Someone once told me you can’t ever get something that is

• cheap
• and good
• and fast.

You simply cannot have all three things in one product or service.

If it’s a good product, either you bear the cost in real currency, or you lose speed by investing your own time to make it work – hence allowing it to be cheap.

If you can get it or its results fast, the quality of the product suffers or you bear the expense in real currency- cash.

If you can find it cheap, either it’s sub-par quality, or you bear the cost of speed.

Ten years on the web has taught me that this is true, and those are the consequences of getting something cheap and fast, good and cheap or fast and good.

(Okay, you caught me trying to look young. The real number is 12 years on the internet – I built my first business site in 1998.

Goodness. It’s actually 17 years if you count newsgroups and such.

I am so old. Anyway.)

In my newsletter, from time to time I’ll suggest an inexpensive resource. I will only do this if

1. I own the product

(which means I went through the entire delivery process- including customer service if something went wrong)

2. I found the strategy sound

having used a similar enough tactic myself, or actually implemented the exact one I was reading, and,

3. It can benefit a variety of businesses, not just internet marketing.

There are lots of things that work only in the bubble of the internet marketing niche, because that’s a special type of consumer, as is the business opportunity niche or the business to business niche. Not saying it’s better or worse. Just different.

Having said that, I have to apply that logic to cheap traffic guides, including my own, so that you can understand why some of my prices are quite low, and others are so expensive, only the truly well-insulated or managed firm can afford both me, and the time it takes to see the first signs of my high end advice sticking.

There are people out there whose entire careers are based on information I share in this blog, to put that into perspective for you.

(I’d say “not to brag” but then you’d have to say “yeah, right.” And then I’d have to say “you can only successfully brag about things that are true.” and… well it would turn into a whole “thing.”.)

Some of those people make free or cheap guides to get their businesses started. Some with my permission, some without. All of us, myself included, sometimes forget the problem with cheap traffic guides before we go further.

Or we at least forget to explain them in our salesletters or within the guide itself. That’s what brings me to look at the cheap traffic guide issue from many angles, to see their potential problems.

The first problem is that whole cheap, fast and good thing. Myself? I try to err on the side of cheap and good.

I believe in hard work. The fact is that most really good traffic techniques are often inexpensive, but take a lot of hard work to build.

But not everyone makes cheap traffic guides with that in mind. Some people write them about traffic tactics they used a year ago, not knowing that they are worthless now.

I don’t think they do this maliciously, I think they just don’t often see that the reason any loophole they may have found still works for them because they got in really early. They don’t realize the promise they are making to a newcomer won’t be kept. It’s a classic problem for people new to selling traffic products or services.

So you get a product that is cheap, that you can put to work fast, but is ultimately worthless…

And as such is no good.

You also occasionally happen upon someone who shares a loophole early. So you get a fast and cheap technique, but since they made it available to so many people, it draws too much attention and the loophole is closed.

To me? Good just for a short term is still bad if I’m trying to run a reputable business. (If you’re running a triple X site, or gambling or any other venture that you can afford to have banned or can quickly rebuild, feel free to put your black hat on. I won’t judge.) A true traffic technique is good for the long run….

And as such is no good.

Everything else will fall under the heading of fast and good. You’ll pay for someone to do it for you, or you’ll pay to learn about it. Yes, you have to make an investment, but boy, it’s worth it.

They are few in number but when they come along, it’s great.

Which brings us to the second problem with cheap traffic guides.

They are general knowledge, even when the implementation steps are given in great detail. Allow me to explain.

Let’s say I go bananas about an expertise marketing course. I get it, it’s fantastic, it even works.

But I own a video game site. Expertise marketing may not be the best choice for an entertainment product. I probably would have been better off business blogging, advertising within other games, being on sites gamers go to, doing a social media campaign supported by light ads on social media sites.

The seller of a cheap traffic guide doesn’t know that.

Either they don’t have the expertise, or they do and can’t share it because you aren’t playing at that level – you’re doing the entry level cheap guides when you should be getting traffic makeover from a someone with a Traffic PHD.

