Attracting and growing traffic to a website is the #1 thing I’m asked about via email and on my social channels. It’s also the #1 thing I’m shown in adverts, email newsletters and events.
Everyone want’s traffic to their website and everyone wants MORE traffic to their website.
In this blog post, I’m going to share the absolute fundamental action to generating and growing sustainable traffic for both yourself and customers
The traffic problem
Websites that want to drive and attract traffic face a HUGE problem. Why on Earth should anyone spend their precious time on your website, when they could watch YouTube videos, stalk people on Facebook, play Candy Crush, buy something on Amazon or open their emails?
Our attention is distracted more than ever. We’ve become used to switching from tab to tab, mindlessly browsing sites we’re familiar with, in order to get our little dopamine fixes.
Anyone who wants regular, healthy traffic to their website needs to become familiar. They need to become a habit that their users are comfortable with.
“OK Mike, that’s fine. But how can I get someone familiar with my site if they don’t visit in the first place!”
Well that’s the real problem isn’t it? Appearing at the right time, in the right place with something that appeals to new visitors. Fortunately, there is a solution.
10 000 visits a day
The bad old days saw us heading over to Fiverr or any other cheap outsourcing marketplace and buying traffic. I’m not even talking about buying quality traffic, but low grade “10 000 visits a day” traffic.
We all know now that this approach is cancer to your business. 10 000 visits is nice, but it doesn’t result in anything. Especially when they’re most likely bots, miss-directed re-directs and from countries that you couldn’t even serve.
We’ve all tried buying links, ranking higher with cross-posting and any other fast track to traffic. And every single time it doesn’t work. You feel stupid, you’re starting from scratch and the money you paid might as well have been used on content.
There is a MASSIVE misconception that all you need is one super good, ultra-viral post to be shared 10 000 times and your traffic problems will be solved. If you’ve read my post on money beliefs killing your business, you might recognise a few similarities here.
It takes years and hundreds of published posts to produce one viral hit. But still people chase the idea that they can create one perfect, killer blog post and they’ll go hyper-viral.
Paid traffic isn’t sustainable
And then YouTube and Facebook started offering paid posts.
Advertising is of course nothing new. But placing content into social feeds for a fee was a revolution to website traffic. It changed the way people saw “traffic”.
Traffic was now a tap that you could just turn on and drive more visits from. It was like discovering a gold vein under your house. And just like the poorly written, heavy handed metaphor of a gold vein under your house, people were ignoring their own platform to mine gold from under them.
The problem comes when the platform starts to give way. What happens when YouTube changes it’s advertising policy? What happens when Facebook changes it’s newsfeed?
When you build your traffic strategy on someone else’s platform, you’re subject to THEIR whims and wants. If they want to increase advertising prices (which they do and will), that’s now YOUR problem.
Yes, I absolutely understand that PPC, paid social and video advertising is a wonderful tool. I also understand that you can liquidate the cost of acquisition of traffic with splinter products and tripwires. I’ve even got a video of my strategy for doing that here.
But what’s happening, is that businesses are treating traffic sources like a tap, not remembering that it’s at the discretion of the source.
In order to start generating sustainable, growing and regular traffic to your website (or any website) there is only one solution.
Deadlines
On top of all that, you’ve got to deal with the constant looming deadlines of content creation. We all know that we should be posting once a week. Which seems to roll around faster and faster each week (Monday already?!).
BTW – I suck at traffic
In late 2016 I decided that Sell Your Service was going to be my primary source of income. I was going to generate $10 000 a month from selling coaching, courses and resources for funnel builders.
All I wanted to do, was help funnel builders sell more funnels to their customers. In fact, it became my moral obligation to help ANYONE who sold marketing funnels, sell more funnels.
That deep down, moral duty that I help to funnel builders all over the world, became the driving force behind my traffic and sales strategy. I became so obsessed with it, that the day I got the keys to my new house, I quit my job.
I knew that my conviction to help funnel builders was so strong, that it would carry me through my mortgage, bills, debts and living expenses. It’s how I wanted to make my living and change the world.
That same conviction gave me EVERYTHING I needed to build a traffic attraction strategy with content, that would work.
Where you give up, is my opportunity
It’s often said that “where you give up, is my opportunity.” That means when you hit your wall, when you can’t push any further, that’s when I’ll outshine you.
The ONLY surefire way to succeed in business, is to outlast everyone else. It’s easier said than done, but it’s the truth. And if you want to drive an ass-load of traffic to your website, or your customer’s website, you have to remember “the wall”.
The wall is when everyone else want’s to give up. It’s when your competition are ready to call it a day because it doesn’t seem to be working.
In 2014 Sell Your Service had 1332 visits from around 600 unique visitors. I launched Sell Your Service in early 2014 and didn’t see a single hit for months.
Even for the easiest of quitters, that’s surely too soon to start calling it a day right?
In 2015 I tried to cheat and I bought over 100 000 visitors to my site. I used cheap, shit traffic sources and bought a load of visitors to my site.
