Archive for category Traffic
Products as a traffic strategy – The Idea Stage
Posted by Rohit Sinha in Monetization, Traffic on June 17th, 2009
My last post, where I talked about how creating products and signing up lots of affiliates is the best traffic strategy generated quite a bit of interest. So I decided to dig a little deeper.
In this post, we will talk about how to come up with ideas for creating your products. Remember, we don’t want to create any old product. We want to create products that will double up as a traffic strategy.
People
In every market, there are three types of people:
- Those who will NEVER buy something, no matter what. They keep looking for freebies.
- Those who will buy eventually, if you convince them enough that the product is good, is what they need, doesn’t cost much, and there is no risk involved in the purchase, and so on.
- Those who will buy something the moment you show it to them.
Now, every person at some stage is in one of the above three “roles.” It depends on the person’s mood, what he/she is looking for at the moment, how important s/he thinks it is, whether or not s/he is looking for something at all, and so on.
So, which person/role from the above list is the best, as far as you are concerned?
Why, the third one, of course – the one who will buy from you the moment you present something to him/her. After all, we SBIers are not very good copy writers and don’t want to become too salesy in our approach. It’s better to cater to someone who is already willing to buy. It’s easier to do, more profitable, and leaves us with a cleaner conscience.
OK, keep that in mind.
Products
Similarly, in any market/niche, you can create three types of products:
- Those that no one will ever buy, no matter what.
- Those that people will buy eventually, if you convince them enough.
- Those that will get sold the moment people learn about it.
Which type of product do you want to create? 
The same reasoning applies here too.
Alright, moving on…
You
So what you want to do here is to:
- Create products that get sold the moment people learn about it
- And then present it to people who will buy it the moment you show it to them
Right? That’s the road to maximum, easiest, and quickest profits. Right?
OK.
People
So now that we have decided we want to go for the people who buy something the moment you show it to them, who are these people?
There could be more, but in my opinion, they can be classified into two groups:
- Those who want to get rid of, or avoid, some kind of pain, embarrassment, fear, troubles, guilt, and so on, and want to do it NOW. People with toothaches, babies crying non-stop, some pain in a body part that they can’t tell everyone about, belated birthday/anniversary gifts, and so on.
- Those who are passionate about something to the point of being fanatic and irrational. Sports fans, music fans, pet lovers, movie buffs, coin collectors, and so on. Most hobbies, in fact.
Every market or niche has these two kinds of people. Yours has them too. Look for them.
Products
So if you want your product to sell well, it has to cater to one of the two types of people I mentioned above. And what else?
Remember we are relying on affiliates to come to our aid and promote it for us? But affiliates won’t do it out of charity, or because they are your friends (well, some of them may be, but you would like more of them to promote your product, won’t you?).
And you don’t want to only be “promoted” by affiliates who mass-add affiliate links to some sort of directories or junk sites.
Good affiliates want two things in a product they promote:
- It should sell well. If the affiliate sends X people to your sales page, as many of them as possible should end up buying the product. The more, the better.
- The affiliate should get a nice commission on each sale. The more, the better.
You
You are taking care of the first condition by catering ONLY to the right group of people, as mentioned above.
And in order for the affiliate to get a nice commission on each sale, you want to create a product that has a high price.
Which means you don’t want to create a $7 product or a $17 product. You need to create a high priced item, if you want to attract lots of affiliates. How high is high, depends on your market, of course. Try to keep the price slightly higher than your competition, but not too high.
But a high price implies a high value in the eyes of the buyer, which means you need to create a great product that justifies the price.
Value, of course, has no relation to the number of pages (if it’s an ebook, for example). I once purchased a short report/ebook that cost $97 and consisted of 11 pages. But I was very happy with the purchase, because I used the information in the report and earned $1700 in one day. Gimme more such $97 reports, and I will buy all of them. I don’t care if it’s 1 page, 11 pages, or a hundred pages. All that matters is the value I get out of it.
