Traffic Exchange Hell

So, you want ideas to make money in the internet marketing business?

Great! Before we get started, some housekeeping related to my Internet Marketing Wake Up Call post here, specifically about my background.

In my introductory post I told you I was new to the world of internet marketing (a little over a year) and did not know what I was doing. This is true. I plugged along trying to learn what I could about internet marketing and I ended up joining literally hundreds of forums, dozens of affiliate programs and a number of online businesses. I really did make money by accident without any real ideas to make money.

The problem for me was I was inundated with tons of things all at once – spam emails, latest tools and software, ebooks, sites, forums, memberships – and because I had just coughed up $4000 to get started (and at the time money was very tight), my focus was on trying to recoup that as fast as I could. I didn’t look as closely to the process as I should have so I made mistakes and lost money. Fortunately, I did not lose tons of $$ as a lot of others have but I think you get the point.

I have had a number of enlightening experiences and here is one I will share – keep in mind that this was just one of the many balls I tried to juggle, things I mentioned above. I spent the first 60 days of my baptism to the internet marketing world in traffic exchange hell trying to earn enough credits for clicks and banner impressions and I found that for me at least, it was a waste of my time. Hours and hours with multiple tabs and traffic exchanges trying to drive traffic (clicks) to my site.

Never mind that most everyone on these sites was there for the same reason – I mean, how many of us are REALLY going to click on other people’s pages beyond the initial click to get credit? Sure there were some neat sites and products on the traffic exchanges but nothing that I couldn’t already find via Google directly and I did not get one sale from traffic exchanges. The analogy I use is playing darts blindfolded and trying to just hit the board (forget about the bullseye).

It may work for some and I know people that have outsourced the clicking of banners overseas to countries like India where the costs are lower, but for me that was not what I was looking for.

In any event, the point here is I spent my time in the trenches learning what did not work (had I spent more time studying what did work, I would have been a lot farther along the curve early on) so you will not have to repeat my mistakes.

You see, the ’skill’ or techniques of sales have been around as long as man and they are quite simple to understand. The basic sales process no matter what you are selling or where you are selling it can best be described by the acronym AIDA.

AIDA
Attention/Awareness – attract the attention of the customer
Interest - raise their interest level
Desire - convince the customers that they want and desire what you offer
Action - lead the customers toward taking action – opting in, buying, subscribing, etc…

As I mentioned, I was new to internet marketing but I was not new to sales. For over 20+ I have been in sales – operations, marketing and management. I worked for some large Fortune 500 companies primarily in the beverage industry and later in the technology space where I learned a lot about sales contact center operations.

The principles of online and offline sales are exactly the same. The main difference is the environment and the execution.

When I sold Pepsi, my process for sales was AIDA. I had to (A)ttract the attention of both my existing customers and new prospects (I worked in the soda fountain division – bars, restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, colleges – and in the early days, customers were loyal to either Pepsi or Coke and most places did not sell both so we were always trying to steal away Coke retailers). Obviously that is not the case today but I digress.

I had to (I)nterest them in any new products or promotions we were offering.

I had to (C)onvince them that they had to have the new product or take advantage of the killer promotion.

I had to lead them to take (A)ction and buy what I was offering.

AIDA is the sales process you will be following to drive your marketing efforts with your business.

Your first thing you are going to want to do is familiarize yourself with the concept of AIDA, if only from the perspective of understanding how the sales process in general works. You do not need to become an expert in any of these areas and frankly an in depth discussion of AIDA is beyond the scope of this blog and not something you need great detail about. Just know that these 4 components are the underlying basis that drives the sales process. With Web 2.0, much of the components of AIDA are simplified and I will touch on these in future posts.

The second concept you need to understand is that traffic + conversions = sales. As basic as the formula looks, this is of extreme importance for you to comprehend. Without traffic you will not have conversions to sales with which to fill your pockets with money. This topic alone can fill hundreds of pages but the main focus here is that you need traffic, but not just any traffic – targeted or highly targeted traffic is the key.

I’m betting that you probably receive hundreds of unsolicited spam messages like I do every day (I receive upwards of 300-400, all redirected into my spam folder). Consider that there are roughly 220,000,000+ internet users in the US alone and well I think you can picture how much unsolicited spam is out there.

By design, unsolicited spam has to function the way it does (“help, I’m being electronically assaulted”) because the conversion rates are minuscule (the click through rates are so ridiculously small – you literally have better odds of successfully herding cats) that it takes a MASSIVE amount of it in order to generate revenue. My point? Traffic is essential because without it, you have no conversions BUT traffic without a targeting strategy is useless because you will not get the conversions you want and you will spend a ton of time, money and energy that would be better spent in more practical revenue generating activities (affectionately known as ‘RGA’).

NOTICE to Barbara Deville (if that is your real name), Queen of Unsolicited Spam (uniteddvds or titaniumsoloads): please get an autoresponder service and allow people to opt out. You are in violation of the CANSPAM act.

I will go into a broader discussion on traffic in the future but just know this – the components of AIDA will help guide your strategy to target traffic (read CUSTOMERS) to your business, traffic from people who want to know about you and what you offer. And these are the people you want – targeted, interested, like-minded folks hitting your sites are the most likely to purchase from you or opt in to your newsletter, take (A)ction either now or later, and guess what? They are even more likely to purchase from you a second, third or even more times, provided you gave them what they were looking for, it met their expectations and the ‘customer experience’ was a positive one.

For now, if you are not already, become familiar with the following tools:

Flock – the next generation of browsers. It puts the process of Web 2.0 social browsing on steroids and it is phenomenal. I have replaced IE and Firefox with Flock (don’t worry, it is built on the Firefox platform and works great). There are some great getting started videos on the site. Check it out.

Twitter - a great little tool, designed primarily for people to keep tabs on each other and what they are up to at the moment. While I myself am a real novice with this tool (I only recently decided to try it out but I have friends that make good money using the power of Tweets), I can see the value in using it to attract people interested in me and what I have to offer so Twitter is now part of my strategy

That’s it for now. Until next time – To Your Success!

- LoadedBeachBum

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