Free Traffic Tips

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How do you get lifelong customers? How do you get the visitor that comes back to your site over and over, and just can’t get enough of you, who is actually waiting for you to create something so you they can buy it?

(And yes, I have customers like that. Go to the forums and lurk. No need to register. Start in the General forum and read just the first page of threads. Some of those people have been with me since my first site.)

Three things.

Personality, giving real value before you get a thing, and good marketing to a specific niche. All three of these things should have one thing in mind as you practice each one - your reputation.

You don’t need the whole world to know about you. You don’t need to give away all your secrets, and you shouldn’t hide behind your company name and a PO Box.

First, you need to be different. I don’t just mean, don’t make an ebook about making money online if you haven’t made money online. I mean, go find out what vexes people and fix it. For instance, I would like to know the best way to manage sudden explosive growth and still be able to give my visitors thepersonal attention that sent them to me in the first place. So far, I’m on top of it, but how do I keep up when I get sick, or behind?

I’ve got biz automaters, autoresponders and I try to get people to call instead of email as much as possible - but I’m still swamped, though not enough to be able to hire a big staff.

And you know, if I have this problem periodically (a GREAT problem to have by the way), you know I’ll have it again with continued success. Solve that problem for me, and I’m your customer for life.

Or how about this… what can you market to people who are Already successful? If you’ve been successful at business before, or are retired from a successful endeavor, maybe you could share tips with me about how to improve the quality of my life. Or how to work a little smarter. or how to retire faster (at this pace, I’m looking at 5 years, but I’d love to retire before I turn 35).

The most useless crap is sold on the Net by the truckload and bought because of great marketing. So it’s obviously not the value of the product that makes people rich, though you should have a wonderful product if you intend to stay that way.

Good marketing will get you the customer the first time. GREAT products and service, and you’ll get people you couldn’t pay to leave. It’s hard to get an initial customer. It’s relatively easy to get them to buy from you again once they see that what you sell actually helps them. Carve out your niche, then serve it in a way that is beyond reproach.

This is where injecting your site with your personality helps you. I’m not perfect. I make mistakes … but I encourage my audience to point them out. Sometimes it gets busy and it will take me a week to answer an email. But my audience knows that 1- I will eventually answer, and 2- when they get an answer, it’ll be a real answer. On the other hand, they know that I’m not sitting shackled to my PC waiting for them to write - I’m out finding or providing them tips.

Which brings them to the other thing I spoke of, the fact that I give before I get anything. And I still have people on my lists who are just there for the free stuff, and will never, ever buy anything from me. I don’t care. If my free tips help them enough to continue on their own, as far as I’m concerned, it all balances out.

Because there are also people who buy things from me, or from what they know is an affiliate link because they trust me. They know I refuse to suggest something that is junk or useless. Some of them even admit that they were going to get the product, but wanted to wait and see what I said about it, or that they wanted me to get the credit as an affiliate.

How’s that for humbling? I wonder sometimes how I get to be so blessed….

So, okay, now you know how what to do when you get the customers. How do you get the initial customer, how do you get them over that first hump?

By not starting off with a sales pitch. It doesn’t have to be an article, or a blog post, or a free ebook. It can be as simple as helping someone out in a forum. It can be as small as forwarding the publisher of an ezine that you enjoy to another person you know. Share just one of the secrets you use to convert traffic to buyers in your ezine. Ask your audience their opinion. Admit that you don’t know everything and ask your audience for help.

Whatever their first interaction is with you, make sure they get something of value from it, even if it’s just the good feeling from witnessing you doing something good for someone else. Then baby step them through the process of eventually buying from you.

My process is normally this - they follow a link to my site, be it from a search engine, another site, my feed, my signature in some forum, whatever.

When my site was smaller, the only way you could get past the first page, no matter where you landed, was to sign up for my ezine. 33% - 66% of people who see those pages (which still exist at the old site) would do so.

Then you see my offer, normally at the best price with the best features. Nothing too hype-y.

3%-11% buy right then.

Whether or not they did, they get an intro to the ezine. It has freebies in it, most of them custom-tailored to my audience. Then in about a week they get my ezine, full of case studies, and some freebies. But to filter out most of the freebie-seekers, I don’t really get into things until about the fourth issue, each issue becoming better than the last. From the 4th to 10th issue, I let the quality plateau. I come out with a new product or service about every 12 weeks. So the 11th issue, value increases sharply, then goes up.

I don’t try to get them to buy something every single issue, not even my affiliate products. I try and give them unique tools that will help their business, or alternatives to ones they have already.

Pretty soon, around the 7th - 10th issue, people really start to see how much of my time I spend finding valuable cheap and free tools for their business. And a funny thing happens. They get real skeptical and unsubscribe, (many times opting for the feed version instead) or they really start to get into the ezine, the community and the blog.

And to tell the truth, there are plenty of people who get to this stage and still never buy anything. But they tell a friend, and that friend does. Or they make a comment to someone online, who ends up at the site, and that person buys something.

It’s working quite nicely. And I never have to deal with the thought I might be cheating people out of their money, because I really believe in what I’m doing.

Next tip:the relation of reputation to traffic.