The Importance Of Multiple Sources Of Traffic

With any online promotional campaign, it is obviously important to get targeted traffic. It is quite possible to target down to a very granular level.

It is indeed amazing how granular you can get with some of this targeting. There’s a process we’re using now which people should look into. It’s called remarketing or retargeting. This is something we’re doing on the Traffic Evolution review site. When people go to our website and they don’t buy, they’re cookied. When they visit a site in the Yahoo network or AOL or Time Warner or Fox News or any of these large tier one sites, our banners follow them around and actually stalk them.

It’s a really interesting way that you can do targeting right now. Google doesn’t have a lot of those targeting things. In search engine optimization, you’ll never be able to do that. You could never retarget to people because you’re not using any technology that you own. You’re using somebody else’s process.

That’s something I want to say that’s really important. Either you’re in control of your business or somebody else is. If you’re relying on search engine optimization, then Google, Yahoo and Bing are in control of your business. At any given time they could stop sending you traffic. It is their right to stop sending you traffic if they want to, because it’s their traffic. When people really start to understand that it is not a sustainable business model, they really start to look at going outside.

I want to say something about Google AdWords. I love Google AdWords. I think it is a great place for people to go to cut their teeth. But Google has got this system, and if you’ve used it you know, and if you haven’t used it you’re going to find out, where it’s like they know the ads that are performing best for you and they start raising your bids as soon as they start performing.

People have spent huge amounts of money getting less traffic than they should, because Google decided there was something about their page they either didn’t like or for whatever reason they’re going to charge you more money.

Nowadays when Google slaps you, they actually don’t show any ads, no matter how much you bid, and if they ban you, they ban you for life. So people who are bound and determined to use Google should make sure they stay in Google’s very good graces. Spending money is not a panacea here. Perry Marshall just reported that one of his clients spends a million dollars a year with Google. This is $85,000 a month, and they just got banned. They don’t sell a blog or some Google thing, they sell coffee.

So if it can happen to them and it can happen to the people that we’re hearing from- you don’t have to take my word for it. Go over to one of the discussion boards, Warriors or something like that, they’re abuzz about all these Google accounts being banned and them really cracking down. Use Google, use SEO techniques but I think people need to look outside that single traffic source for their business.

I think this is really critical for people to learn that they need to look outside for other traffic sources. I’ve had plenty of clients and even myself have had more than one AdSense account banned. When you’re building a business around one particular method and model, Jay Abrahams always talks about having those pillars and making sure you’ve got something that is supporting your business so that if that one pillar gets wiped away, you’re not up the creek without a paddle.

Listen To This Jonathan Mizel Interview To Learn More About Internet Marketing. Visit: http://www.podcastinterviews.com

Targeting For Your Ad Networks

Driving traffic to a new website is the first important step in any online campaign. I’m going to talk a little bit about targeting. That’s what’s really nerve wracking to a lot of people but I want to tell you there is light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of people have set up campaigns with say, the Right Media Exchange directly, which you can get to through AdBuyer or one of the Google networks. They’ve set up these ad campaigns and they’ve decided to use the automatic targeting feature. They let the ads run for maybe $300-$500 and they see a couple of clicks and no conversions so they can the account.

Over the course of a couple of weeks certainly, but maybe even a week, the networks start to return intelligence to the system that says, people on this site like the banner and people on that site don’t. People on this site actually convert, people on this site opt in. It takes more than some SEO skills for this strategy.

Practically all of these networks, have a little tracking code that they’ll allow you to add to your website which will allow them to see how many conversions you’re making. What we’re really looking for, is being able to get these networks to not sell you advertising, but to be your affiliate.

When they’re your affiliate, they figure out where the sales are and you only pay them on a per sale basis. That is the kind of deal you’re only going to get if you’ve got the highest conversion rate, earnings per click, earnings per cost per thousand. When you really start to get your metrics down, that’s when you’re putting yourself in a position to actually make these guys your affiliate.

When you can get these guys to be your affiliate, I want you to realize something. A lot of people think the holy grail is CPA, but it’s not. The CPA networks are cesspools of fraud, of lousy offers, of illegal activities. I think we’re going to see a lot of those people go to jail, get shut down, get sued into oblivion. The practices they’re using dictate that and that’s what should probably happen to a lot of them.

When you go into that realm, you’re dealing with affiliates, and affiliate marketing in general, who have, and I don’t want to paint the whole industry like that, but even the top players have a lot of fraud. By a lot I mean, sometimes 15-20% of the traffic and the orders and the sales are fake. The affiliate gets the money and you’re stuck with the mess to clean up afterwards.

When you’re running on AOL or Yahoo or a big network, they don’t have fraud in their network on a CPA basis. They don’t hire fifty people in India to buy your product twenty times so they can get a wire with a commission and then share the money with the Russian hackers who gave them the credit card numbers or whatever they do. They’re just somebody in New York who sells advertising. When you can get the networks to be your affiliates, the quality of the traffic is so much higher than when you’re dealing with a CPA network just because of the nature of the people.

It’s harder to get in, it’s harder to get the offers approved, but that’s cool. Let me tell you a story. I had an offer a while back.

We have a big ISP internet access provider in America called Juno. Now if you’re Ford or General Motors or IBM and you call them, they’re going to charge you for a little banner spot between $10,000-$20,000 to be on their home page. There were not a lot of advertisers during this period when I started doing this. I told these guys that I wasn’t going to pay that, but I wanted the spot. I’d rather just pay them a commission.

For months and months I had two or three of my offers on the Juno NetZero home page. It would be like being on the AOL home page. There are huge amounts of traffic coming in and I only paid $40-$50 whenever a sale was made.

In the old days, people would not do that. The networks would not do that. Nowadays if they like you, if they like your offer, if they know you can pay, if they know you’re not a cheat, if they know your products are good and you’re doing a good job, you have a good shot at getting them to be your affiliate. That is like the holy grail.

Listen To This Jonathan Mizel Interview To Learn More About Increasing Your Traffic. Visit: http://www.podcastinterviews.com

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.