I Hope You Learned These Two Things From Me | Retirement Count Down #8

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.