Building an online business - You need website traffic and sales - Part 3

Building an online business - You need website traffic and sales - Part 3

In part 3 or Building and online business I will dive into reasons you need traffic, what traffic you should target and especially how to obtain the traffic.  I will also get into what you need to do in order to obtain the sales you are chasing, because that's what we all want, right?  I know that if you're reading this, you're likely running a website or two and are wanting more sales.  If you don't want more sales, you should pack up all you websites and delete them!  I'm joking, don't do that because I don't want to be the cause of your bankruptcy lol.

So about the business, it's not exactly easy cracking the internet like all of the gurus and software sellers claim it is.  There's not quick fix to make millions of dollars a year, and there's no easy street to go down in order to sit on a beach and collect a check.  My goal is to sit on my couch and watch the notifications on my phone go off letting me know that a couple hundred times a day I've made some massive sales, but it doesn't happen like that.  I've been working online for 15+ years and I do make enough to pay all of my bills and live a nice life style, but I'm by no means rich or wealthy and can sit on a beach and collect checks lol.  You'll have to work for your money, so stop trying to take short cuts

If I've still got your attention, this discussion will go over why you need traffic and the sources to target as well as how to convert that traffic into sales


Website Traffic
We all want website traffic but we all don't know the best means to obtain it, right?  Well let uncle Razzy help you with this because it can be difficult.  I've been playing around with almost all of the good traffic methods over the years and experimenting with the ones that are less than good lol.  I've ran banner advertising for a monthly fee, paid for ads on Facebook/Bing and Yahoo /Adwords and done plenty of SEO in my time to know what works and what doesn't. 

Types of traffic to AVOID
Now normally I would talk about what you should do right away, but I want to cover what you should avoid first so no one messes up.  I've got 2 big traffic sources to avoid because they are pretty much garbage when it comes to making a sale, and they are:

1. Buying Traffic Packages:  This type of traffic is when you go to a service and someone says "I'll send you X,XXX,XXX visits a month for $29.95"  What they're really saying is "I'll send you bot traffic for $29.95 and you won't make a single sale!"  I don't know why people get away with selling this type of traffic, because it never does anything since there are no real visitors visiting your pages.  If someone were to actually send you X,XXX,XXX real visitors, you would get at least a few clicks on your adsense, right?  With these traffic packages you will get 0, zip, zilch, Nada clicks on your links.
2. Traffic Exchanges:  Traffic exchanges tend to have real people on them, but the way most of them are set up is to auto surf.  This means the user doesn't even have to be behind the computer in order to surf peoples websites, your websites.  You're basically getting "real" visitors who aren't seeing your website.  Now there are manual traffic exchanges, but these don't tend to work well either because people just get click happy and are only there to accumulate points.  They will click away from your website as soon as they can in order to have someone view their website(s).

*** A "Razzy" trick with manual traffic exchanges ***
Remember when I said I mess around with all types of traffic sources?  Well even though traffic exchanges aren't great, I still target some manual ones to test a trick I like to do in order to get some additional targeted traffic

What I'll do is set up a buffer website that is optimized for conversions, and I will have a big button on there that says "CLICK HERE" or "MORE INFO" in order to have a chance at capturing the people who actually see my site.  Now I could just set up a subpage that has some nice info on it that could entice someone to purchase, but there's a reason I set up a buffer site. 

The Bandwidth!

I set up a buffer site on a hosting plan that allows unlimited traffic.  This allows me to save up my main websites bandwidth and the only people coming to my site are quality leads lol.

Now you're saying "But what happens when the page is done and they user clicks away?" well this is where the "Razzy trick" comes in   All you have to do on your buffer sit is have the button open in a new tab, or window, when clicked so that you take the person away from the traffic exchange and they don't close your website right away.  The traffic exchange will still operate and the user can go back to it and keep surfing, but your website is now up in a new tab or window on their computer for them to go back to   Remember, if they clicked the button, that means they were interested and now they will be glad your website opened in a new tab


Types of traffic to TARGET
There are a few big methods that we all know about, so I won't get into too much detail here.  The main sources of traffic I like to target are the big 4, and those are:

1. SEO
2. Adwords
3. Bing Ads
4. Facebook Ads

Yes, 3 of the 4 are paid advertising and you might not have the budget to run a campaign for an entire month, but you should be trying to get to the point where you can set an ad at $10 a day for 1 month and not worry about it

SEO:  Now I've been doing SEO since 2003 and have learned many things about it.  I know what to do and what not to do, but right now all you should focus on are your titles, descriptions, headers, alt tags and your content.  Don't worry too much about backlinks until you get a decent amount of content on your website.  After you get to the point where you need backlinks, start researching good sources of high quality links, you can even purchase some from credible sellers.  I would try to get some interviews out there as well as some good guest posts in order to pull in some additional traffic as well as gain some backlinks.  If you didn't know, backlinks are one of the main ways that the search engines will determine your rankings within their search results.  The more high quality backlinks you have, the better your rankings tend to be
Adwords/Bing Ads:  I bundled these two together because they're practically identical when it comes to how they work.  What you'll want to do is get super targeted with your ads and keywords so you're not wasting any clicks on someone who probably won't convert.  A good example of this is if you sell beds and you're targeting keywords related to futons.  You will get clicks because they are related, but someone searching for a $100 futon with a frame won't be interested in a $500+ mattress with no frame.  You can definitely branch out later and take some chances on your keywords, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is just starting out.  Play it safe and get the sales rolling in before you expand your targeting
Facebook Ads:  This is one of my favorite traffic methods because you can get super targeted.  You can target what people are doing in their daily activities to targeting spending habits since Facebook is linked up with major companies that track everything people do from day to day.  It sounds creepy, but they track everything and you can benefit from this immensely   If you can get super targeted with your demographic targeting on Facebook, you can usually see a much larger conversion rate than all of the other methods, even with SEO!



Making The Sale
Everyone thinks that just getting the people to your website means they will buy.  This is completely false because your website will need to sell the person before they decide to pay for anything.  You need to think of what the person is viewing once they get to your page and how they got there.  If the person is coming through the search engines, SEO traffic, you will not be able to control how they go there and how they will convert unless your website is set up for good traffic flow (it should be).  If the people coming from your paid ads are just landing on your homepage, you won't see as high of a conversion as you should. 

To increase your conversions from paid ads, you need to set up custom landing pages for people from specific ads.  This doesn't mean you have to set up 20 different landing pages because you have 20 ads running on 3 different platforms.  It means you need to set up 3 different landing pages that target your Adwords traffic, Bing ads traffic and your facebook ads traffic.  Set up the pages welcoming them and mention how they go there.

Facebook ad landing page example: 

Hi there! 

Thank you for taking some time away from Facebook and checking out our website!

We know your time is precious, so to show our appreciation, here's a 10% off coupon code for anyone who left facebook to visit up

(CODE HERE)

Again, thank you for visiting us and we hope you love our website!


- Management (Or whatever you want to put here)

If you caught on to what I did there, I threw a coupon code at them right away on the landing page to increase the conversions even more.  By thanking them for leaving the platform they were just on and giving them a discount code, you're showing your appreciation and they will love that!  Even if it's just 10%, you will see an increase in sales from people, or you might get a decent amount of people simply sharing your page with the discount



In Conclusion:
You definitely need traffic and sales in order to succeed online, but getting those 2 things can be tricky if you're not getting the traffic that will convert and not setting up some pages in order to increase your conversions.  Offering visitors who clicked on your ads a coupon right away, even if it's just 10%, will increase your conversions and shares because of the 10 minutes you took to make the one landing page



Remember to follow me!
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/Razzy


Thanks!

Razzy