The Traffic Firestarter

There’s 2 sides to traffic. One is the people that you directly invite to your website through email or organic search or similar. Or, that you pay them to come to your website. Those are the two things we can use to invite them. There’s 2 ways to direct people to your website, one is through some free methods, some content, organic, etc. 2nd is paid methods. Those are the 2 ways to directly get people to your website.

The other way that people come to your website is when people who have been directly invited, invite other people to come to your website. That’s the difference between traffic, and viral traffic. Viral traffic is when it just takes off, and you don’t have to keep plugging away to make it happen.

You might continue to throw fire starter in there. Maybe you have to direct 1000 people each month, and maybe they direct another 10k because they like your content. But if you stop directing the initial people, maybe you wouldn’t have so much viral traffic. There’s going to be 2 parts to that. If you look at most viral businesses, they started with some component in place.

Here’s an offline example: you open up a new hot-dog stand in your town. If you don’t invite the first 1000 people, nobody is going to know about it. But, if the hot-dogs are incredible, and you hand out these little coupons that say if your friend comes and orders a hot-dog you get your next one for free, that makes things go viral. But if you didn’t invite the first 1000 people it wouldn’t go viral. When we think about viral traffic, we have to start intentional traffic, then we move to viral traffic. It’s two components.

I believe that a one of the mistakes that people make when they’re focused on viral traffic is they want everything to happen virally, so they don’t do anything to get the fire starters there. You’ve got to get the fire starters there first. Then it can go viral.

Today we’re going to have a talk about these various pieces. If you are partial in some way, and you just listen to part of what I’m telling you today, and then you go off and do part of what I’m telling you today, you’re probably not going to get the kind of traffic that you want.

The second thing is, I’m not going to give you a “1-2-3-4 this is exactly how you get traffic to your website.” Here’s why: some of you have weight loss websites, some of you have weight gain websites, some of you have high-ticket websites, and some of you have low-ticket websites, and some of you have free websites, some of you have content websites, all of you have different topics. Some of you are in karate or swimming or crocheting or whatever. And the exact traffic, the exact people that you’re going to invite to your website are going to be different. It’s depending on your website, depending on who you want to get to your website. You’re going to have to go out there and be constructive. You’re going to have to be creative and say “where are the people who need what I have hanging out online? Where are they? How can we invite them to come to the website?”

And, the 2nd part is, once we invite them, what can we do to get them to share what we have on the website?

The truth of the matter is, if you have horrible content, nobody is going to share it.

Think about when you go to somebody else’s website. What does it take for you to share it? It’s got to be good, right? It’s got to be something that you want to share. You want people to thank you for sharing. When you’re building your website, you’ve got to put “thank you” content on your website. You’ve got to put content on your website that makes people want to say “thank you”. When they say “thank you” they share.

We’re going to talk about that. If you’re attracting the wrong person, you have to switch over and say, how do we attract the right people? When we think about this, driving traffic is really about attracting the right people to your website. I’m going to give you an example:

I want you to imagine that you have a karate website. I’ll tell you a funny thing, people will write me and tell me all about their business model, and then say please don’t tell anybody about my business model. What they don’t realize is that 5 other people have already told me about the same business model about their niche. I mean I’ve probably fielded thousands of e-mails in the past that have something to do with niches. If I talk about karate, or swimming, or crochet, or anything else, somebody out there is doing it. It’s almost impossible to come up with something that’s just absolutely what nobody else is doing.

So if you’re in karate and I picked that, it wasn’t on purpose ;).

Let’s imagine that we want to attract people who want to buy your karate course. Of course, I’m using this as an example. Your karate course is going to be about self-defense. How to defend yourself if somebody attacks you.

Your course is $100 and so you want to attract people who are willing to pay you for that course. Those are the people you want to attract.

You don’t want to attract “tire kickers”. Your purpose is to sell this $100 course. Your squeeze page might say “Attention! If you would like to learn how to defend yourself against attackers, then download my e-book XYZ how to do it. It’s going to teach you how to do these 3 particular things”. Then the first day that they’re on your list, they receive an invite to purchase the $100 training. You are setting the stage for people to recognize that they’re going to pay you to teach.

I want you to imagine that you do the opposite.

Instead of having a squeeze page that talks about the things that you can learn if you get onto my list, your squeeze page instead just says “Free karate training, come one, come all, enter your name and e-mail”. What’s going to happen is: A) you’re going to get a lot of “tire kickers”, and then if for the first 30 days all you do is send out free information, and then on Day 30 you send an email out that says, “please buy my $100 training program,” you have conditioned people that everything they get from you is free, they’re not going to spend $100. Do you see this? How you position your website is going to determine what people are going to do. If you can get people sharing your website on Day 1, they’ll share in the future. But if you wait until they’ve been on your website for 31 days to ask them to share, they’re probably never going to share.