How Much is Too Good to be True?

I’m taking a break from this social media currency series for the holidays. We’ll resume that topic in January. It takes too much brain power to do every day.

What I want to talk about until then are concepts that we as business people, especially those of us with younger businesses need to be concerned with in regards to search, social media, traffic and marketing, as we come upon 2010.

At this time of year, I think about the things that hold me back, that used to hold me back, or that I see holding other people back from progress. At the top of that list is belief.

I know that seems like a funny thing for a free traffic site to be discussing. But it really is a topic central to everything. I’ll give you an example.

When I was in college, $20 was a fortune. Now, if I gave my niece a $50 to pay for  large pizza, if the change was less than $20, I’d let her keep it. She’s a teenager, so to her, that’s still worth something – she can get a couple of albums on sale at iTunes, rent a movie, buy three or four apps for her iPod Touch.

Now, when having $20 was a big deal, making $40,000 a year seems incredible, impossible, a dream. Not even three years out of college, I had a job making $40k a year. I was in my mid-twenties and could buy anything a person in their mid-20s could want. So when I started a business a year or so later, making an extra $300 a month from banner ads was incredible to me. But to make $100k a year from that same business seemed an unreachable goal.

Then one day, I decided it wasn’t. I just decided it was possible, and sat down with a piece of paper and tried to figure it out. My reasoning was that some people were millionaires, some people were business owners with companies that generated $300k a year. So maybe the goal wasn’t the problem, it was because I didn’t believe it could be true for me, I wouldn’t bother to try.

The point being two-fold; 1- what was once a once-unbelievable amount of money became commonplace to me, 2- it became attainable when I began to believe not that it was certain, just that it was possible, and sat down and made a roadmap that I thought was realistic.

To bring us back to traffic, that’s really all I do. I listen to how many visitors people think would be ideal to have, just outside what they think they could buy and/or generate on their own, and I add what I know how to produce. I take a simplified version of my plan, test it on a generic business of a friend or a client, break it down into steps, teach it to a novice, document the process, have other novices try the same process without my help,  then turn it into a product.

So I know that every product I’ve ever made to get traffic works. I use it myself, I test it on people who aren’t traffic experts, I release it to the public. That’s all. And the inevitable question comes at some point: how do I know I can do this?

Or as with the 27k Visitors system, is it too good to be true?

To which I counter, how is 27,000 visitors in a week too good to be true? That’s not even 4000 visitors a day.  You’ve seen my stats, and I’ve shown you how I get over 1000 visitors a day from my Evergreen Traffic System if I don’t do anything at all. And you see how  I increase that to 3000 visitors a day with a little blogging and a couple of articles.

Twitter didn’t exist a few years ago. Some people reading this have never heard of it, and don’t care but they get millions of visitors a day who do. Where was Facebook a few years ago? And now they have over 350 million ACTIVE users.

Meaning that’s not how many users they have, that’s how many of their users are using the site, not just create dead profiles and move on. Out of those people HALF of them log in each day.

And yeah, they are Facebook now. Which is what probably has you thinking, well, they have that because they’re this big company with a huge ad budget.

Really? I’ve never seen a Facebook commercial on TV, have you? And even if it’s their ad budget now, what about when they were just a small idea? What about when they just served one university?

Most if not all of the successful sites in the world were once an entrepreneurial project, like yours or mine. And I know it’s easier for me to believe your site can get 250,000 visitors a month because I see it every day.

But. Even I was once struggling to get 100 visitors. I got from there to here, and you can too.  There’s only one catch.

Well, two.

You can’t attain something you don’t believe it. You won’t bother to try if you don’t think it’s within your grasp. So you have to break down that goal you have in mind, traffic or whatever it is, into tinier portions and split it up into ideas you can digest.

Second, you, or someone else, has to do some work for traffic to show up. Buy ads, apply a system, learn a system to apply, use some software, join a network– there’s always something.

The question is, will you make sure it gets done?