No longer is having a profile in LinkedIn enough to get you ahead.

LinkedIn has changed and those riding the wave of change on the newest social-media content platform are those that are winning with bigger reach and authority.

The recent change on LinkedIn is the addition of LinkedIn Pulse, a blog style portal on linkedin.com for professional content. On this episode we discuss how to use LinkedIn Pulse effectively inorder to grab the attention of your would be audience.

Our guest explaining all is Sarah Santacroce, a LinkedIn specialist from simplicitysmallbiz.com.

OUR GUEST:

Sarah Santacroce helps busy small business owners and professionals get more exposure online.

Sarah, born and raised in Switzerland, started her career at McDonalds teaching soft skills to aspiring McDonalds managers. Her first online business was created whilst living in California.

In building her own virtual business over the years, Sarah has attended a huge number of marketing events and trainings, the knowledge from which she now shares with students.

She is the creator of the course LinkedIn For B2B Success amongst other social media training material.

When she is not in front of her computer, she enjoys reading and travelling.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 65  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Sarah Santacroce quote from the show:

You can also get Sarah’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“If you want sucess in LinkedIn, build relationships.” @sarahsantacroce
Click To Tweet

To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey, what’s up listeners? Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is show#65 of the podcast that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online.

Today, we are going to be talking about LinkedIn, one of the most requested topics of our show in recent times so I think it is about time we revisited the topic especially since LinkedIn is such a fast moving platform of late and I really want to bring you up to speed with what’s working now straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak, bringing an expert on who gets really good stuff with the platform.

In just a moment we are going to be speaking with Sarah Santacroce but before that I want to give a quick shout out and thank you to a few loyal listeners, Lucas, Ernesto and Jim, all whom have stopped by the episode pages of Traffic Jam, either to leave a comment or a question and that too is where you should be heading because each and every episode comes with a bunch of bonuses, normally including a transcript and an MP3 download but in the case of today’s session, we’ve also got a LinkedIn checklist. A day to day cheat sheet that will tell you exactly the task that you should be conducting on LinkedIn, both daily, weekly and monthly. That has been provided by Sarah Santacroce, our guest on this episode. So to get access to that, go to TrafficJamCast.com/65. Go on over there right now, grab your bonuses and then listen on to the show.

Before we dive in to today’s interview, let us introduce our show guest. As mentioned at the top of the show, her name is Sarah Santacroce and she is from the website www.simplicitysmallbiz.com, which is a site where I was very lucky to be interviewed for just recently and then now I am returning the favor by interviewing Sarah for Traffic Jam so I am looking forward to diving in, tapping her knowledge on LinkedIn which is one of the main areas of expertise and she actually counsels business owners, entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs well all around the world on all aspects of internet marketing but LinkedIn is definitely her forte. She’s produced a couple of courses on the topic already and she’s been doing some really good stuff on the platform which is exactly why I wanted to invite her on to the show so I guess without any further ado, let us welcome to Traffic Jam, Sarah Santacroce from simplicitysmallbiz.com.

James: So hey there listener! It’s been a good six months since we last focused the show on LinkedIn so I think it is fit to invite on to Traffic Jam a LinkedIn specialist to talk about the changes and what’s working right now on the world’s #1 professional network so join me in welcoming to the show Sarah Santacroce.

Sarah: Hi James, thanks so much for having me.

James: Thank you for coming onboard. This is going to be interesting. We’ll I think touch upon a lot that has been happening on LinkedIn in recent times and I think we’ll start by talking about what seems to be a fairly big change on LinkedIn’s part and that seems to be the movement on the platform from what used to be your one to one networking platform to what’s now more kind of a broadcast or content sort of platform, what do you believe for the reason on LinkedIn’s part in the recent move and changing direction for them?

