What makes a good piggyback ride?

1. When the other person is much bigger than you. Otherwise what’s the point?
2. A willing and able piggybacker.
3. Mutual benefit – for example, you’re both having fun.

The same is true in business. If you look carefully, you’ll often see some of the companies you work with offer to share the might of their promotional powerhouse with you.

I love Google Checkout. Over the years, my clients have grown to enjoy them as well.

It seems like a lot safer way to be paid for large sums of money than a check – up to several months later if the recipient of my services is dissatisfied, they can reach me through the system. I don’t have to risk checks that may bounce, and there’s an easy way for customers to leave me recommendations.

In the last year or so, they’ve begun to include me in their holiday promotions.  I haven’t had enough notice from them to actually make sales from them, but the two-way promotion still benefits us both.

I get listed as a company having a promotion through Google Checkout – the association between my company and Google is a nice perk. They’re already promoting holiday discounts and I get included in that.

Meanwhile, they get promoted to my audience and some of the trust I’ve built with them transfers to Google. My clients see a safe way to try my services, knowing I’d never want to sully my reputation with Google. I, in turn, am protected against fraudulent orders.

Win-win-win.

Check with some of the bigger companies you work with, or even smaller companies with wider audiences. There are all kinds of joint promotion opportunities out there.

… of the Year, is now online.

You have no idea how close it came to being the last one ever…

Whew!

In this Christmas Issue:

Five Seasons Freebies
Four Traffic Weapons
Three Blogger’s Resources
Two On-Going Contest
and a Funny Chirstmas Video of Me!

Can’t wait to see you there!

I JUST turned the page back on for more Traffic Reality memberships, with immediate access to the site and the last two newsletters. And some people must have those notifiers turned on that tell them when a page has changed, because the first 12 are already gone! I was preparing to announce it in the newsletter in a few hours, but okay – go get ‘em if you want ‘em!

(And if, by chance you really don’t know what I’m babbling about, you can click the link. )

… You have a realistic goal.

Which is why it really irks me when I see a traffic program/software package/course that promises you thousands of visitors when it’s done. What if I already have thousands of visitors? How many thousands are we talking about anyway?

Whenever these things come out, I know that within a week to a month, someone is going to write me saying “I used x product and I’m failing. Can you help me?” And there are potential clients I turn away because they want to get 10,000 visitors a day like this program promised them, when they aren’t going to get much more than 2000 a day with their site the way it is.

This isn’t to say that some high-yield traffic programs don’t work if used properly. And to be sure, sometimes failure is about the fact that the person failed, not the program.

Some work (and I’ll make a post about evaluating these programs another time), but in my opinion, most of them

1. Make the whole idea of increasing traffic organically too hard
2. Behave as if raising traffic, as opposed to profit, is the one and only point
3. Don’t tell you that the quality of traffic you’ll get might not be what you want
4. Lead you to believe you’ll never have to spend a penny to increase your traffic.That’s BS. Sooner or later, someone has to advertise, or make an improvement to your site, products, services, sales pages, etc that is going to cost you money.There WILL be a traffic-related expense. The trick is to minimize it, or shift the cost elsewhere. And faced with a consistenly converting product, your affiliates will probably be happy to foot the cost of advertising, but you will still have to improve your web design, or hire a copywriter, something.Even if it’s the phone call to an expert to JV with you, at some point you will spend money. You can bootstap your way a surprisingly significant part of the way without funds.

I do believe that a million visitors or a million page views even, is a realistic goal for traffic.

However, for someone who is starting at zero, or getting one hundred unique visitors a day and actually converting some of those people into sales, on your way to a million, you have to start somewhere. What do you think is a realistic, starting-out goal?