Paid Traffic Gets You Targeted Traffic

This is based from a Jonathan Mizel interview, a true Internet marketing legend. Listen to more interviews over at Podcast Interviews


Search engine optimization is definitely a great place to start when you’re getting online, getting that initial traffic, just learning the basics of the way keywords work and just online marketing. Let’s think a little bit about comparing SEO versus paid traffic.

First of all I am a huge fan of search engine optimization strategies and I am also a fan of free traffic. I think that a lot of the methods that are out there regarding optimizing your pages and getting your sites in Google and other search engines, are really fantastic. That’s especially for people just getting started. This is a way to get traffic that is relatively high quality, for free.

The big difference between SEO and paid traffic, and when we talk about paid traffic, I’m just going to exclude from the conversation Google AdWords, that’s it’s own separate animal. The big difference is that there are huge amounts of advertising inventory out there, whereas when you’re trying to do search engine optimization you’re really limited to the keyword volume that your niche actually has. So for example, you may be going into weight loss or something, or belly fat - let’s just say that is the word you’re going to try to optimize for, is lose belly fat.

I’m sure there is a lot of search volume on belly fat but there’s not an unlimited amount of search volume for that phrase. In order to get ranked for that phrase, it’s really determined by how many people are looking for that particular phrase, that particular topic.

Where paid media starts to shine, once you have an offer you know works, once you have an affiliate offer, or you have an offer that you’ve developed yourself, your own product, and you have some idea what visitors are worth and what kind of conversion rate you’re going to get and you understand your metrics and your numbers and you’ve done some testing and some tracking, once you get to that level, you get really frustrated with your SEO campaign.

You just can’t get more than the traffic that you’ve been getting, based on the number of people who are searching for that particular phrase, then divided by all the other competitors that you have and all the other paid listings and all the other stuff.

Really, where paid traffic comes in is, it allows you to evolve your traffic generation from just whatever comes in, based on search engines being a bit more proactive. You’re going out there and you’re saying, through keyword ads, through general ads, through banner ads, through pop ups, contextual ads, though opt in email ads, through all the other places and all the other types of media you can run, you can actually take something like a belly fat offer that really, on a search engine optimization basis, is going to be limited.

You can enter this whole new world and start to get significant amounts of traffic. Let me give you a story, because I know a lot of people say, well what’s the difference here? The difference is that really good SEO specialists I know, really top guys, can generate maybe a couple of thousand visitors a day, if they’re really good, if they’re really lucky and if they’ve created the process to continually generate new content. With those two thousand visitors, they’re going to make however much they make.

But there comes a point where people want to make more. They want to grow their businesses and they want to make more money for their families and they want to take vacations and buy all the things that we want to buy, houses and cars and toys or just retirement or college fund or a savings account. We don’t have to get all ambitious with Ferraris. People want to grow their business so they can get themselves security. A lot of people find it very difficult to do that with just the traffic that they get from SEO techniques.

What paid media really allows you to do, is to go outside the people who are looking for your product and start really proactively approaching people through banner ads and so on. Probably the most common ones are banner ads, the little text ads you see that look like Google ads but they’re not Google ads, and maybe pop ups, that when you visit a site you actually get a pop up. All those things mean that you now are not limited to a few hundred or at the most a few thousand visitors a day. You can get a few thousand visitors an hour.

That is the sort of result it is possible to get with paid traffic.

Web Traffic With One Way Link Building

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David: Testing and the SEO guide makes you stand out in the crowd. Testing is one of those things which can be the difference between someone making it really big versus just kicking along when they are trying to drive traffic to a new domain.

James: Think about it this waywith your SEO training. If you can increase your conversions by 2% and you’re only doing 2%, it’s like getting twice as much traffic. More people should look into that. I’m not a testing freak, but it is worth bearing in mind. Be inquisitive and have a look behind the scenes to see what is actually happening. You’d be surprised quite often how easy it is to get an improvement just by checking something out. It could be as easy as installing Heat Map tracking onto your site just to know where people are clicking.

David: What do you use for split tests?

James: I mostly just use Google Website Optimizer or a Link Rotator.

David: Very good. You have a lot of Google’s tools and they’re all free.

James: They have great tools.

David: With some of the other things you do, like you’ve got a lot of different link building mechanisms, for all of what you do, where would you identify the biggest bang for your buck? Of course link diversity is important and you don’t want to just hone into one particular thing. I’m curious to know, of all the things you’ve tested, where do you notice the biggest bang for your buck?