Sarah: That’s a good point. I think what they announced, probably already a year and a half ago is that they want to become the number one platform for professional content. So that was really their goal in order to change that mentality that LinkedIn is just a place where I post my profile, my CV, and then never go back to it. Well, they want their users to go back to it in a daily basis and in order to achieve that, they needed to create a real but social but professional platform. And so that was really the move that they have in mind and I think they are doing a decent job because as you said, more and more content are being shared professional content and we can go in to the different kinds of functionality in a little bit but that was really their goal. To have people come to LinkedIn to get their dose of content on a daily basis.

James: Two of my prior guests in fact, Larry Kim and Neil Patel have both been very successful in generating a lot of traffic essentially by using LinkedIn like they would do Twitter and by that I mean basically accepting and adding as many connections as they can in order to build a large audience for their content. Do you kind of agree with the shotgun style approach that those two guys have adopted?

Sarah: It definitely helps with visibility. I always say a small network gives you small visibility so it always depends on your business modules and on your objectives. Obviously if you have an online business like Neil Patel, yes it makes sense. However, if there are listeners here who are in the corporate and they are just using LinkedIn to build their own personal brand where you have a business but it is a local business, then I wouldn’t agree with that connection strategy because you really want to build a network in this case yes have that decent number of connections but also take note where you are at you value the relationships more than the numbers. For me LinkedIn, if you really want success, it’s about building relationships. So the way Neil Patel is using it for the visibility and he has got more success with that but I’d say he’s more about the relationships that count in LinkedIn.

James: Does LinkedIn operate in a similar fashion to Facebook in terms of its algorithm? I’m sure that the content that is popping up in yours and my newsfeed is based on some form of algorithmic structure, the people that we have been potentially connecting with much so if that is the case, can it actually affect us if we build too large an audience and a few of those people are actually engaging with the content and engaging personally on the platform?

Sarah: That’s a good question. LinkedIn doesn’t really disclose that much information about their algorithm but yes, I am sure there is an algorithm in place and it will affect interactions and engagement will affect how successful you are with the platform.

James: Yeah, I guess it is always the marketing case that you really should be connecting with those people that are either your ideal target audience or your ideal audience in terms of content connectors or whoever else. You’ve got to really know who you’re trying to talk to because anyone outside of that is essentially noise for you, isn’t it?

Sarah: Exactly, yes. And I think that’s what’s different on LinkedIn, when I teach LinkedIn to those sales professionals for example, a lot of people still have that mindset that oh, I have to mass produce or mass blast links out. LinkedIn is not like that, you can get so much information about an individual that you can then really target your information and so if you are prospecting on LinkedIn for example, you don’t want to prospect with 200 people and send them all the same information. You want to get in to the details and see if this is an actual fit for whatever it is you are trying to sell them.

James: Yeah, let’s continue our discussion around LinkedIn Pulse because that has been the major development, at least in recent times and I think it is not just open to influencers as it was originally but it has opened to everyone. I can see that you yourself have been posting regularly to LinkedIn Pulse, can you share any of your success stories or results that you’ve been able to achieve with the 35 articles you’ve posted so far by looking at your LinkedIn profile. What sort of results have you got?

Sarah: It is interesting! As you said, when it first launched it was still closed and so you have to submit some kind of thumbprint, they wanted to look at it and back then the results were just amazing and I hear that from other colleagues that you could get really big views on your posts. Because it was still closed. Not that it has opened, you can do quite a bit and get good results and what is nice is that you can reach outside of your LinkedIn network so people always think I am just going to reach my connections but now they can go viral and if it gets picked up by LinkedIn themselves so it gets added to a category in the Pulse then you can really hit the jackpot and go really big. But I’d say just like with Facebook, there is so much content being shared in Facebook that eventually the numbers went down and I kind of see the same thing happening with LinkedIn and yeah, touch wood, hopefully we are not going to have a Facebook situation where you actually have to pay to get visibility.

