Hi, folks...
This issue is one you should read all the way through.
Especially if you're not making the kind of strides you've
wanted in your online efforts.
The article may just be the start of a whole new trend for you.
And the main concept applies to everything you do.
Yes, really. Everything.
"Immediate, Targeted Traffic"
==========================
If you checked out the traffic guide I mentioned in the last
email and didn't get it, think about that again. Especially
after you read this issue.
If you didn't, ignore the long, dull intro. Scroll down to the
bullet list about half way down the page and start reading
there.
http://talkbiz.com/trafficflood/?e=1
No, I didn't write that letter. I'm going to rewrite it,
though. It doesn't begin to do that product justice. (I didn't
write the product, either. It was created by a friend who's got
over a decade of experience in that end of the business.)
Well worth the investment, and it's covered by my usual
guarantee.
"Rigging the Game"
================
Anyone who's been to Vegas more than once knows the one big
reality there: The house always wins.
Sure one person can have a big night and walk away ahead of the
game. But in the long run, the odds are such that the house is
going to be the biggest winner, by far. And, when you have the
numbers of people they have coming through, "the long run"
means... every hour of every day.
The rules are right out there in front of you. For example,
each casino has their payout percentage for the slots posted
somewhere. It's a percentage, always les than 100. So, it might
tell you that for every time you put a dollar in, you're going
to get back, on average, 87 cents.
Nothing crooked about it. The game is rigged, but they tell you
that right up front.
Doing business on the net is a rigged game, too. The only
problem is, you never know the house odds. Unless you set them
for yourself.
....
I'm not talking about cheating. Any system big enough to be
worth cheating is big enough to have security guards. It's
usually not worth the effort and the risk.
Consider the recent Panda and Penguin updates to Google's
ranking algorithm. They were designed to clean out the
"cheaters." The people who played the automated link spamming
game to the point at which the search results folks were
getting had become, on many topics, just about useless.
Panda just discounted those spammy links. Sites that had
previously ruled their keyword selections suddenly had much
less traffic, or no traffic at all. The Penguin was more
vicious. If that one hit you, you could be de-indexed, which
meant you couldn't even be found for the content you
legitimately should have ranked for.
That's an arms race. In the long run, Google sets the rules, so
that's a game they'll win. And if they catch you counting
cards, they're going to bar you from the casino for life.
You don't just lose the game. You're out.
....
Rigging the game means you set things up so the odds are
consistently in your favor. You don't do that by following the
crowd. The crowd is what finances the lights and fancy decor at
those casinos, after all.
For example, when Squidoo and Hubpages were the current fad,
world+dog were scrambling to set up lenses and pages. And,
since they were focused on the cash return, they pushed the
limits of the terms of service of those sites. When the hammer
came down, those pages got yanked.
And, as usually happens when an amateur looks for the quick
score, they made little if any money in the mean time. The more
aggressive black hat types may have made decent money with
them, but only as part of a well thought out process. And, for
them, those were throwaway sites.
This has happened more times over the years than I can count.
Google slaps, AdSense purges, YouTube yanking accounts, Blogger
banning blogs, Facebook fan page forfeitures, etc, yada yada,
ad nauseam. These sites were just not set up for the
convenience of marketers. Nor should they have been.
And whenever any of this happens, the people who created the
pollution and destructive elements scream about how the owners
of those sites are evil, nasty, malevolent monopolists for
wanting to profit off their own creations.
The nerve of those ... those... productive capitalists!
Sheesh. Some people's kids.
....
Rig the game.
I know people who wrote hundreds, and in some cases thousands,
or articles which were all posted to EzineArticles.com. They
competed with the tens of thousands of other articles on the
site, and the only real result each one got was a backlink.
I'm not talking about that machine-spun garbage, either. I'm
talking about folks who put themselves through the grueling
process of hand-writing all that content, only to pass it over
to EZA, who made money on the AdSense clicks from other
people's content. (Legit proposition, as it was all very up
front and properly explained.)
That's a mind-numbing amount of work, with very little return
for each piece of content.
Intelligent syndication of quality content is a whole other
game. One you can rig very heavily in your favor, and which
people will thank you for. Instead of 10 or 20 bits of digital
pablum, you create one quality article and send it out to
dozens (or hundreds) of blogs, newsletters and content sites.
The ones who use it will usually have it as a focus on the day
it's published, and keep it online for a long time.
And, as is always the case with quality content, you can use it
in other ways. It's an asset with potentially growing value to
you, rather than being one more small bit of flotsam in an
ocean of junk.
....
Quality content can be leveraged even further on your own
sites, with Facebook Like buttons, Twitter links, and a Digg
option.
You can start it off by posting the piece to your own site,
with just the article, a subscription form, and some social
bookmarking buttons. If it's good, that can get you subscribers
and friends/followers, along with the social signals ("klout")
that comes from having people talking about your stuff.
And all of those things can be done with the same article or
report.
Multiple ways to benefit from the same piece of content. Now
we're rigging the game.
....
In the midst of all the screaming about sites being blasted
from Google for their sketchy linking tactics, there was a
steady murmur of happiness from sites that saw a big boost in
rankings and traffic because their content now counted again.
Giving the house what it wants doesn't hurt your odds.
....
Another way to flip the percentages: Become an audience
attractor, rather than a reflector.