(Yep, I’m linking to a bunch of my products. I appreciate it if you do purchase something, but feel free to just soak up this knowledge for future reference instead. I’m linking to other stuff too, but just in case you’re looking for something of mine, hit the bold links.)

You may not even need a bunch of cheap guides, or even an expensive consultant. What you may need is to pay more attention to your site and apply some good common sense.

Things like – if your site sold better before the redesign, redesign again based on the old design with stylistic updates only.

Or things like, if a high percentage of people are leaving your site, and it’s not to go purchase through a third-party processor, maybe you need to figure out what’s driving them off – and if it’s a good thing.

Or things like, if you make more money when your newsletter comes out, ask your audience if they’d like more newsletters. Then increase your mailings to however many they say per week.

Anyway, the point is, a traffic guide can build on your knowledge but it can’t advise you whether choosing to use the tactics in it are best used on your site or business.

On the other hand, sometimes you don’t need specialized knowledge, or you want to focus in on one small area, or you want to own everything that person ever created, or or you’re beginning and you want to see what’s in the water before you jump in.

That’s cool, because that’s what is great about cheap traffic guides.

With a minuscule investment, you can skip today’s latte, small pizza, or cheeseburger meal, and find out if you can use Twitter effectively for your business, even though you hate Twitter.

You can find out whether there is any potential for you to get traffic from Facebook.

So I hope this makes things clear – I know there are some issues with using cheap traffic methods. That’s part of why I give you the same information you might find in a cheap guide for free on my site, then put $97 into $8 products, and collections worth $25,000 into $600 reports or $100 video packages.

I want you to be wildly successful so that you can afford me, and come back for some more of that good stuff your business is now addicted to – ain’t I a cad?

For the record, these are the cheap and good ones I currently, openly, and proudly endorse. The
ones I created are in bold. If you own others, share them. Affiliate links are OK. For our purposes, cheap means less than $15, and good means the technique still works.

Remember also that “fast” like cheap and good, are relative. I can generate 10,000 even 100,000 or a million visitors overnight given the right budget, tools and team. So if I say I’m teaching you how to get 1000 visitors overnight, realize, that’s slow to me.

• Fast Facebook Traffic
• The Twitter Lists Secret
• Twitter Traffic
• Google Social Search Secrets
• fast blog traffic
• how to maximize mbl traffic (My Blog Log)
• list explodes
• 1 month – 1000 members
• Video Traffic Guide
• Video Traffic Power
• Video Traffic sales letter
• 2 bucks an ad

If you’ve listened to The 7 Secrets to Massive Traffic, you know that one of the primary things I have been teaching for years, is that

1. not every traffic technique works for every site, and
2. every site benefits from more than one type of website promotion technique.

It stands to reason, but let’s face it – not much about trying to get Google to send more visitors, or most other traffic generation tactics seem reasonable on the surface.

But when you apply the logic, it starts to make sense.

What works for a blog isn’t so hot for a sales letter. The kind of traffic you send to a page where you want one action – like a squeeze page – isn’t always the same as you’d send to a page where you’d want another – like a blog post you want people to comment on.

I bring this up in answer to a common question – do I use all the 366 traffic methods I know on my own sites?

Nope.

Even when I have a full team in place, we normally focus on four to 14 things.

Left to my own devices, I pick five, one for each day of the week. And on the appropriate day of the week, I fling my entire soul at that day’s objective for the time I have allotted for marketing. When that time is up, I check on the progress of the other things.

Now, if I had unlimited resources and staff, sure, I’d have more things done. On the occasions that I have extra time or resources, I do that. But I still like each person to be focused on just a handful of marketing tasks, and no more than one major area in a day.

Once I find the right way to bring visitors to a site, I think about a subset of five things that are best suited to the personality of the individual who will be the main broadcaster to the audience. For example, if the voice of the site is a singer, and the best promotion for the site is content marketing, I think of what the best content marketing is for that singer.

