3 Steps to Getting More Traffic and Higher Conversions

If you had to pick between getting tons of traffic or having a high conversion rate, which one would you pick?

Most marketers churn out content for SEO rankings, build backlinks for offsite optimization and may even invest in PPC at some point.

Whether your objective is to get people to buy, opt in to your list or download your content, you need to understand the significance of both.

All traffics are not created equal

It’s surprising to me when I hear business owners and bloggers ask the question, “how do I get more traffic?”

Sure, traffic is important and with lots of traffic you won’t need a high conversion rate. It becomes a numbers game.

On the other hand high conversion says you’re selling to the right people at the right time at the right place. It’s how well you’re able to connect with your customer.

So why can’t you do both?

That’s precisely what successful businesses do when it comes to Internet marketing. They drive highly targeted traffic to relevant content that leads to rapid conversions.

So how do you go about getting quality traffic? Simple, here is a three step process to get you started.

1. Start with the right expectations

The art of getting traffic goes back to the roots of direct response marketing.

Specially the why, who, what where and how of your target. It’s often referred to as the Five W’s and one H. You can see an example of this concept in the post Social Media Science: The Five W’s of Twitter Marketing.

In the case of traffic you need to start by asking the right question that solves the right problem.

It’s like going to the doctor’s office when you’re sick and you expect the doctor to ask you how you feel not what your favorite TV show is.

Pinpoint the right problem is how you can make meaningful assumptions to achieve your desire outcome. This calls for a bit of critical thinking.

Getting on the first page of Google won’t mean much if you don’t get any clicks. After all there are a bunch of ads all around it fighting for attention and clicks.

Here are some questions you need to consider to get started:

Why would someone click on it? (you’re not the only one with relevant title)
Who should click on it? (are you talking to the right prospects?)
What would clicking on your link do for them? (what do they really want?)
Where does the link take them? (what click path are they on? What are the options?)
How would you maintain a visitor’s interest? (how do you stay relevant?)

These questions serve as the foundation to help you identify your main objective of getting traffic: What’s the desire outcome?

Think holistically. Then think specifically.

What is the end goal that you have in mind? In other words, you need to have a real, tangible result in mind.

You want sales? Great, how much sales? From where? When?

How would those statistics stack up again what’s going on now?

By setting the proper expectations you get altitude on what matters in your pursuit to traffic. It brings clarity to how your traffic generation tactics fit into the overall strategy.

Then it all comes down to executing and measuring the effectiveness of each tactic you employ.

2. Convince people with compelling content

Measuring results is hard to do and often the results will manifest themselves into insights other than the website. This is why you need to realize that traffics are actually people.

And people want to be treated like a human being regardless of what campaign you run. At some point you will need to use a combination of words and images to grab attention and understand the psychology of your customers.

People often think they know what they need, but they don’t take action to fulfill those needs because they simply can’t justify the benefits of buying.

Why buy this now? Why should I buy it from you?

Aim for emotions that matters to people. People are more likely to buy from those they trust and like so show them who you are.

What are your values? Bring some social proof and authority but also show your personality. Be human.

Once you establish some level of rapport, you need to make sure that they “get” the immediate impact that you can make going forward.

You can do that by showing them why they need what you have right now using effective content and marketing strategies.

3. Measuring performance and results

It you sell stuff online it’s relatively easy to assess whether things are working or not. You can get to the bottom line with total sales, orders and customers or you can use metrics like the conversion rate to give you a sense of how effective the site is in turning visitors to customers.

That’s measuring results.

But if you run non-transactional websites, you need to have a different perspective to measure your return on investment. Specifically you will need to look at the activities that happen on the site.

This is measuring performance.

These are probably the best way to gauge your conversion rate which requires a level of scientific assumptions.

Does the number of visits have an impact on the awareness of the campaign?
How does pages views relate to the amount of information being consumed?
How many people took the action that you’ve put in place? Such as download a PDF content or request for moreinformation via a contact form.
Where are people “going” on your site? You can craete a visual of your visitor’s click path by using Google Analytics content Drilldown and In-Page analytics

Basically you can make some pretty reasonable assumptions using web analytics system, but it simply can’t tell you exactly what the visitors ended up doing at the end.

This is why it’s important to measure results not just performance. Results bring you insights that will tell you more about your target audience than your website.

It therefore requires a lot of thinking and coming up with the right hypothesis for testing.

Free vs paid tactics

Most of us don’t know what we don’t know that’s how we end up wasting hours on tactics that will never work.

This is especially true when it comes to implementing your traffic generation strategies.

