Less Traffic for More Sales

Thanks for your feedback on yesterday’s 12 rules. As you can see, I try and start off each week with a “mindset”-style article to challenge your thinking before we get into some really cool tactics.

Speaking of which, we’re going back to Rick Porter for some website traffic advice today.

By the way, Rick’s advice starts off a little technical, but don’t miss his advice near the bottom of the article about picking the right keywords for your website – showing you why LESS traffic can be better.

A reader asked…

“Can you or Rick Porter recommend some syndication services for blog posts and articles? I am no longer using article directories since the traffic from them has dropped significantly?”

Craig’s Answer: No. Rick?

Rick’s Answer: I use everything possible for syndication.

Even though article directories don’t give as much traffic as they used to they are still a good place to get backlinks.

There are a lot of WordPress based article directories out there that I actually prefer because many of them allow you to drop a link or two in the body of your article which gives a much stronger backlink than a link at the bottom of a page in an article resource box.

Anytime you can get your backlink on a page “above the fold” it will have more value and importance.

The easiest way to syndicate all of your blog posts is to setup an account with Ping.fm and/or Pixelpipe.

I use Ping.fm for every site that I have. This allows you to setup about 40 social accounts and link them into Ping.fm

– then you can add the RSS feed of your blog to your Ping.fm account and everytime you post that link will go out to all 40 of those social accounts (Twitter,Facebook,Blogger,Wordpress) – it’s quite powerful.

You can only add 1 RSS feed to your Ping.fm account so if you want to use multiple blogs on Ping.fm there are a couple of different options:

1) setup another Ping.fm account for each blog

2) use a Ping.fm plugin on WordPress and you put your Ping.fm API code in there

3) create a mix RSS feed of several of your blogs, article directory RSS feeds, twitter feed, etc and create 1 feed to add to Ping.fm (you can use http://www.rssmix.com/ or a few other free sites to create mix RSS feeds) – then submit this RSS feed to RSS directories

I also like to submit my blog RSS feeds to as many RSS directories as possible because articles will start to get picked up in News feeds – many people setup Google Alerts so that they can get new articles and news that contain certain keywords.

When you submit your RSS feed to all of these directories they start getting picked up in syndication easier by people that have the information delivered to them.

I’ll go on a bit of a tangent now that makes getting traffic much much more productive and most people are totally missing the boat on it.  This is super important.

Right now the best plan you can create to get traffic is to pick the right keywords.

PICKING THE RIGHT KEYWORDS FOR YOUR SITE:

There are millions of open keywords out there that have no competition and you can land them on page 1 overnight with a well optimized piece of content.

Too often people are looking for high traffic keywords when they should be looking for a low competition keyword that they can match up to an offer that will convert.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned after getting dozens of keywords to rank #1 is that some of them make me absolutely no money at all even though they get me a lot of traffic.

There are presently hundreds of thousands of keywords for the taking that may only get you 4-5 hits a day but convert extremely high with the right offer.

(Craig Ballantyne: Read that again…it doesn’t matter if you have a ton of traffic if none of it converts. You need to shift your thinking to go after long-tail keywords that lead to sales…and you can find out what converts by looking at your google analytics.)

Find buyer keywords and you won’t have to worry about getting thousands of people per day.

What targeted traffic means is delivering someones search to the exact thing they would want to have.

Here is an illustration of a very high traffic keyword that won’t net high conversions and how Google is using the instant/suggest function to steer people the right way

‘weight loss’

Who might use this search? could be anyone

1) a high school student doing a report for their nutrition class
2) a college wrestler looking for some free tips
3) a doctor looking for the latest medical journals
4) a mom that just had a baby and wants to lose post pregnancy weight
5) someone that is ill that is trying to find out why they are losing weight

Once these people find that the search ‘weight loss’ yields none of the results they are looking for they would start narrowing it down to maybe these searches

– high school student – ‘best foods for weight loss’
– wrestler – ‘workouts for fast weight loss’
– doctor – ‘recent weight loss medical journal articles’
– mom – ‘post pregnancy weight loss’
– sick person – ‘medical reasons for weight loss’

Most of the people in this group are just looking for free information – the mom is the only possible buyer and that would only be if she was then taken to an incredible product on how to lose weight post pregnancy –but even then, she could be looking for 3 different products that would fit her post pregnancy needs:

1) weight loss supplement

2) home workout

3) healthy diet

So you can see from this example why so many people never make any money from affiliate marketing – they pick a keyword, they pick a great offer, they get traffic – BUT still no sales!

Once you understand that the first step is a laser targeted keyword with a laser targeted offer that matches – you then find that the search volume is significantly lower but nets a lot more sales and is a lot LESS work.

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Thanks Rick.

When Rick first sent me this, I smacked myself in the head. About 3 years ago I started chasing a mega-search common keyword.

All that money and effort I poured into it turned out to be a fairly big waste of time.

Fortunately, since I met Rick about a year ago, he’s straightened me out and now even though my traffic hasn’t gone through the roof, my keyword-based sales have increased.

So that’s how less traffic – from high-converting keywords – can be better than more traffic from generic, no-converting keywords.

More great advice from Rick Porter, the SEO guru.

Go get some traffic,

Craig Ballantyne

Admit to – and learn from – your mistakes. Your mistakes are the 2nd best things that could happen to you…because with the knowledge you gain from them, you are able to achieve the best things in your life. Without the lows in life, the highs would never really seem that high