James: In terms of conversions, it’s pretty hard to beat forum signatures and blog comments. They’re very targeted buyers, they are super targeted. You can control where you place your link to a high degree. Here’s a tip. You use the search tool in a form and search for exactly the problem that your blog post solves. Posting that thread you’ll get quite a lot of conversions. Also you’re posting from a keyword related site.

David: So you get the good inbound link. With forums, we’ve done a little bit of forum commenting and also blog commenting as well. What are the sort of tips you have? We didn’t have a great success with it. The biggest reason was we were trying to do it en masse. We were using different assistants to do it. We tried to use ones who at least had a grasp of the English language.

But we weren’t seeing a huge amount of traction for how much we were spending. Sometimes you would make a post, this was more so on blog commenting and then that blog comment may not have got accepted. What are your thoughts? Is that something you’re doing yourself or are you outsourcing?

James: Yes, I do that myself. When it comes to my primary blogs, I post the comments, I post the content, I do the forum posting. You have a lot of control and influence on that. When it comes to article distribution and buying links, or submitting videos you don’t need to be involved with that so much because it’s not going to change the process.

Wherever you need to exert control, that is where your own work will be necessary. Otherwise, don’t make life hard for yourself, and outsource as many tasks as is feasible.



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Who Else Wants To Learn About Getting Website Traffic

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David: I talk about different search engine optimization strategies and when starting to drive traffic to a new domain, research needs to be carried out in order to plan out how to build the site. Then you say, these are the keywords I need to be doing, build out the pages on your WordPress platform for those particular buying keywords.

I learned this from the public domain ebooks. You’re crafting these little pages of content and then are they driving straight to the offer, straight from that, or do you funnel them into another sales letter? I suppose it depends what you’re working on.

James: It depends on the system. I’m really going well with the blog model where I have a name capture on the blog and I convert a fair bit of that traffic on to a list where I can build the relationship. There are select opportunities for that person to take any of the call to actions, either ones directly in the article itself or to the side where I’ll put strategic banner placements etc.

You build up the on page thing. Then what I’ll do is I’ll take that same content and leverage off page as well. I’ll get rewrites of that article distributed and point back to the first one. Then I’ll start building a layer of third party sites.

David: Do you have a process, a systematized process? Ok, you’ve created the page, so you then get those articles rewritten and then going out for distribution. Do you have a thing where you say, for example, at minimum I’m looking for ten articles or twenty articles or whatever? How do you do it? For a system to work you need to have some guidelines or goalposts to shoot between.

James: I have a perpetual content machine working. All I need to do is feed it keywords and then the content will come back to me for me to place on the blog and the rest of it will be distributed automatically using for example, Article Marketing.

David: Is there any chance we can dig in deep as to how that model works? You get the content done, so you get it written through your writer and then it comes back to you and you publish on the blog. What are some of the different processes? I know you use blog comments and article submissions.

James: Basically as soon as an article is posted on my blog, that activates back linking and further distribution of that article. That’s the signal.

David: Where are you posting on that? Do you take it to Ezine?

James: Much broader than that. Basically I have someone posting it to article submission sites. So it will go to all the popular article sites and it will also go to private blog networks. It will be linked back to the site and the category and to the article itself. They’ll be different versions of the article.

David: Where’s this assistant posting it? It sounds like there are quite a few different areas it’s going out to.

James: Yes, it goes across several networks, so you don’t want to be single network dependent because it’s too much of a pattern. Also you’re missing opportunities. So you want to go quite broad with your traffic syndication. I use a number of networks and a number of ways to get links. I think that’s worked well for me to go very broad. I’ve got a lot of different traffic channels for my content and that’s why I get a lot more traffic than most people. Also I’m able to cover some of the areas that they’re missing.

David: How does your assistant or the assistant who’s posting the content out, know which one to do? Let’s say you’ve just created that content and let’s say you’ve got six or seven different methods. Do you just say, pick three of the seven different methods that we have at random and post for that? I’m just really wondering how your systematize it.

James: I have subscriptions with some services and we use all of them, the only enhancement or variable is if I want to add on top. If I want to do an extra special bomb, then I could go a little bit hard core. Say, video distribution; we would start with a baseline but I would also add in a couple of extra video channels if I decide that is going to be worth the effort.

David: Yes, I think I actually saw on your blog just recently, you did a post as far as using Animoto and then the way you go you distribute that using Traffic Geyser.

James: Yes, that is a good example of one traffic channel and there are so many.