Not just a singer – of course a singer should sing. But are they photogenic? Then maybe they should focus on video. If they’re shy, maybe audio is best. Then I try to keep them focused on mastering both the habit of producing that content and the quality of what they produce, until they’re doing the best thing at the best time, in the best way, for their site.

I also believe

1- the quality of your work can suffer if you multi-task, and

2- it’s easier to be great at five things, especially one at a time, than 500.

My advice to you would be to pick five traffic techniques that seem like they go best with your personality.  Tie each one to a day for a couple of weeks, and check out the results. If they’re great, do it bigger. If it’s not, find out how the ones that aren’t working can be done better, or throw them out. Keep going until you have five core tasks that really work great at bringing you results.

You can always add more later. Here are a couple of examples:

A site that sells any kind of information, service or entertainment that can be sampled to the benefit of the producers, is likely to benefit from something that centers around giving bite sized tastes of expertise, otherwise known as expertise marketing.

Depending on your personality, you may execute this differently than the next person.

If you’re a writer at heart, blogging, list building, article marketing, press releases and PDF marketing may be the best handful of tasks for you.

If you’re a talker, podcasting, video marketing, radio interviews, slidecasts, and teleseminars might work best.

All the better if you can get those activities to build on each other. Try picking a handful from our list of 366 Traffic Methods this week.

First, let’s define the term Explosive Results for our usage.

When you visualize something exploding, you think about a burst of energy, often associated with fire for some reason – probably the fault of our favorite action pictures.

I love to see things blow up as long as I know no one really got hurt – not just in movies but in website promotion. And an intelligent social media strategy won’t just get you several thousand links from various social sites. It can bring you premium web visibility, more targeted visitors, and bring you closer to your existing audience.

An standard social media campaign helps spread the word about you and encourages other people to as well.

An explosive social media campaign has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.

When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?

Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #1 – Hot Content

The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s going hot in your targeted topic and find a unique angle to fit your content into what people already like, without stealing their ideas.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #2 – Niched Network Nuances

The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or your own. Here’s the logic.

People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you have a whirlwind of clicks happening. The only question is, will it be your link that gets clicked or passed over?

Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored, or worse yet, blocked completely.

It’s about the perfect balance of quality AND quantity.

And if I’m not paying attention to you, I can’t and won’t spread your message. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match, and can dramatically cut down your search for the right partners and prospects.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #3 – Simplify Sharing

It amazes me how many people miss this one.

You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network.

Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-in wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-in list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?

If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t Want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.

Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button.

Put a few sharing links on your page.

Make it easy for them to Retweet.

The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #4 – Consistency

And now we come to the area I fail at the most. It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistency, and still give them best possible service and support to my customers and clients. I always err on serving people who have bought from me, figuring that next blog post can wait until tomorrow.

Then at some point, I noticed a decline in return traffic – people weren’t coming back because they’d already heard everything I had to say. The solution? I got help for my content creation process. The ideas are still mine, but I was able to barter help for research, transcribing, and editing. I am also able to get audio and video polished much less expensively than I thought, though I don’t always use this option due to time constraints.

The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.

You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #5 – Think Engagement

Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.

Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.

This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?

Once you know the content your audience is most connected to, and why, you can make more of it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #6 – Three-Way Connection and Communication

That’s not a typo. Three-way communication is when the way you conduct yourself online is observed to a third party, who is also indirectly being addressed by your manner or statement. I wish I could credit the proper author of this, but I just don’t remember who it was who first observed that three people are positively affected by an act of kindness – the person giving, the person receiving, and the person observing.

One example of this in action is having a conversation with a peer about their new product on a social media site. Your friend is probably Dying to tell someone about the testimonial they just got, but don’t want to be rude or are too humble to brag. Ask them in front of your audience, and the conversation is exposed to your connections and re-exposed to theirs.

Connection is just as important – if communication is the conveyance of information, connection is doing so in a way that bonds. A several hundred closely bonded contacts will spread your message faster and farther than several thousand distant aquaintances.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #7 – What’s In It for All?