James: Yeah, well I guess it is a big topic, we are approaching this point, not just on the social platforms but really that internet as a whole where we are facing content shock, the idea that there’s more content out there than can ever be consumed so it is going to get diminishing returns as we go on but I certainly do see myself being in LinkedIn that I am certainly getting far more notifications now than I have ever before about content pieces being posted. I am just wondering how much visibility over time they can possibly get because we are limited in terms of our capacity to consume content as consumers. Well, let’s talk about how we might craft and effective post for Pulse. What are your top tips on both creating a content piece that could hopefully get viral, at least some increased exposure and perhaps your tips on promoting it to get a large audience.

Sarah: It always comes down to the title just like in any other blog post, the title is what makes the reader click on not click or to read it so obviously the title needs to be sexy and appealing to the audience you are writing to, and I think the errors that I see most often is maybe because people are not used to writing blog posts so they just go on LinkedIn and say hey, I can just write my text in here. It is just like any other blog post, you need to create paragraphs, you need to use the headings; different headings. You can embed image or media. So for example a YouTube video. That stuff obviously is important. It needs to be appealing to the eyes of the readers. When he reads it, it’s not just one big blog of text otherwise nobody is going to read your post. I always recommend also at the bottom to include a small bio. Yes we know already at the top it says this has been published by Sarah Santacroce and they see your picture but if they are at the bottom of the post, they don’t know who wrote this article, if they just come via a link for example so it is always good to have a bio at the bottom and remind them who’s written this article. There is a whole discussion going around about duplicate content, if you’re probably the right person to ask you this but my opinion is yes, it is duplicate content but it doesn’t matter that much as long as you always link back to the original post and you kind of adapt the content in LinkedIn to your LinkedIn audience a little bit so even just the audience, duplicate content would be if you copy a post that you’ve originally posted on your blog and republished it on LinkedIn. I am curious to hear your opinion James.

James: From what I understand if basically you use a hyperlink that might say something like originally posted on as you would do typically with other content syndication platforms, that should be enough to tell Google and other search engines that that is where the originating piece of content lives, I am not quite sure if you can post a canonical URL to LinkedIn which is technically the technical term –

Sarah: You can’t.

James: So you can’t? I think based on that then the other method of just saying hey, this was originally posted on should be enough for the search engines to determine that. But it opens up an interesting conversation, would you typically use Pulse for syndicated content so almost like an outpost for a really good core piece of content that was originally created on your blog, perhaps you can then maybe adjust it, rewrite it, reformat it a little bit for LinkedIn and give it a new audience there?

Sarah: It is funny because I kind of changed my opinion. In the beginning I was saying and telling my clients, no, just create unique content on LinkedIn, but let’s face it, there’s just not enough time in our week to create that much content so most clients told me well, we just don’t have the time. And so now I am telling my clients, okay, go, look at your Google analytics and kind of search for the content on your blog that has been previously posted that got a lot of traffic and so you know this must be a good content and then you can republish it but just not copy paste it but maybe create a couple of new paragraphs and then link back to the original post on your blog. I think for most of my clients who are small business owners, this is a strategy that works for them. Of course, ideally, yes you would create unique content for LinkedIn, that would be the best.

James: Yeah, and I guess final question around Pulse, what type of content works best? Is it just purely blog style content or have you found the perhaps like image assets like infographics perform also well in the platform? What can you post there?

Sarah: Yeah you can definitely post infographics. I am not sure if just an infographic, I don’t think that would work on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn user is a professional user who wants to get more details rather than just a visual so I would go in to a bit more detail. It would have to be content obviously that fits that LinkedIn audience and really gets them interested. It depends again on your business as well, if your business is in the creative and you are a jewelry maker, well, obviously, your LinkedIn audience is not on LinkedIn so don’t even waste your time writing on LinkedIn publisher so I would say it is professional content.

James: Well, let’s lay out some action steps perhaps for our listener around pulse so your advice is to go and check your website analytics and find what content pieces are performing well. I guess some other places you can go to would be things like Buzz Sumo which might tell you about the social traction that your content has generated, that might be a good place to look. Then reformat the content for LinkedIn, make sure it’s chunked down but using appropriate headers and titles that you have a compelling headline to your article and then importantly at the bottom that you include a bio and a link back off to the original piece of content. Will that seem fair?