So don’t try to add fluff to your product just to try to increase its value. Fluff and filler will actually decrease the perceived value of your product. Instead, try to actually add value.
Alright, back to…
People
Now that we understand the theory, it’s time for some action. Let’s look for the people who will readily buy from us.
Go to forums in your niche and start looking for threads that ask a question. Keep noting down the questions. Don’t think, just take notes. The time to think will come later.
In addition to forums, you can also try Yahoo Answers, Google Groups, and so on. Do your research on as many community sites as you can.
(Do not ever think of asking your site visitors or newsletter/ezine subscribers what they want. It rarely works for the group of people we are looking for. It does work, but only when you have a VERY loyal following who will ACTUALLY tell you all about their pains, ambitions, embarrassments, and so on. In most cases, people will tell you they want X, and then when you create it, hardly anyone will actually buy it. So make your decision based on what they do (ask questions in the forums, for example), not on what they say to you.)
When you have exhausted all the sites, and taken as much notes as you can, it’s time to review your list of questions.
Categorize the questions into these three categories:
- Questions that are about avoiding or getting rid of some kind of pain, or embarrassment, fear, guilt, etc.
- Questions that are about some kind of passion related to your market/niche.
- Others. (These are to be rejected.)
Basically, you only want to be collecting questions from people who belong to one of the two groups I mentioned above (avoiding pain, etc., or passionate fans).
At this point, you may have several questions left in your list, and combined together, they represent several potential ideas for…
Products
So which of these product ideas will you work on first? The one that is most likely to sell, right? And which one would that be?
If you can spot a definite pattern in your list of questions, that’s obviously a popular topic that bothers/excites a lot of people, and would be a good candidate for a product.
But if there is more than one such potential product, what do you do? Pick a clear winner, or pick the one that you like better or find easier to create, or if you can’t decide at all, just pick one randomly.
The important thing is to PICK one and STICK to it till it’s done. Don’t make the mistake of working on more than one product at a time. Finish the first one, and THEN move on to the next one in your list.
You
If you think you learned something from this post, you are not getting it. This post is not about learning. It’s not even about inspiration.
It’s about action. Go and take action.
Now!
Because the best of ideas don’t make any money till executed. The better you are at executing ideas, the quicker you put them into action, and the more consistent you are into putting ideas into action as soon as you get them, the more money you will make.
So go and come up with your single best product idea, and post it here as a comment if you want. And if you have any questions, you can ask those too, and I will try my best to answer them.
Edit: Thanks to Mimi from http://www.feel-great-about-yourself.com/ for raising a very important point that I forgot to address in this post. This is what I for focusing on the structure and rhythm of the post too much… People, Product, You… People, Product, You… People, Product, You… bah! Anyway, to read Mimi’s comment click here. Be sure to read my reply just below her comment, and don’t forget to post a comment yourself.
The BEST Traffic Strategy, Ever
Posted by Rohit Sinha in For Every SBIer, Traffic on June 13th, 2009
So as promised in my last post about how HARD work is your best way to eliminate competition, I am going to discuss what I feel is the best traffic strategy ever.
The big picture of why we want traffic
So why do we want traffic? No, really. Why?
Because we want to make money, right?
Yes, big traffic numbers make us feel good about all the hard work we have been putting in, but good feelings don’t put money in the bank, do they?
We want traffic because we want money. The more traffic you have, the more money you can potentially make.
This is true no matter what niche you are in. Some niches are inherently more monetizable than others, but in general, in any given niche, your income is directly proportional to your traffic.
Now that we have established that, let’s move on to the next point. Because if you remember from my last post, I said this traffic strategy also doubles up as a monetization strategy. (Actually, this is a monetization strategy that doubles up as a traffic strategy too.) Don’t worry, it will all make sense very soon.