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SEO Techniques, Linking To Your Website

Let us think about something which I would call advanced search engine optimization strategies. It’s incredible that I know a lot of serious players, internet marketing players are doing. That is leveraging their own network of sites.

I learned this from these podcast interviews that I listened to. There’s a lot of talk about whether you need separate IPs and whether you need to mask the information because, again, the search engines find that if you’re linking between sites that you actually possess, you’re going to get penalized. I’ve just known a lot of people are doing it and they’re having a lot of luck with it.

I think a lot of people can really get caught up putting their focus into the wrong area when they head down this track. You need to just see it for what it is and then apply a few basic things that I’ll talk about and you’re going to be much better off than if you do try and go off and do it. I have actually had experience with doing this type of thing myself.

We were looking at putting some little clusters of sites on different unique class C IP addresses. We were registering the domain names in different people’s names so that way they weren’t all linked together. You need to make sure you’re avoiding things like putting the same AdSense account across all of them. In fact, especially for your feeder site, it’s better not to have any AdSense on there. It’s the same with Google Analytics.

There are so many ways that Google can tie those networks collectively that you can continually feel like you’re having to look over your shoulder. You should really be focused on structuring those pages, getting your good content out there, rather than spending your time focusing on, have I messed up here and have I cross linked something and then effectively that whole network is going to get taken down.

I think it gets back to that idea that it’s all about building a good quality business that’s going to last, not necessarily going for black hat type techniques. There is a line as to what’s reasonable and what’s unreasonable. I don’t think Google would say having a few different websites is bad.

People do that, people have multiple websites. The way that it is linking together, you see people talking about all the different wagon wheel linking structures. There are so many different ways that you can do it.

I think you’re better off, once you start to build your own network, depending on the competitive niche, you might register three or five blogs on different domain names. Start building the content up on those, don’t stress too much about having them on different class C IP addresses.

If you have a couple of hosting accounts, it can’t hurt to spread them out. Then just start to build good quality links into those websites and then be strategic in the way that you send the links over. Don’t use one of these plug ins where you drop in a keyword and every time it is mentioned on the page, it is going to link back to that specific page.

You might send a few links here, a few links there. It’s also important to use web 2.0 properties and other websites to build your own network. So now when I think about building my own network, it’s not just about my own domain names.

I’ll also go and set up a blog over at WordPress and also go set up a blog over at Blogger and use some of these other websites where we can leverage off the age of their domain name and the links it’s already getting and build a site there. Then we can use that to shoot back targeted links.

I think the benefit of building your own network is the fact that you can so tightly target and be really specific on what links you’re sending to where. To get caught up in a lot of the other technqiues can get you off track, when really you just need to be focusing on let’s build a business. To summarize, the main thing is just to focus on three or five different additional sites and do good off page linking to those and then make sure that you don’t excessively cross link between each of your different websites in that network.



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SEO Techniques, How To Drive Massive Traffic To Your Website Using SEO Alone

When you consider SEO training, links is where it’s at. Every page you optimize for you’re giving yourself another chance of getting picked up on more keywords.

That’s why e commerce websites work so well. You can have an e commerce site that is loaded with a thousand different pages, all of these different keywords that are optimized for specific product names. These are the long tail things that people are searching if they’re about to buy. I learned a lot of this stuff through the wordpress direct review. So going for that can be a great deal easier than trying to target two or three pages to try and get someone to a long form sales letter. It really is about volume.

There are also the other advantages as well. If you’ve got that quantity of pages, you can manage your internal linking arrangement. A lot of people don’t put a lot of weight on the internal linking configuration. I really think it is a highly underutilized SEO technique. Some people are doing it, but really it is so influential because it’s on your site. You can manage where you put the link, what anchor text it gets and what type of link it is.

There is the idea that Google doesn’t necessarily rank websites, it ranks individual pages. I don’t think you’re going to get as much of a benefit from getting an off site link back to your website. But it definitely adds, and you get a lot more control over it and it also makes it more spiderable. It’s all about passing that right link reputation. When you’re linking, you can make sure that you’re telling Google what it is that this particular page is about.

When you’re doing a lot of other link building methods, if you’re trying to build, let’s say deep links where the keyword may not necessarily be in the root part of the domain name, you might have it in the extension but your keyword isn’t as clear because it’s been diluted. The density of that keyword is being diluted because there are other key words or characters that are linking in that particular anchor text. When you’re doing a lot of your own link optimization on page, you can really control that. You can say exactly what that page is about and not dilute what it is that you’re trying to rank for.