AdSense sites are reflectors. They exist to create traffic and
then send that traffic on to another site, for a small piece of
the action. That can be a profitable model, to be sure, but
it's not a game for small players.
The same is true for Amazon review sites, and most affiliate
sites. Especially if you do them the way most people do, which
is to sloppily pimp products you haven't bought and don't use.
Bah.
There's nothing wrong with review sites, if you're actually
giving objective reviews on things you're competent to compare.
That is a valuable service. But it's still a reflector.
Sometimes the change is as simple as requiring that people sign
up for notifications, or register to access your content. That
works, if you present a worthwhile value in return.
Same game, but now you control the odds.
Want proof? Look at Angie's List.
....
When most people think about traffic, they think of two
things: Building an email list and getting ranked in the
search engines. That's it.
Those can be enough. Still, SEO is a difficult and
ever-changing game if you want to do it effectively. And
list-building involves a way of thinking that most people just
can't wrap their heads round. It's so simple they can't believe
it, so they make it complicated and difficult. And, of course,
most people don't have the faintest idea of what to do once
they have subscribers.
DUH! You give them what you told them you'd give them when they
signed up.
This ain't rocket science.
Still, there are so many more ways to get traffic that it would
make most people's heads spin. The simplest is: Buy it.
Want to test a new subscription form? Buy some traffic. Get
stats. Then you'll have an idea if it's worth the effort of
sending serious traffic to it.
Want to find out which of two pages works best? Buy some
traffic and compare the results.
Want stats to give your affiliates some real-world stats? Buy a
few targeted solo ads. If it works, you make a profit and can
confidently tell your affiliates about it. If it bombs, you
lose a few bucks, but you don't irritate your affiliates by
encouraging them to send traffic to something that bombs. And
when you get the ad right, you and your affiliates both make
more money.
There are a lot more advantages than that to buying traffic.
The biggest being that you can do it quickly and with no
hassles. You don't have to convince anyone to promote your
products. You don't have to sell your future reputation with
promises of "you email mine and I'll email yours." And, when
you have a profitable offer, you can scale it up by
re-investing the initial spend plus part of the profits.
It never ceases to amaze me that people with perfectly solid
offers and sales funnels will spend months and years, not to
mention thousands of dollars, trying to master SEO. They could
get to the same goal by simply buying small amounts of traffic
until they had a campaign that worked, and then scaling it up.
Screw Google. Take control of your own systems.
That's rigging the game.
And you can get started for a whole lot less than most people
would think. For instance, InfoLinks has intext traffic
available for as little as 2 cents a click. There are tricks to
making that traffic work, and not every niche will have a lot
of traffic available. Still, if the traffic is there and you
learn a few simple things, it can give you a big ROI with very
little effort or expense.
Total minimum spend? $25. And you can split it across
campaigns.
This is not high finance.
....
Instead of doing CPA offers, which can be scrubbed down to the
point where you don't get paid at all, why not set up your own
subscriber or prospect systems?
I spent a couple of days back in 2000 creating a quiz. One day
to write the content and tailor the answers, and another to set
up the software. I had to create the form and template myself.
Then I announced it, with ways for affiliates to get
commissions from the resulting analysis which was mailed to the
people taking it. They all subscribed to my newsletter as part
of the process.
That thing brought in subscribers for years. A few dozen a day
at first, and then finally down to 4 a day on average after
about 4 or 5 years. I had to eventually shut it down when
spammers figured out how to use the software behind it to send
spam through.
There is commercially available software now that makes those
things easy. You could do a pretty decent one in an afternoon.
Let's say it started at the low end where mine finished. Would
you spend an afternoon creating something that got you just 4
subscribers a day, week after week? And then a few days
promoting it?
To rephrase, would you spend 3 days to get 1460 interested and
active subscribers?
Or more? Remember, when I did my first quiz, Facebook didn't
exist. There were no social buttons the visitors could use to
tell others about the thing. And I know they would have, since
so many ended up linking to it from their own sites.
Create something like that which is useful or funny, and
people will talk about it. Make it easy for them to tell their
friends, and you could have a hit on your hands.
Rigging the game, indeed.
....
Mix and match as appropriate.
Create a really useful or entertaining quiz. Pay for traffic,
and let folks know they'll also be getting your newsletter or
whatever when they take it. Offer them a product after they
sign up, as a way to reduce costs, or even turn a profit on the
thing. And give them a way in the answers and on the results
page to tell their friends through social media.
If the content is good, everyone benefits, every time they take
the action you ask them to.
People often say they hate ads. Despite those protestations,
when they click on one and get what the expected, they don't
complain. They buy, or subscribe, or tell their friends.
Don't follow the herd. Take control of your odds.
Rig the game.
....
Take a look at what you're doing now, or what you have
planned. How much of it is in someone else's control? How can
you take that control back, and possibly leverage it to produce
better results?
Spend a few minutes with that exercise, and you may find your
odds of success going up dramatically.
This sort of potential is why I recommend the "Paid Traffic
Course." It's just one way, among many, to take more control
over the odds and create a more profitable future.
You can get that here:
http://talkbiz.com/trafficflood/?e=1
That's a solid introduction to the media buying game. And a
good example of possibility thinking.
Enjoy!
Paul
-----===(*)===-----
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