photo credit: alkruse24

This is the first in a series of 8 posts I’ll be writing during the next week, leading up to my retirement.

I’m not leaving the internet, just internet marketing, & website promotion. If you need to contact me you’ll be able. The best way is currently following me on Twitter.

The two things I hope you have learned from me are

1- How to Create Money, and
2- What Getting Traffic, online or offline is really about.

If you haven’t learned those two basic things from me, grab a cup of coffee and sit back. I’ll give you the executive summary in a few seconds. First, I want to talk about why I feel this conversation is relevant right now.

Of course, I’m about to withdraw, to work behind the scenes with one special client, who shall remain nameless unless or until such a time comes when that person desires to do make our association public. I’m am totally geeked about it and it’s a dream opportunity. I feel I have a real shot at helping to change the world.

If you’ve learned these two things from me though, I already have.

Have You Learned How to Create Money?

I’ll bet you’re baffled by the first thing, how to create money. How exactly does one learn that from a site about traffic? Let’s meditate on that a second.

As I’ve written before, and likely will again, that’s what traffic represents, on or off line. Whether it’s foot traffic or online clicks, traffic is currency in its raw form.

Ah, but some people get dimes, and others get dollars. And I’d personally rather have 5000 dollars than 25,000 dimes. The higher the quality of your traffic, the more money is in your pockets. And if you have something of value to point that fire hose of traffic at, that traffic turns into money.

If you can learn to create traffic, you can learn to create money. All of the simple ways I know how are on this site. They are my gift to you.

Do You Know What Traffic Is Really About?

The thing that I regret the most is not re-constructing my brand when I had the chance. I moved this site three times, changed the domain and the focus twice, but I left the title in reference to free traffic and now, increase your web site traffic because I doubted my SEO skills.

Time showed me that one, I had nothing to worry about, and two, I would eventually have enough from free traffic to buy traffic to supplement it if I ever wished to do so.

Normally that many changes would kill a site. I worried about that, until I realized that I’d developed a perpetual traffic system in case I lost everything , and a following whose core body would follow me where ever I went.

I used to think it was because I had served them well, and was greatly humbled by the thought that so many people cared about me and allowed me to touch their lives.

But it’s deeper than that.

Whether it’s in person getting people to come in and buy from your store, or online getting people to come to your site and make a purchase, real traffic is about connecting.

We are snarky, sarcastic, honest, caring, humble, arrogant, open-armed, or close-fisted for the same reason online as we are off. We’re all seeking connections.

Those of us in touch with this fact and unafraid of it are more open, transparent, gentle, and giving, though we have our moments of pettiness.

Those of us who are divorced from this reality are often cold, bitter, biting and mean, though we have our moments of clarity.

We’re all here reaching and yearning for the same thing. Social media is just a set of new toys to facilitate our age old quest to be closer.

Closer to friendship, to ourselves, to something new and unknown, or old and familiar… we’re here to share and be shared. Not everyone realizes it when they’re taking cheap shots at a well known brand, or writing odes to their favorite products.

But it’s there. And whether you represent a billion dollar corporation or just yourself, the crazy thing is that we all have that same power to connect, human to human, in the end.

If you can do that, if you can find a way for your words to sincerely be written to all of your audience, and also each one of them individually, you’ll never have to hurt for customers, ever.

Everyone can do this.

Some people are great writers. Some are great speakers. Some can whiteboard or screencast like nobody’s business, others make bad-ass slide shows or documents. Everyone has some way of connecting – find yours.

And reach out.

photo credit: bitmask

I’m looking at what feeds to keep or delete in Google Reader and I discovered something.

I can pretty much tell what a site is about if I look at it in list view, which just lists the headlines in a feed. That’s helping me categorize un-categorized feeds. Which blog I’m writing in determines what I’ll prioritize reading that day, so being able to tell at a glance what a blog’s “voice” or “message” is strikes me as important.

You know how I think — would my blog pass that test?

And sadly, (though not surprisingly, given that I’ve been quiet in anticipation of my “retirement” next month), even if I take out our special Friday editions, I can only give a qualified yes to answer that question.

IF the person subscribing already knows a bit about traffic, they can tell my posts are on that topic from the headlines. If not, you can’t really tell.

Granted, I like to get creative with my titles. But headlines are everything. Am I losing the core audience this site was built for by leaning too much towards witticisms?

Could you gain more visitors by tweaking your titles?

Try this exercise on your own site and tell me what you found out.

photo credit: AComment

1. Find the Market
2. Get in the Market’s Path
3. Educate that market that they have a need. .
4. Tie it to an existing pain
5. Make it as easy as possible for them to hear you, and also for them to want to listen.
6. Provide the solution as a value exchange – make sure the perceived value of the solution is greater than the perceived cost of the solution OR of continuing to have the problem.
7. Tie the perceived cost of the solution or of continuing to have the problem to an ego trigger.
8. Deliver more relief in your solution than the recipient is expecting.
9. Go back to step three and continue on infinite loop once the market is big enough to support you in the manner to which you would like to grow accustomed.

Most people think that traffic is all about wrestling some poor schmoe to the ground (electronically) and forcing them to go somewhere they don’t want to go.

Wrong. Traffic is about being in a flow that already exists. It’s about fulfilling desire. And if you can Create that desire, you can OWN the market. A market that other people might not even realize exists, if you create new need instead of filling old need.

Is it manipulation?

Yes.

So is copywriting. That doesn’t mean it has to be used to do wrong.

Someone has created need in you at some point. Who really *needs* a microwave oven, or a cell phone? We don’t. Not in the survival sense of the word need. Those things have been made INTO necessities. We are now thankful that we need those things.

(Then again… I could do without my cell phone. Hm.)

As you create need, traffic flows naturally to fill the vaccum created by the people moving out of their current stream and flowing to you.

Everyone wants to go where everyone is going.

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?

I wasn’t going to tell you this until Friday, but I just can’t take it any more. Jack Humphrey has finally lost his mind and made his incredible EquipMint site free for everyone. Get on it before he goes sane again.