The way I see it, your internal linking, if you’re trying to rank for say, dog training and you build a number of subsidiary pages around your home page which is trying to rank for the term dog training using these pages around it and linking to it, you’re basically telling Google or the search engine, this page is about dog training.

I think the search engines will take that into account. There’s always some degree of mistrust in your own website. We know that all website owners maybe have some kind of commercial intention. So they can’t just go on your word alone.

You tell them internally that your page is about dog training and then back that up by other sites linking and saying, yes, it is about dog training. With your internal links, you’re saying, listen Mr Google, this page is about dog training, and just for good measure, there are all these sites around the net telling you it’s about dog training. So logically they’re going to have to assume it is about dog training and reward you with a high ranking.

The way that we do that, using the e commerce example, you’ll just do it when someone visits the page; it’s almost like Amazon. Clients who looked at this product were also interested in these products. You’ll have the three other products. Beneath that, I’ll have the test link. You don’t really want to have these site wide links where you’ve got left hand navigation.

I’ll pick out a few pages that we use for the site wide links, but typically for those few pages, I’m funneling the link juice straight into almost like a category page rather than individual product pages. On the product pages, I’m linking to other relevant pages using that anchor text.

Let’s say you’re looking at a particular Sony camera or something like that. Clients who looked at this Sony camera also checked out these other Sony cameras. The link is coming from a page talking about Sony, linking to another page with Sony with the right anchor text. I think that’s the way to do it, rather than bury right down in the footer of the page all of the links to their different pages on their websites with the right anchor test. I think you should do that, but really target the key ones that you want to rank for.



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SEO Techniques and Performance Optimization

SEO is a powerful tool when trying to get a website ranked. The fact is, all keywords are fair game, but you have to make that value judgment, do you really want to take on companies that own the keywords loans or mortgages? I learned this from the Ken Evoy Interview.  Some of these are blue chip publicly trading companies with millions of pounds at their disposal to employ some of the world’s best SEO basics minds and SEO teams who continually build back links and so on.

You’ve got to make the decision are you really prepared to take these companies on? Some of them do just own those keywords. So I think there definitely has to be a judgment call. That’s not to say all keywords are impossible. If you were absolutely determined that you wanted to rank number one for loans or mortgages or porn, huge traffic, huge volume keywords, you really have to decide how much time and money you’re prepared to put into it, because it’s going to be a great struggle.

It’s just a matter of identifying that. I look for, I suppose, what you’d say is that low hanging fruit. I go for the second tier to third tier type keywords. Sometimes I go for the long tail really model specific type keywords. Other times I’ll go for ones slightly more aggressive. The way I do it, when you think of a tiered structure of a website, on your home page, tier one is usually that slightly more competitive term. The tier two is slightly less competitive and then tier three is the really long tail words. It all feeds back up to that home page, especially if you get all your on page linking structure right.

Let’s consider why links are so absolutely crucial for SEO.

I deal with a lot of companies and I’m pitching for business. Some of the companies I’m dealing with will actually show me the proposals that my competitors have given them. These proposals will be realms of paper about why they need to optimize the alt text and get a keyword density of 2.57, and they need to rewrite the description tags and so on.

If you do a search in Google and you type in click here and notice Adobe is ranking number one, ranking for the term click here and yet there is apparently no on page SEO done on that, there’s no click here in the title tag, not in the keyword tag, it’s not in the description tag, it’s not mentioned once on the page, it’s not in the site map and so on. Then you realize the point for that term, that surely is because it’s got millions of links around the net pointing to it with the phrase click here. Links are essentially the life blood of SEO.

Links is where it’s at. As far as SEO is concerned, you can rank a website, even a Flash website, that doesn’t have any information that can be read on the site by the search engine. It’s purely based on the number of links and the Adobe example is a perfect example of that.

I don’t know of anyone doing any tests to verify this, but they say the classic 80-20 applies. 80% of your ranking factor comes from links, whereas 20% of your ranking factor comes from your on page optimization. Whether or not that’s true, the idea is, the most important component of any SEO campaign is the links. So I think it just comes back to the way that the Google search algorithm was designed.

It’s based on that academic research report theory and the idea that a research report gains weight in the eyes of the community the more people who are referencing it in their research reports. It’s like one big popularity contest online. It’s citation. The more times you’re cited, your research report gains weight in the community. The same sort of thing is happening online obviously. A citation is when someone links to you from their website. That’s when your website starts to gain a little bit of extra weight.

It’s all about having the right links. It’s also important that those links are saying the right thing when they link to you because you want to make sure you’re telling the search engines what it is that this particular website is about.



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