Sarah: Yeah, that sounds good. Sometimes also business owners have submitted articles to print magazines and they don’t have anything on their blog about that so that would be a good strategy also to repurpose the content on LinkedIn Publisher.

James: Yeah, definitely. Well a couple of other additions to LinkedIn recently has been the acquisition of Newsle and Slideshare which I guess also supports their new direction toward a content platform. As a marketer, where do these applications fit in our LinkedIn strategy and should we indeed be using them?

Sarah: Well, I actually do not know about Newsle so that would be new to me, I would have to look that up. But Slideshare that is definitely another content platform but that is more visual but it is also a very professional platform that gets a lot of business professionals use PowerPoint presentations, do presentations in business and so it is nice to have those together and be able to embed presentations on your profile for example.

James: Yeah, and I have also seen that they can rank quite well in search, often above LinkedIn profiles themselves. I don’t know whether there’s full follow links there at play or what is happening but it seems to perform quite well in Google search, that’s another little technique you might want to look out for. Aside from Pulse, Slideshare and a few other things, I guess the core of LinkedIn is still the LinkedIn profile, that’s where we base most of our activities. What advice do you have for optimizing your LinkedIn profiles to attract more search traffic and then perhaps also to move that traffic away from the outpost of LinkedIn to your home base such as your company website or your personal website?

Sarah: A lot of people don’t realize that the LinkedIn profile is kind of like a mini website and so apart from having to be complete and visually attractive it also needs to be search engine optimized because LinkedIn has its own internal search engine and so that means using keywords, breaking them in strategic locations as for example the headline, that’s probably the biggest mistake I see people make on their headline, that’s the line beneath your name, they use that as a chopped title so they would say owner at Traffic Jam for example. Well, why is that wrong? Because the owner is very generic, every company has an owner and people are not going to be searching for owner in the search bar if they are looking for someone like you as an SEO specialist, and using the company name on the headline because it is like on Google, people tell me you show up for Simplicity, yeah okay I understand that but that’s not what people are searching for. On LinkedIn, it is the same. You don’t put your company name because people don’t know your company name if they don’t know you yet. So that’s the one thing, in your headline you need to describe what it is that you need to bring to the table and what your specialties are, use your keywords in that area.

James: Yeah, I am just looking at yours now and I can see that you state that you’re a small business digital marketing consultant which I guess could be the type of terms that the people are searching and then you’ve also stated who you help and why which is also I guess a positioning statement that you just list what you want to do and how you can help which obviously is effective. But I am also scrolling down your profile, I can see some unusual things that I haven’t necessarily noticed elsewhere. If I go down to your interests, I can see there that some of your interests that you’ve listed there are probably chosen with LinkedIn search in mind for instance, would that be the case?

Sarah: Yeah, I am totally against keyword stuffing in LinkedIn profiles. That just doesn’t look good if you look keywords in every section, but the interest section is kind of the nice way to hide some keywords because it is all that is. It is just a list of interests and most people use it for hobbies and yes it is nice to add some personal interests in there. It is also a nice place to hide some keywords. What I usually tell my clients is to copy all your skills and paste them in to the interests section so that you kind of have your keywords in both locations. Another tip there is to use common misspellings of your name so my name is really sort of difficult to spell and I have hidden some misspellings in that interest section as well.

James: Interesting, I also see that just scanning through the profile itself you’ve got numerous calls to action to various places, be it LinkedIn groups that may be of interest to people, you’ve got email, you’ve got telephone number and it is not often used right? I mean if you look at the average LinkedIn profile, it very much is a biography or a CV or that information but it doesn’t really compel anyone to take a course of action so what would you recommend as a good strategy to move people away from LinkedIn to appropriate places that might move them along that customer journey with you?

