Tapping into Paid Traffic
How do you get traffic to your website? This is the number one question that
business owners ask about digital marketing. The truth is that getting
traffic to a website is not a problem. In fact, thousands of traffic platforms,
including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, allow you to buy advertising and would
love nothing more than to send traffic to your website. The question isn’t how to
get traffic; rather, it’s what to do with the traffic when you get it. What product or
service should you offer? What content should you show your visitors? Should you
ask them to give you their contact information or come right out and ask them to
buy a product or service?
Paid traffic is available in many forms, such as pay-per-click advertising using
platforms like Google AdWords, banner ads, and paid ads on social networks that
include Facebook and Twitter. Paid traffic is a powerful tool because it helps to
build your brand, makes people aware of your products or services, and generates
leads and sales for your products and services.
In this chapter, we discuss the major advertising platforms and when you should
choose to use each one. We also show you how to set up a powerful form of adver-
tising called retargeting and how to troubleshoot your ad campaigns to get the
most out of every campaign you run.» Cold traffic: These are people who have never heard of you, your brands, or
your products or services. You have no relationship with these people, but
they are important because they bring new leads and sales to your business.
You must build trust, credibility, and authority with your cold traffic. Before
they agree to buy from you, they need to prove that your brand is a worthy
investment of their time and money. Make ungated offers to valuable content
on your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel to cold traffic. Turn to Chapter 3
for more information about ungated offers.
» Warm traffic: These are people who have heard about you or engaged with
your brand but haven’t bought from you. They may have read your blog,
listened to your podcast, or joined your email newsletter. People in the warm
traffic stage are evaluating whether they like what you say, and are interested
in learning more and possibly purchasing from you. They’re deciding whether
your company is the best option to solve their problem. They’re also evaluat-
ing your competitors to see whether they do it better or more cheaply. Make
entry point offers and gated offers to these folks to get them in the door
without much risk. for more information about entry point
offers and gated offers.
» Hot traffic: As you’ve probably guessed, these are people who have bought
from you. They may be first-time buyers to repeat buyers. These are the
customers you have already spent time, money, and energy to acquire. The
biggest mistake that advertisers make is concentrating only on bringing in
new leads and sales. The savvy marketer also uses paid traffic to sell more
and more often to the customers he already has. Make profit maximizer
offers to hot traffic.
In summary, you want to follow these steps for traffic temperature:
1. Introduce yourself to cold traffic with valuable content.
2. Convert warm traffic to leads and low dollar buyers.
3. Sell more and more often to existing buyers.
Choosing the Right Traffic Platform
Before you craft a marketing message, decide what traffic platform your audience
is using, which you do by determining where your market is “hanging out” online.
The traffic platform you make your offer on is essential to the success of your
campaign. Even with the perfect marketing message, if your ad is placed on the
wrong traffic platform, your entire campaign will fail. For instance, if your target
audience doesn’t use Twitter, you shouldn’t be spending money advertising on it.
You have thousands of traffic stores to choose from, but what traffic store is the best
match for your business? If you’re looking to buy traffic, do so from a source that
can help you reach your market. To reach your market, you must first define your
customer avatar (see Chapter 1 to learn more about creating your customer avatar).
Traffic stores such as Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and others have aggregated
millions of users, and each platform has slightly different demographics. Use
broad demographic information (such as age, gender, and income) to help deter-
mine the correct traffic store that your audiences use, and thus the best store to
reach them on. To help create your customer avatar, use research tools, such as
the analytics software company Alexa. This type of tool gives the user demo-
graphics of traffic stores and websites. Also, research your audiences’ specific
interests (such as their hobbies, the books and blogs they read, authority figures
they follow, and the pain points they have) to determine how to target your audi-
ences after you’re on the platform.
This research takes time, but when done correctly, it helps you determine both the
correct traffic store to advertise on and the message you use to reach out to your
audiences. The next section examines the Big Six traffic stores that you can reach
your audiences on.
