The Power of Networking

Now that I have some years of experience in the internet marketing world, I would say that there are a couple of crucial turning points which have helped me create the business online I have today. The first of these turning points I would say is the networking. I started going to seminars about a year ago again. I’d probably had done about two hundred seminars, which I really stopped doing in 2001, 2002. I’d go to a couple but I was just out of it. Then I ended up going back to seminars after a few years’ hiatus and I can’t tell you the networks and the people who are out there.

Just as an example one guy who I met at a seminar two years ago, or a year and a half ago, just contacted me. He’s got a list of 50,000 people and he wants to be my affiliate and promote for me. I don’t even remember him. I do now because we’ve talked, but when I first heard from him I said, oh, where did I meet you? Oh, yes, I remember. These networking things are just huge. Really how are you going to get someone to be your affiliate? How are you going to get a network to be your affiliate?

The first thing is, they’ve got to like you. You’ve got to be honest, you’ve got to be straight, you’ve got to be good and creative. You’ve got to have the greatest amount of conversion and all that other stuff. All the numbers have to work. But they have to like you.

People like doing things for people who they like. People generally like people who are in this business who network. Get out, share. These were huge things for me, and I just can’t stress how getting off the desk and getting out into the seminar worked for me. There are some good seminars out there.

Even a bad internet marketing seminar, some of the ones that are $500 or $1000 or whatever, even these cheap ones, even if it’s a product dump, where you’re just going to go and get pitched, look at what they’re pitching. Look at what people are doing. Watch what people are selling. Look at their offer. Look at how they’re collecting the cash and what they’re giving away and what they’re charging. Those are huge.

There’s another turning point for me. Learn to love your spam, learn to love your pop ups. Learn to love your email. Learn to love all the stuff that people normally say, I hate. People say, I hate spam. I say I love spam. Why? Because I can see what people are selling. I can see what’s in my in box. I like pop ups, I like banners, I like contextual ads. I can see what’s going on out in the marketplace. This is competitive intelligence.

I think the breakthroughs and the leverage points are more about shifting your mindset than they are about actually doing anything. Just about taking your business seriously, learning to look at the competition and really getting out there and starting to talk to other people. And also learn SEO step by step as well.

There are a lot of people in my network, and I can just take a sales letter and send it to five or six people who are friends of mine, because we have bought drinks and whatnot, and I’ll get some pretty good feedback from them. These are people who, when you want your product promoted, they’ll promote it.

One guy I knew, I met him a while back at a seminar, he introduced me to an ad rep I’d been looking for who wasn’t returning my call. I’d been trying to reach this particular guy for a while now, and he said, oh, let’s get him on the phone right now. He got him on the phone and he took my call and he said, I’ll answer you’re calls and I’ll call you back. I didn’t know who you were. That’s huge stuff. It’s really about shifting the mindset.

So to summarize, go to seminars and make yourself known, learn to love the advertising of your competitors, and learn to take your business seriously.

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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.

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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.

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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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