Sarah: The first thing you could do is to optimize your website links. At the top of the profile we have the option to send people in different pages and by default it would say company page or blog or personal website. That’s okay, some people might click on it. But if you actually customize it you can make it in to a call to action and I think I have something like a free e-book or check out this and that. So you can send them to a specific page, so that could be for example a landing page and so you send them to the landing page and they sign up to your list, we all know that that’s the one place where we want our people and send them to our email list. And that is a good way to send people over. Unfortunately those website links are now much more hidden than they used to be so it is good for people who are already connected with you but otherwise people won’t see that hidden section there. So there’s other ways to use links, for example in reach media you can add a link to a landing page and LinkedIn will then automatically pull in the picture of that landing page and so when people click on it, it will link them forward to your landing page so different options to send people to specific pages on your website.

James: Excellent! Well I am going to make sure that your LinkedIn profile of course is included in the show notes page as a mini case study and an example for our listeners. I am sure that there are plenty of learning that they can gain from checking that out. Before we sort of wrap things up on LinkedIn itself, where else should we be spending time on the platform? I think there’s still quite a lot of advocates of LinkedIn groups and a few other things, where would you suggest our listener spend any other time they might have for LinkedIn?

Sarah: Yeah there’s definitely the groups. Search for groups where your target audience hangs out. A lot of people or clients still spend too much time on groups where their peers hang out. You want to think about your clients, customer prospects, and that is the group that you want to be active on. So that’s definitely a big thing, and then we don’t have time to talk about the company page. If you are bigger company or agency that is another thing that you need to be using and it is nice because you can use it as a team so it is not just you publishing content but your whole team and your employees can also publish content through that company page. Often I see company pages that have been created but companies don’t really understand that once you created it you should actually be using it just like your personal profile to share content so it all comes down to building an editorial calendar and make sure that there’s valuable content and being shared with the followers.

James: Excellent! I always love the conversations that we have before these interviews because I often find out about little gems and I found out about a new tool today which I have never seen or heard of before and that’s Listly and I think you have been getting good results with curated lists. I think before we round out the episode you should probably tell us what you’ve been doing there.

Sarah: Listly is a tool where you can build lists, so you would have a top 10 list LinkedIn experts or you can have a top 10 list of best LinkedIn posts for business and things like that and then you can just blend in to the articles it will generate a nice list for you and you can then embed on your WordPress website for example, they have a nice little plugin that you can use and so it generates traffic to your website and also on Listly itself and you and I both know that people love lists so it is really a tool that works great and keeps sending traffic to you.

James: Very nice! I guess it is a tool that expands on the concept of the roundup posts where you call on experts perhaps that may contribute to and that’s a fantastic traffic source. You could be mentioning influencers, there is a good chance that they might want to go and promote your content themselves. Good tool, we’ll make sure that that’s linked off to in the episode page of Traffic Jam#65 but before we round things out Sarah I am sure there are listeners wanting to find out a little bit more about you and perhaps what you’ve got to offer. So where should we send people off to?

Sarah: Different things, my website is simplicitysmallbiz.com, you can look me up on LinkedIn. One thing I didn’t mention is customization of invitations. I won’t accept your invitation if you just send me the customized ones because I don’t know if you’ve listened to this podcast so make sure that you mention the podcast and I’d be happy to connect with you. So yeah, check me out on LinkedIn. We also have a LinkedIn challenge that I host twice a year but now I am changing one of them to French because I also have French audience so the next one won’t be until December but you can look up the LinkedIn Challenge LinkedIn group, that is a group that I am running close to a thousand members now and we just answer any kind of LinkedIn question so I look forward to seeing you on that Group and what else? Did I give you any other links, James?

James: LinkedIn for B2B success was something that you mentioned to me so I guess we should probably include that as well.

Sarah: Yes, that is an online video course that I created for small business owners and entrepreneurs wanting to use LinkedIn for their business and so it is a 15-part video course.

James: Excellent! Well you the listener if you’ve been listening to Traffic Jam for some time you will now where all of those links live and that is on the episode page of today’s show which today you get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/65. Awesome! Let’s wrap things up there Sarah. And it has been beneficial certainly to me to kind of get up to date with what is happening on LinkedIn. I am sure our listeners have also gained as much value as I have so thank you!