Here are some “free” tactics to get traffic:

Submit your site to search engines, content directories, news sites, social bookmarking sites, RSS aggregators and share them on social networks
Publish quality content (articles, videos, podcasts, infographics) that embeds the keywords you want to rank in mind
Guest post on blogs in your niche area that ranks high, you can start with Google contextual search
Comment on other people’s blog by elevating the conversation not spamming with your links
Start conversations in social media and make sure you include links to your website on your profile page. You can start by answering questions on Linked or respond on Twitter
Build an email list if you don’t already have one and direct them to your web properties
Sign up for HARO and participate
Submit content to free press release websites, check out this list of paid and free ones
Include links in your outbound documents to clients such as invoices, postcards, RFPs, reports, make it fun and interesting (has to be done tastefully)

Although those are considered free tactics, they may not be free if you don’t get the results you want. And don’t forget your time isn’t free!

Now here are the no so free tactics:

Advertise on websites where your target audience visits the most (e-publications, web portals, forums or blogs), this can be in the form of banners, sponsored content, endorsed links or joint venture promotions
Contribute (recycle) content to partners, affiliates and complimentary products (make sure you arm them with tools to market your name)
Sponsor events or better yet start one, even a Twitter chat is a start
The good’o pay-per-click on Google still works but also checkout Bing and Facebook, both have less competition and spam
Hire writers and bloggers to help you create content using services such as Junta42 or use the Problogger job board
Join a paid networking group both online or offline, you can find some via Ning or Meetup
Submit content to paid press release website, check out this list of paid and free ones
Publish an eBook, write a report (whitepaper) or webinar
Start a giveaway

The take away: As I write this I know there are new ways to get traffic such as hiring people on Fiverr to fabricate you arbitrary social proof.

Just remember that black hat tricks such as the ones BMW and JC Penney did will ultimately hurt you in the long run.

So be honest with what’s working and what isn’t, what was smoking mirror and what wasn’t. Keep doing what’s working and stop doing what’s not. Done right, getting traffic is a lot like selling water in the desert.

Remember, the quality of your traffic has a direct impact in the rate of your conversion.

Not only will you need to understand why they’re here, you need to be able to convince them to take the action you want them to take.

So stop focusing on obtaining large amount of unqualified traffic.

Instead focus on collecting and profiling your prospects and customers. There is no excuse now with all the advance tools you can profile just about anyone using a combination of social CRM and behavior targeting techniques.

How to Create Magnetic Copy to Maximize Your Content Appeal

by Eric Tsai

Getting people to take actions from your content requires a deep connection with your audience.

We all know the need to implement the right tactics to capture the emotion that leads to those desirable actions. Provide valuable content, use ethical SEO (search engine optimization) tactics, give away free eBooks, free webinars, whitepapers, special reports, you name it.

But if you really want to elevate your conversion rate, you need to understand the art and science of content marketing.

You need to figure out what motivates your audience to click here and sign up there.

Why people give their emails away to complete strangers, follow every call-to-action and come back for more.

Let’s look at the 3 keys of creating powerful content to help you increase your product appeal.

Grab and Keep Attention

How do you read newspaper? How about magazines? Do you every sentence of every word from start to finish cover to cover?

If you do, that’s great, but for rest of us we scan.

In today’s drive-by attention grabbing culture, people do judge a book by its cover.

That’s why magnetic copy must have magnetic headlines that get people curious. It should always be organize around benefits, the “what’s in it for me” must jump out at your prospective customers.

This is why content marketing mimics the format of news with powerful headlines, sub-headlines and bullets. Simply put, human beings are wired to tune out advertising because that’s the natural of our brain to detect deceptions.

People have less resistance with news style formatted content than advertising that looks like, well, advertising!

So start getting into the mindset that you need to write effective copy in order to grab and keep attention.

Focus your coy on the results that your customer will get instead of what your product does or the fancy technology behind it. Research your customer’s behaviors, attitudes and demographics.

People only really care about themselves so keep your copy simple to the point and write in a way as if it’s you and one other person that are in conversation.

Your content can break through the noise if it’s interesting and exciting.

Demonstrate Social Proof

Ever since we’re little we associate ourselves with certain type of identifiers. Whether it’s the cloths we wear, the car we drive, the food we eat, the music we listen to, we’re obsessed with being part of a group.

This is human nature and the foundation of our society.

When people first land on your website or visits your social media profile they are looking for validation. The idea of social proof is all about perceived value of your influence and authority.

Who you are, what you do and why should people trust you?

You simply can NOT ignore the fact that people will form opinions in their own mind that reflects the perceived status of your stuff. You literally have less than 10 seconds to make an impression and that’s your instant reputation.