How most of us SBIers monetize our sites
There are several monetization methods listed in the monetization HQ, but the most common monetization method used by most SBIers is affiliate links inserted strategically into content pages.
Right?
So suppose you get 100 visitors a day to a particular page, out of which you send 10 visitors a day to a particular merchant using your affiliate link. And suppose 1 in 10 of those visitors ends up buying that $20 product, for which you get paid $10.
Those are all made up figures, and I chose them only because the math will be easier. (Yes, MATH! Now, don’t get scared, it’s not difficult at all.) I am also assuming there is no other monetization method being used on that page, which is the way it should be anyway. Just one MWR per page.
In the above example, you are getting paid $10 for every 100 visitors to that page, or 10 cents per visitor.
How much do you think the merchant is getting paid?
Well, you sent that evil merchant 10 visitors, out of which 1 visitor bought their crappy $20 product, out of which they gave you $10 in commissions, keeping $10 to themselves.
$10 for 10 visitors, or $1 per visitor.
In case you missed it, let me repeat it:
You make 10 cents per visitor, and the merchant makes $1 per visitor – 10 times more than you do!
Not.
Bad.
At.
All!
So whose traffic is better? Yours, or the merchant’s?
Now, moving on to the next point:
The merchant’s is bigger than the affiliate’s – traffic, that is
So you think you are making good money sending traffic to that merchant, because they convert at 10%.
Guess how many OTHER affiliates are thinking the same thing?
LOTS! And a LOT of affiliates are sending traffic to the merchant.
If the product is good, and the sales page converts well, it’s no surprise to see a thousand or more affiliates trying to send traffic to the merchant.
Even if each of the affiliates send the merchant just one visitor per day on average (some will send more, some less, some none, but let’s say this is the average), the merchant gets 1000 visitors per day to the page that makes him $1 per visitor.
That equals $1000 per day in profits.
Not.
Bad.
At.
All!
Most affiliates don’t make that much in a whole month, let alone one day.
Do you see what monetization and traffic strategy I was talking about?
Of course you get it by now, but for the sake of completeness, I want to say that the best traffic strategy in my opinion is to have your own product, and sign up as many affiliates as you can.
Not only will you get more traffic, but you get better paying traffic too, in terms of dollars earned per visitor. And you will start getting this traffic much quicker than you would by creating content pages and trying to rank in the search engines.
This is not a knock on content as a traffic strategy
No way.
Creating content is a great way to get traffic, even when you have your own product(s), because the traffic that you get this way is traffic that is your own. And you don’t have to pay any commissions or advertising costs for this traffic.
But having your own affiliates will really take it to the next level, and help you reach places, people and markets that you couldn’t have reached otherwise. At least not this quick.
In fact, I suspect that the most successful SBIers (in terms of money) all have their own products or services.
Next steps
Here is the action plan, if you agree with me about this:
- Decide what you want to create and sell as a product. Make sure it’s something others would want to pay money for.
- Find a cave to hide in while you create your products, so no one can disturb or distract you. It’s going to take a couple of months at least, so make sure you are well fed all this while.
- Once the product is complete, the proof reading and the design (ecover as well as the design of the product itself) are done, put it up on Clickbank or some other affiliate network/marketplace.
- Go hunting for affiliates. Contact other website owners and ask them to promote your product. Don’t just rely on Clickbank for this. The hunting bird gets the most worms. Keep hunting.
- Keep creating content on your site to pull in more search engine traffic.
Easy, huh?
Well, no. It’s not easy. It’s hard.
Coming up with a good topic for your product is hard work. You want a topic that bugs people so much they want to pay good money for a solution (your product).
Creating the actual product is hard work. You, an SBIer tortoise, would create nothing less than stellar, would you?
And all the other steps involved in product creation and design, writing a sales page that converts well, signing up with Clickbank (or whatever), signing up an army of affiliates, etc. is hard work too.
You need to figure out a lot of stuff and go through a lot of difficulties.