Sorry Robert, I know you’re reading this and I have paid for my sins.
This is what a REALLY shit traffic strategy looks like. It was costing me money and delivering me NOTHING.
I made NO sales and I generated NO email subscribers. My whole process was messed up. See those low points on the graph? That’s the average visit count. The huge spikes were harmful and spam traffic that I thought I could cheat the system with.
Short term I lost a bit of money and some ego. But long term, this damaged my reputation as a reliable source of content.
In 2016, I made a change and tried blogging. On and off. I also bought some more traffic, this time from proper sources and sent back to proper landing pages and content.
But guess what…
No growth. Overall, 2016 was as big a waste as 2015. I didn’t get it. I had written 2 awesome blog posts. Why wasn’t I going viral!?
So frustrating. So I invested every penny I had into Facebook advertising to attract some traffic. But it wasn’t sustainable.
I’m not saying paid Facebook traffic isn’t sustainable or even profitable. I’m saying that without sticking to a strategy and committing to the results, you’ll never see and experience growth.
So. 2017 rolls around and I decided to start blogging. Not just every week. Every day.
And wouldn’t you know what happens.
Growth. Longer term, predictable growth. Doesn’t that look healthier? Like training for a marathon, or a savings account.
You see traffic is a lot like investing. Stocks, shares, funds, whatever you decide to put your money into, it’s the regular payments over a long period of time that pay off. Not the short term bursts. Let’s take a look at a smoother data line.
This is all our traffic from 2017 – 2018 so far. Don’t worry about the drop at the end, it’s still calculating per/month traffic for February.
But as you can see, my traffic hits 1000 users a month in October 2017 and in March 2018 we’re expecting 2000 visitors a month.
So it took 10 months to get to 1000.
And it took 5 months to get to 2000. So it took half the time, to double the visits. Or, it took half the time to get the same result.
This is the effect of compound blogging.
Compound blogging
Compound blogging is similar to compound interest. It’s a term that means regular, repeat content creation on a website in order to generate a larger return than one single post could generate.
Compound actions are in themselves, incredibly powerful. Darren Hardy, founder of Success Magazine writes about it in his book “The Compound Effect”.
What we find with compound blogging, is that regular content repeatedly published will produce far more results that 1 or 2 killer posts ever could.
Even 500 words a week will drive thousands of free visitors to your site.
I hear entrepreneurs, funnel builders and business owners all talk about how they’d do anything to be successful. They’re not afraid of working hard or breaking a sweat. Hustle! Grind! I hear them shout.
“OK” I respond “commit to writing 2 posts a week every single week for the rest of your life.”
“Well I wouldn’t know what to write”.
“I’m not really a writer”.
“I just don’t have the time”.
I hear these same excuses and more over and over. If you’re not 100% committed to a traffic strategy, how on Earth do you think people will be moved by your products?
Regular, repeat actions are how you build a reputation. And a reputation is how you make easier sales.
Facebook can change it’s advertising policy, YouTube can choke my traffic. But MY content on MY platform is always 100% owned and operated by me.
I can move my posts where I like and I can post them where I like. If it’s useful, valuable, helpful, entertaining or provocative – it’ll get shared and attract new readers.
Repeatedly posting content that I am MORALLY obliged to share, is my traffic strategy.
Take saving and investing again.
$100 saved every month, with an 8% ROI payout, would lead to over $18 000 in 10 years. That’s just from $1200 a year. In 10 years that’s an extra $6000 on top of your savings.
$200 every month for 5 years, yields just $15000. For the same input, you actually receive LESS because you haven’t been doing it as long.
Content is the same. Repeatedly publishing content over and over is what wins. That’s what I was talking about with “the wall”.
I get so much free traffic because others give up. In the 2 years I’ve been really writing content, I know of 3 businesses that have tried to take over the “selling marketing funnels” niche. And they’ve packed it in.
They wrote good content, their research was better than mine. But I stayed longer. I decided to give up later.
That’s how your content and traffic strategy needs to work. Regular content for longer than your competition. Simple. I can’t make it any more simple.
What to write about
“But Mike! I don’t know what to write about?!” I know what you’re saying. But it’s an excuse.
I’ll let you into a HUGE secret. I was writing every week long before I really knew the market I was going to serve. The habit and repeated practice of writing is what exposed my market to me. I saw what was being shared and commented on. I saw how people reacted to my content.
Over time, funnel builders became my tribe and I wanted to lead them. Go back and read my earlier posts and I’ll talk about graphic designers, WordPress consultants and website agencies.
The act of compound blogging revealed trends to me that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, that’s why it’s so powerful.
My favourite part
My favourite part is watching my traffic continually rise, at a predictable pace. You can read my traffic reports here and here and here to see just how predictable it is. Once you start getting predictable traffic and income, you’re unstoppable.
Tell me about your traffic strategy and how it’s going to work for you? What are you morally obliged to share with the world and can you commit to 2 posts a week?
