scott Hogue

Malik, glad to see you building more organically . . when you own your lead process rather than counting on someone else (aka google) to provide it for you, you create long term stability!

Sean

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Malik Ahmad, Roger Rakestraw, Scott Hogue

Out-Google, Google…

I too believe that building your own platform is so very, very important, especially in this age of the internet.

As far as trying to “out google, google” I’m not ever going to say it’s impossible, because google “out-yahooed, yahoo” to put themselves in the position they’re in.

It will take a tremendous amount of work, foresight, vision & energy to do it.

And to build that place, one doesn’t necessarily need to start out with that objective as the end goal.

Just be extraordinarily good at one thing that will cause others to evangelise for you, and you’re on your way.

The one place I see that google consistently fails at customer service. That just might be the opening.

That’s the one thing Zappo’s used to put themselves head & shoulders above the other shoe sites.

That’s really what Amazon has used to put themselves in the position they’re in.

Customer Service.

And they had to “out-WalMart, WalMart” to get to where they are.

At the time, that seemed like an impossible dream to most.

Anything and everything is possible with the right combination of factors.

Most things are improbable for a variety of reasons, but everything is possible.

I’m hoping we all figure out that “one thing” (most of the time it’s several things wrapped up in the guise of One Thing) in our fields and exploit it to as best as we possibly can to create that platform which will allow us to live the life we choose!

A HUGE Thank You to Sean for creating this fantastic place for us to get together and here’s to each and every one of us to accomplish all we want/need to!

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Sean Mize, Mark Rhodes, Scott Hogue

Roger thanks so much for the kudos!

I love what you wrote: “Just be extraordinarily good at one thing that will cause others to evangelise for you, and you’re on your way.”

I believe there is tons of room for folks to be the very best in their space and in what they do, and when you are the best, it shows, people can talk about what you do and share . .

Sean

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Malik Ahmad, Bruce Hoag