And that is exactly why you should do it. Because it’s hard, most people find it easier to just take the easy way out and become affiliates.
And work hard to make one tenth of the money per visitor they could make and get a tenth of the traffic they could get (meaning they make a hundred times less money than they could).
The choice is yours.
Hard work, or working hard? Which one?
At this point, I could have easily recommended a resource for you to check out, to help you create products easily. But I don’t want to do that. I want to keep this blog free of any ads, affiliate links, and so forth, so I can provide my best ideas to you without any greed on my part. The purpose of this blog is to share with my fellow SBIers, and not to make money.
So will you be kind enough and post a comment below, so I can know if this post strikes a chord with you? Or if you think the post sucked, let me know too. Let’s have a discussion going!
Update: I created a follow-up post discussing how to come up with product ideas that will sell well and attract a ton of affiliates. You can read it here.
Free and easy backlinks from a PR-10 site
Posted by Rohit Sinha in Traffic on May 31st, 2009
It’s quite possible that you already know about this, but I am still going to share it with you just in case you weren’t aware of it.
Go to Google Profiles:
http://www.google.com/profiles (link opens in a new window)
And create a profile there.
This is great because you can not only tell people about you and your site(s) here, but it’s also a great way to create one-way backlinks from a PR-10 site (google.com).
You can create a bio where you can add links to your site(s). They even let you add custom links to your profile.
In all of these places, you get to choose your anchor text as well. Isn’t that awesome?
And google.com is a PR-10 site, so a backlink from there could mean a lot for your rankings.
For best results, I would recommend creating a separate profile for each of your sites. That way, your bio for each profile page will be “relevant” to the anchor texts you would be providing.
This matters not just because it will add more weight to the links to your site, but also because your profile page may actually turn up in the search results for a few keywords related to your site!
Also, be sure to add links to several pages of your site, not just the home page.
Additional tip: You can create your profile pages on MSN as well. And other community sites, for that matter.
Are you already using this strategy? If so, do you have other websites that you can share?
Changing these three sentences could triple your traffic and income
Posted by Rohit Sinha in Traffic on May 27th, 2009
Wow, is that an outrageously bold claim or what? 
But allow me to explain. Let’s start with…
Sentence one and two
In order to understand what I am on about, let’s go back into the mind of the person who searches for one of your keywords in Google. What do you think this guy (or gal) is thinking?
Umm… let’s see, does this site have this info, does this site have this info, does this site, this site, this, this, this…
Yup? That’s what we all do when we search, right?
And what that person is actually doing is scanning the titles, the descriptions, and perhaps the URLs displayed in the search engine listings… looking for an answer to the question…
Does this site have what I want?
It’s the job of your title tag and the meta description tag to answer that question.
It’s not enough to provide an accurate description of the page here.
You must first get into the head of that person and find out what they are looking for when they type that keyword in Google.
When someone types “Goa vacation” into Google, they probably want to decide if a vacation in Goa is right for them, and what it would be like to have a vacation in Goa.
When someone types “Goa vacations” (plural) into Google, they are probably looking for vacation packages for Goa. It’s very likely that they have already decided that they want to have a vacation in Goa this summer. (Or winter. It’s always summer in Goa.)
Stop! Did you notice that?
The person searching for “Goa vacation” is looking for something completely different from the person searching for “Goa vacations.”
If we want the person searching for one of these two terms (or ANY term for that matter) to click on OUR link in the search engine results page, we want the title of the page and the site’s description to tell them that THIS PAGE HERE is where they will get what they are looking for.
So take a few minutes to think about what the searcher is really looking for when he/she types that keyword in Google, and try to make the content of your title tag and your meta description tag to really appeal to him/her.
The more appealing your title and description are, the more clicks you will get, and hence more traffic.
So that explains the first and second sentences.
If you want, you can just rework the title tag, but why not rework the meta description tag too, while you are at it?