Sarah: Thank you James! It’s my pleasure.

So thank you to Sarah from simplicitysmallbiz.com and thank you to you the listener for listening in to episode#65 of Traffic Jam. We’ll be back next week with another awesome episode and awesome guest as well.

In the meantime, remember that we have a bunch of goodies available for this show which you can access by going to TrafficJamCast.com/65 where Sarah has kindly donated a daily LinkedIn task sheet. Want to know what you need to do in LinkedIn daily, weekly and monthly? Then you’ll find out in a very convenient checklist provided by Sarah so get your hands on that. Also on the episode page you’ll find a full transcript of today’s session plus an MP3 download as well.

If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the show via iTunes and Stitcher radio which you do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

Of course we end the show with the traffic jam. It is chosen by our guest by our guest today and she has gone for a song call I Need My Girl and it is by The Nationals so enjoy the track and I will see you back here in about seven days from now. See you then!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The soundtrack for this episode, or the Traffic “Jam” as we like to call it is a song called “I Need My Girl” by The National, an American alternative rock band. It was recorded in 2013 for the their album “Trouble Will Find Me”.

The band is made up of Matt Berninger (lead vocals), Aaron Dessner (rhythm guitar, keyboards, vibraphone, harmonica), Bryce Dessner (lead guitar, keyboards, e-bow, orchestration), Bryan Devendorf (drums, percussion) and Scott Devendorf  (bass guitar).

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

To help you maximise your results on LinkedIn with minimum effort, Sarah Santacroce has provided a special LinkedIn Marketing checklist for you.

The checklist is a simple one page “to-do” list that will show you exactly the right things to be doing on LinkedIn daily, weekly and monthly.

Act on each item in the guide, tick off the items as you go and watch your results explode.

The LinkedIn Marketing Checklist is available for immediate download below:

Anyone in their right mind will grab a good second chance when it’s presented to them, an opportunity to redeem themselves if they missed out the first time round.

This is never more prevalent than in marketing – direct mail, email follow up and now retargeting provide us marketers with second chance to persuade our audience to take the step. Subtle reminders using banner retargeting can be enough to push prospects over the line if first time around your product wasn’t right or it wasn’t the right time.

Chris Evans loves following up with video, social and banner retargeting and rightly so. According to him retargeting generates a 500% to 1000% better ROI than front end marketing. If you are new to retargeting, curious to know what it is and how it works, or a seasoned retargeter looking for advanced strategies, you’ll find plenty in this episode.

OUR GUEST:

Chris Evans is a “business growth strategist” doing Facebook ads, sales funnels, paid media, and retargeting. He is the president and owner of Online Profit Strategies a North Carolina marketing firm.

Formerly Chris was the host and co-founder of ReoSuccess TV, a web TV show for the Real Estate Industry. Chris now runs paid media campaigns for several guru’s and consults for Fortune 500 companies.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 64  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Chris Evans quote from the show:

You can also get Chris’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Retargeting is a second chance to persuade.” ~ Chris Evans
Click To Tweet

To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Listener, welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode#64 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get traffic and build a super profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds and today we are talking not just how to get traffic to your website but how to get it coming back.

In just a moment we will be joined by Chris Evans who is a retargeting expert so if you’ve ever wanted to know how to follow up your prospects with branded advertising for your business as they browse around the internet then today’s session is for you.

But before we get to the interview with Chris, I want to tell you about our website analysis reports which are available at veravo.com. My team and I will put your site through a thorough 30-point audit and tell you how it is performing, both the search engine optimization, usability, and how it compares to other websites in terms of its traffic volume and performance. If you want to get your performance analyzed, head on over to veravo.com, press the analyze my website button which you’ll find in the top right corner of the site, enter the web address you want us to analyze, the email address you’d want us to send the report to and my team will put together a thorough 30-point check of your website and rush it over to you within a couple of days. So to get your own report go to veravo.com.