If you want your visitors to stay you must show them you’ve got the goods.

You can do this by leveraging testimonials and user-generated content (UGC) such as reviews or questions and answers (Q&A). Then follow up with some high value stuff that resonates with them right away.

Another method is to show the number of subscribers, comments, retweets or followers you have. The bottom line is that social proof is all about positioning.

Get Them To Take Action

So now you’ve demonstrated your expertise across multiple communities. The next step is to get your audience to take action.

Getting people to take action on the internet is all direct response marketing strategy with effective copywriting techniques. This means integrating measurable call-to-action that gets your visitors to do what it is that you want them to do.

It can be as direct as asking people to buy your product, contact you, input their personal information, share your content or leave a comment.

The trick here is that you must provide enough real value to earn the trust of your prospective customer so you can start building a relationship with them.

People are more likely to do what you ask if you’re open, honest and transparent.

Speak like a friend and stay relevant is the key to motivate people to take action.

The take away: Magnetic copy is about appeal and getting attention not about you or what you know. It’s about becoming your customer and getting people genuinely interested so they will want to know more, see more and take actions that you anticipated by design.

Your customers don’t want your product, service or sign up for anything. What they want is the solution to their problems.

Sure you can create content that appears to do that but ultimately magnetic content helps connecting the dots in all your information to drive out miscommunication.

Real effective content actually does help people and get them the result they want.

How about you? Are you creating content that sticks? Share your top tip for creating effective content in the comments.

Why You Should Be In This $50 Billion Dollar Information Marketing Business

by Eric Tsai

Information Marketing

You understand the power of the social web so you set out to master the art of internet marketing. Perhaps you went through some training, attended seminars or read a bunch of great books. You get it.

It’s all about building traffic adding subscribers and ultimately generating a revenue-generating machine. You’ve heard all the hype about social media, SEO and information marketing but the truth is you need a strategy.

Web Strategy Is Business Strategy

The backdrop is set for businesses big or small to become the next millionaire expert, advice guru or information marketer. Regardless of what business you have or what industry you’re in, you need to understand that the biggest opportunity in the history of marketing is here.

Peter Drucker predicted that there would be a evolution in society brought about by information. He argues that although information is conceptual, the meaning is perception.

According to him, the largest working group will become what he calls knowledge workers. The defining characteristic of these knowledge workers is the level of their formal education and training.

Since information is basically content with relevance and purpose, converting them requires knowledge, a specialized knowledge in which people must learn and understand in order to take action.

And relevance and purpose follows the rate of change that’s happening with our society.

We still follow the Maslow’s Law of Hierarchy, maintaining the same needs and wants, but with very different perception of how to obtain them, who to get them from and what to do with the knowledge.

Keep in mind that those needs somehow always comes back to health, wealth and relationships.

Internet Marketing Is Information Marketing

Where are the hottest markets with the biggest opportunities?

According to Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker, online advertising has a $50 billion dollar opportunity simply because eyeballs are moving online!

People spend more and more time online (Some support data here) and the ad dollars just follow people to the web and this is where the change is happening.

Today every business is an information business, everyone idea can become the big idea and even if you don’t have a business yet, you can start from scratch and earn substantial income doing internet marketing as an author, speaker, coach, seminar leader, and online information marketer.

There is no doubt that this trend will continue.

In a paradigm shift like this you can defy conventional wisdom to create new markets without having to fight for competitive advantage, battle over market share, and struggle for differentiation.

Need more facts about this emerging trend?

Check out who’s spending the big bucks online already. There shouldn’t be any surprise that brands like AT&T, Amazon, Expedia or eBay are paying Google to be found online.

How Much Big Brands Are Spending On Google

What most don’t realize is that there is a relatively unknown spenders that’s throwing gobs of cash at online advertising.

Take a look at the number 2 spender in June, Apollo Group, the company behind The University of Phoenix.

They are spending almost as much as AT&T who was trying to direct traffic to its site to sell iPhone 4s. According to Apollo’s income statement (as a public company), the company totally annual revenue is close to $5 billion with a growth rate of 25% per year for the last 3 years.

The company’s primary business is to provide educational programs, trainings and certifications.

Again, this goes back to the explosion of the information era and the need to have knowledge to stay relevant – the idea of becoming a knowledge worker.

3 Key Strategies of Internet Marketing Success

STRATEGY1: CONTENT MARKETING

The main formula of a successful internet marketing strategy is content marketing. It’s about demonstrating your expertise by focusing on high value content delivery.

Great content grabs attention and connects prospects with their emotional needs, it’s the foundation to build your trust, gain credibility and establish authority.