Anyway, moving on to…
Sentence three
Now the visitor is on your page.
Something very important just happened. By clicking on the link to your site in the SERP, the visitor completed phase one of his search.
And their arrival on your site marks the beginning of phase two.
Their mindset is completely changed now. They are looking for the answer to a totally different question:
Do I want to stay on this site and read the rest of this page?
And they give you precious few seconds to prove to them that your site/page is indeed worth their while.
If they don’t think they should stay, they just “bounce.”
Ouch!
And how do they decide?
Several things, I would reckon, but the two most important are (in my experience and opinion):
- Can they easily locate the page’s headline and determine if the page is relevant to what they are looking for?
- What does the headline say?
The first one is a design issue, and the best thing you can do regarding this is to reduce clutter from your page. KISS. It also helps to make the headline stand out clearly from the rest of the page using font size, color, and white space around it.
The second issue is much easier to tackle, and my dear friend, I love you for making it all the way till here only to realize that I am telling you to change your page’s headline, and still not getting mad at me for stating the obvious. 
Wait a minute captain obvious! If you knew that already, why haven’t you done it? Why is your headline the same as your title tag?
I will be the first to admit that I have been lazy myself and I have several pages where the headline of the page is the same as the title tag. Goodness knows how much money I am losing because of this.
Let’s admit it, the people who come to your site and “bounce” immediately, contribute nothing to your site except inflating the traffic stats. What you want is people who stay. People who are a part of the “monetizable traffic.”
And if you reduce your bounce rate by encouraging more people to stay on your site, you effectively increase your traffic – at least the kind that matters – monetizable traffic.
To really help understand this, let’s use an example. And this is of course, just a made-up example, and your mileage will vary.
Suppose you get 100 visitors per day to a particular page that has a bounce rate of 70%. This means that 70 out of these 100 people click the back button within 30 seconds of arriving at your site.
So your monetizable traffic is 30/day. And as we said, this is the only kind of traffic that matters, really.
But suppose after reworking your headline to make it more compelling, you encourage more readers to stay on your page. Suppose you bring down the bounce rate to 40%. This means only 40 people now leave your site within 30 seconds of arriving. The other 60 people stay back to read your content.
Which means that your monetizable traffic now becomes 60/day.
Double!
Wait a second! All you did was change just one sentence!
Do you see the power of the headline now?
The power of compounding
I realize that the exact effect on your site will be different, but consider this:
By changing the title tag and meta description tag of the page, you increase the traffic that your page gets.
By changing the headline to make it more compelling, you increase the percentage of people who arrive at your site and stay on to read your page.
Which means you increase your monetizable traffic a lot.
To illustrate this using an example, suppose your page used to get 100 visitors per day, out of which 70 people left (70% bounce rate), leaving 30 people per day who can be monetized.
But suppose after improving your title tag and meta description tag, more people click on your site’s link in the SERP. Say 150. And this is totally possible, though of course, your mileage may vary.
And also suppose you improved your headline a lot, and reduced your bounce rate from 70% to 40%. Again, this is well within your reach, because remember all you need to do is convince the visitor that they would like to read further.
Which means that 60% of your traffic is monetizable.
60% of 150 is 90. Which is three times your previous monetizable traffic!
When you increase your monetizable traffic by three times, you are actually tripling your income! Because hey, 100% of your income is from the monetizable traffic that you get, not from people who bounce back.
But even if you can’t triple your monetizable traffic, you can still increase it significantly. And your income will grow in direct proportion to your monetizable traffic.
And you get all that just by changing your title tag and meta description tag, and the page’s headline.
Action steps
For the title tag and meta description tag, start with the pages that get a lot of high rankings, but not much traffic.
For the page heading, start with pages that get a lot of traffic, but have a high bounce rate.
Then work your way downwards through the rest of the pages.
Would it worth a few minutes per page to potentially double or triple your income? What do you think?
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