Traffic. Free? Paid? Where do I start?

Okay, so over the past few months my articles have been focused on helping you begin to build out your own sales funnel. From building your squeeze page to analysing and tracking your results, we’ve covered the basics.

Now, let’s assume you have a sales funnel that you’ve built and you at that point where you’re ready to do some testing.

What do you need now? You need traffic. You need to send some consistent traffic flowing to your funnel in order to determine what is going to work and what need immediate changes.

Web traffic is always a huge discussion in internet marketing. Where do you get it? How much do you need? What “kind” of traffic do I need? What’s the best resource for quality traffic? How “targeted” does my traffic need to be? How much should I pay for traffic? Should I even pay for traffic at all..?

Those are some of the questions I get all the time about getting traffic to your offer.

So let’s dig in.

First of all, let me explain that I’ve been in the internet marketing industry for almost 15 years now and I’ve seen just about everything when it comes to traffic generation.. and I know what works, what doesn’t, and what’s easiest for your business.

If you were to ask me how to get the best, most reliable traffic for your offer..

I have 2 words for you:
Buy it.

Buy it and get used to the fact that you are buying it.

There is always going to be that question of “free vs. paid” traffic. But let me explain something about traffic.. and please tattoo this on your brain (or at least write it down and remember it)..

What about FREE traffic?

No matter what people tell you or try to sell you, there is no such thing as free traffic.

Every person that visits your website you will work for, and pay for.

You will pay for your traffic either with your money, or with your time. And since your time is worth money.. it all sort of ends up leveling out after all is said and done.

Traffic is one of the costs of doing business, and when you’re buying traffic you are essentially paying someone (or some company) for the service of sending people to your website. When you look at it that way, as a business expense, it starts to make more sense in the overall scheme of things.

Again, accept the fact that you’re paying for traffic either with your money or with your time.

Personally I prefer to pay for my traffic with money. Why? Because I don’t have the time that it takes to generate traffic without money 🙂

Here’s my reasoning..

If I go out and actually buy my traffic, I can use the time that I have saved to be more productive in perfecting my sales processes (among other things). And I can use that time to analyse the traffic that I do have coming in. I guess it’s a productivity thing for me and it makes more sense than spending all that time trying to get my sites to the top of Google and hoping that the right people will find them.

I would rather pay someone to send me the right people, so I can focus on making money. Simple as that I suppose.

There are pros and cons of course, so what are some of the pros of paid traffic?

• You can get as much traffic as you like, very quickly
• You can be more targeted in your traffic selection (more qualified clicks)
• YOU control the quantity (and quality) of your traffic.
• Paid traffic is instantly scalable.
• With a consistent stream of targeted traffic, you can test the effectiveness of your campaigns and get far more accurate results.

And what are some of the cons of paid traffic?

• You have to spend money to make money
• Traffic is limited by your budget.
• You could get ripped off by less-than-honest traffic vendors
• Your marketing needs to be in place before you buy traffic.

When it comes down to it, the only cons of paid traffic are money-related. Spending money and losing money.

In contrast, when considering the “traditional” sources of what people would call “free” traffic, you would essentially be putting out a huge effort for traffic quantity and quality that you simply have no control over.

Is paid traffic appropriate for a “newbie” marketer?

That’s a very frequently asked question, and it’s a good one. But I’m going to give you a different answer than what you’ve probably heard before.

In my opinion, the first thing to learn about internet marketing is NOT how to get traffic. You need to learn how to convert traffic into buyers before you even consider buying traffic. Most new marketers will just go right for the traffic, and that’s the wrong move. You need to learn how to build your own sales funnels, and how to write effective copy, and how to influence people with your words… first!

So to answer that question, NO traffic is appropriate for newbie marketers.. until you’ve learned how to be a marketer (and having a marketing budget is part of being a marketer).

So where does someone in internet marketing buy traffic?

Well in my case I built the entire foundation of my online business on these traffic sources:

1. Solo ads
2. Email marketing
3. Facebook PPC

Okay, ‘email marketing’ isn’t really a traffic source but it’s where most of my sales come from, and I get traffic from my email lists so I’d say it’s a legitimate traffic source.

So as you can see, I buy my traffic, and I always have.

I buy solo ads, which means I’m buying clicks to my website. I buy clicks through Facebook. But when all is said and done they cost me nothing.. because I spend the rest of my time making my sales funnels more efficient and more profitable.

Learn copywriting, learn sales funnels, learn email marketing, buy traffic.

And in conclusion, here is a notable point with regards to my results I’ve achieved online:

When I started using paid traffic to build my lists and make sales was when I started seeing “real” success in this business.

When something works, you stick with it. Once you learn how to make paid traffic work for your business, it will be all you need.

Make sure you are on our list for when our TRAFFIC SYSTEM Launches:

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Thanks for reading.

– Geoff Stephen