In the 80s, we all thought about what was in it for ourselves. In the 90s we decided to focus on others, hence, what’s in it for them. Today, we’re in the age of the win-win-win situation. Tell them how you benefit and tie it to their benefit.

Want someone to help you spread your stories? Make sure they know how important it is to you, why you came to them for help, and how they’ll be perceived for being the bearer of your good news.

You may look at the list above and feel that it’s intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Focus on doing just one of these things better each day for a few weeks, and before you know it, you’ll be doing them habitually. The results you’ll get will help these new habits stick.

There are two types of traffic campaigns. One brings you a huge burst of short term traffic. The down side to it is that it’s hard to maintain that pace of traffic, marketing and publicity, even if you have a whole department dedicated to just that. You run out of resources of some type eventually.

The other may or may not bring you short term gains, but it builds on its own momentum, and thus, will last forever once it’s started. You would have to abandon it entirely for a year or more to shut it down. The downside to it is that it takes 60 to 90 days for it to fully kick in, and if you don’t know how to attack it a little at a time each day, you won’t have the patience to see it through.

Tactic One: A Single Avalanche 

Avalanches are isolated incidents, relatively rare when compared with blizzards. They happen only once in a while, and can be fairly unpredictable. But what you know for sure – there’s gonna be a LOT of snow, and it’s gonna fall right on top of you, in a short amount of time.

Now, let’s pretend snow represents traffic. Now you can understand the name “Avalanche”. You can build one huge ramp-up campaign that’s a huge blast of traffic that dumps hoards of people in one direction in a short amount of time with a traffic avalanche.

The trouble is, while that’s great for a quick injection of traffic, it is NOT sustainable.

Eventually you run out of resources. That could mean sources of JV partners that are willing to mail for you.

Or in the case of advertising, you run out of inventory.

Or in the case of time, you’re so busy filling orders that you don’t have time to keep up with your traffic method, yet haven’t made enough to constantly pay someone else to do it.

Avalanches are finite. You get a big dump of snow on top of you, and you are under it until the snow melts or you decide to dig your way out. It accumulates on top of existing snow, but it’s not going to constantly build on top of new snow because by nature, it’s a once in a while event.

If someone is talking about how they got 20K new membership subscribers in a month, chances are, they had an avalanche. It’s a good place to start for traffic, but what happens next month? What if you want membership to increase to 200K, then what?

You can’t just do avalanches over and over again. You can’t just start a new blog every time you want traffic to your main product. Once it is built, what sustains that momentum.

A Blizzard. That’s what. Which we’ll talk about next.

Twice upon a time, a very recent time ago, I was making a big mistake with my consulting business. It was such a big mistake that when I discovered it, I decided to never take on new clients, and when the time was right, to drop the two I had.

I’ll tell you what the mistake was in a minute, and why it was so huge that I totally changed my business and as far as how most people know me, retired. First you need to know a little background about me.

You see, I have a reputation as a bit of a rainmaker. I put the proverbial butts in the proverbial seats, and I can do so in droves.

I’m not saying that to brag – I love to brag, but if I was going to I’d be way more specific with graphs and charts and links to proof and stuff. But you can Google that on your own if you like, or look on the site or on my various sales page.

The reason I’m bringing it up is because when you get a reputation for being the go-to person, you get a lot of business related to your expertise or because someone heard about you. And when they hear about you, they want you to do what you did for the other person.

The problem is, what you may be able to do for one type of site, is not necessarily duplicatable for another. Or, in what has been happening to me, I have been hired on to build traffic systems, when most people actually want me to do a marketing blitz or traffic blast.

Once I realized that most folks want a traffic blast I decided to hang up my spurs permanently. Not only do I not have the staff or the time to do hectic traffic blasts each month for the same set of businesses, I hate doing them! The hectic intensity is too much for my lazy nature — and most importantly is 100% wrong for most businesses to do more than once a year.

It was a HUGE mistake to believe that people know the difference between building a traffic system and doing a quick, short blast of traffic.

So I came to an epiphany. Why don’t I show people how to do both? Which came with the issue that first you’d have to know what I was talking about. So here goes.

Stay Tuned.