Introducing the Big Six traffic platforms
We say it earlier, but it’s worth saying again here: You have thousands of traffic
stores for businesses and marketers to choose from. In this section, however, we
discuss the six main traffic stores on the web today:
1.Facebook
2.Twitter
3.Google
4.YouTube
5.Pinterest
6.LinkedIn
Chances are, your market hangs out on one or more of these traffic stores, allow-
ing you to effectively reach out to your target audience. The Big Six are effective
traffic stores because
» They experience a large volume of users and have the necessary resources
that give you the capability to scale campaigns.
» Their ad interfaces are user friendly and easy to use.
» Their targeting options are (usually) better than other traffic stores on the
web. These traffic platforms allow you to target ads to people based on
everything from their demographics, interests, the keywords they’ve typed
into a search engine, and the pages they’ve visited on your website. For
example, if you sell swimming pools in San Diego, you might target your ads
based on any of the following criteria:
• People who live in San Diego.
• People who are interested in water sports.
• People who typed the query “in ground swimming pool san diego” into a
search engine.
• People who have visited the in-ground swimming pool product page on
your website.
You can, in fact, combine these targeting options to, for example, target people
living in San Diego who have an interest in water sports.
No matter the experience level or the industry of your business, the Big Six give
you effective platforms for reaching almost any market, in almost every part of
the globe. In the following sections, we cover the best uses and nuances related to
dealing with these traffic stores.
With well over 1.7 billion monthly active users (users who have logged in to Face-
book within the last 30 days), Facebook allows you to reach almost any market.
The Facebook Ads Manager is user friendly and offers a multitude of targeting
options, so you can get really specific when targeting your market, thereby mak-
ing your ads more personal and effective. Because Facebook is easy to use and
fairly inexpensive to buy traffic on, it’s a good place to start if you’re new to paid
traffic or are testing a new strategy. Plus, you can apply many strategies used in
Facebook on other advertising platforms.
Ads on Facebook are like commercials on TV or the radio: You’re displaying your
message in front of your audiences, but you’re also interrupting those audiences.
So you need to make sure to put your ads in front of the right people and to give
your audiences a reason to click your ad, which is what the domain registrar and
web hosting company GoDaddy does in the Facebook ad.
At the very least, not reach its full potential. To ensure that you reach the right
audience, your targeting needs to be specific. The more specific your campaign is,
the better it will perform. To improve your campaign’s specificity, answer the fol-
lowing questions about your target market for every ad you plan to run on
Facebook:
» Who are the figures, thought leaders, or big brands in your niche?
Chances are, members of your audience follow these influencers on
Facebook.
» What books, magazines, newspapers do your ideal customers read?
» What events do they attend?
» What websites do they frequent?
» Where do they live?
» What tools do they use? These tools can range from programs such as
Photoshop or Evernote to physical tools such as fishing rods or lawn care
equipment.
» What’s specifically unique about this audience?
By knowing the answers to these questions, you can specifically target your audi-
ences’ likes, behaviors, and locations on Facebook, making your ad more personal
and more likely to be placed in front of an audience who is open to your message.
Also, targeting specific likes and interests helps to narrow down your potential
audience size, which is good because you don’t want it to be too broad; if it is, your
ad can be less effective.
At our company, we have found the most success, in terms of conversions and
high Relevance Scores (the algorithm that Facebook uses to judge the quality of
your ad; similar to Google’s Quality Score) with our Facebook ads when the audi-
ence size is made up of 500,000–1,000,000 people (plus or minus several
thousand — it doesn’t have to be exactly 500,000, for instance; there’s wiggle
room). This way, you’re showing your ad to not only a large enough audience but
also a specific one that will find your ad relevant.
If your business is local (as opposed to a national or international company) and
you’re targeting a specific town, city, state, or region, you don’t have to worry
about the size of your audience. Often, the audience size for local ads on Facebook
doesn’t reach half a million to a million people; the town you’re targeting may not
even have a population of that size. Local businesses don’t need to worry about
audience size but instead should be concerned with how you’re targeting that
audience. All other businesses that aren’t local should focus on how you’re target-
ing your audience and the size of your audience.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your happy
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