So before I invite Chris on to the mic let me give him a brief introduction, Chris is the president and owner of Online Profit Strategies which is a marketing agency based out of Charlotte, North Carolina in the USA. His agency focuses on lead generation, lead catcher, sales funnel development, Facebook ads, as well as retargeting which of course is the topic of today’s interview. He’s consultant for Fortune 500 companies, he’s spoken at several marketing conferences and he’s the publisher of his own retargeting course.

So on that note, let’s welcome Chris Evans from Online Profit Strategies.

James: So welcome back listener! This is the interview section of Traffic Jam#64 and today we are joined by Chris Evans for a discussion all about retargeting. Chris, how are you doing?

Chris: I am doing fantastic, how are you?

James: I am doing good, I am super glad that we’ve put this session together and I am going to dive straight in to the content, no fluff here. I have a pretty advanced audience, I think most people listing in will have experienced retargeting in some way, shape or form. As a retargeting expert do you have a metaphor or kind of your own way of describing what retargeting is?

Chris: Yeah, to put it really plain and simply is retargeting really is a second chance. It is a second chance to get a lead, it is a second chance to get a purchase conversion so it is a wonderful thing and I am really excited to be here to talk about this.

James: Cool! It is going to be fun, this is not a new topic we have discussed it a fair amount on the show, in fact we had Mike Rhodes on the show, Traffic Jam#59 where he was saying that retargeting in his mind by Google Adwords is probably the most profitable campaign that you can ever run through the platform. I am curious to know, do you agree with him and if you do, do you have any numbers that might back a claim on that?

Chris: Yeah, I would totally agree with Mike. Mike is a pretty smart guy so pretty much I listen to most things that he says but for the retargeting that we run, we do a lot in Google just like Mike on YouTube and then a tremendous amount on Facebook as well and our numbers, they can be almost unbelievable. The ROI we get can be 500%, 1000% compared to just a front end traffic site. So the whole idea of remarketing, retargeting is it’s a whole process of building rapport, building trust, and building that brand recognition with people so once they go through that process of initially seeing your brand or initially seeing your offer, maybe that willingness to make that commitment or that decision yet so retargeting really is that opportunity for you to continue to persuade and really build a case for why somebody should opt in for your offer or purchase your product.

James: How do you think it has changed our approach to marketing I mean if we sort of think back perhaps to five years where everyone was bashing prospects and visitors over the head ramming them in to squeeze pages really like screwing them to get their email list because they realize that if they left the site there is probably a chance that they never actually get contact with that visitor ever again. How has retargeting changed how we deal with traffic in the first instance to a site?

Chris: Well I think one thing it helps companies not being so douche if you will if you know what I am talking about. But the thing is consumers, and even business owners, if you are in the B2B business, they are becoming more sophisticated every single day. So all the tricks and the trickery and all the things that marketers come up with to try to get somebody a decision, as consumers and business owners are seeing this stuff their sophistication level is basically climbing, they’re just a little bit more numb to the trickery that’s out there so what is happening is we now are forced as marketers or business owners trying to get our products and businesses out there, we are forced to bring more quality to the market, right? So what we are forced to do is whether it is content or we’re showing case studies or whatever it might be. So in my mind retargeting gives us the ability to present that case to our prospects. So if I have clients Bill and Suzy and they accomplish great things to my products and services, if John who’s in my site did not purchase my products, guess what, now I can run a case study of Bill and Suzy and the great things that they have accomplished through my product and service, it gives us the ability to do that and really meet them where they’re at their sophistication level as opposed to just some cheesy looking squeeze page with hyped up copy so that is why I am a huge proponent of retargeting.

James: Where do you think consumers are at in terms of their sophistication? Because I guess most now are probably aware that they’re even retargeted to. It’s not so new now that people just think wow this brand is super prominent out there in the marketplace I am seeing them everywhere. Is that a problem for us marketers and if so is there any pitfalls that we should look out for when constructing our campaigns with that in mind?

Chris: Yeah, you can definitely be very, very creepy in retargeting. And the goal is not to be a creeper. And that is why it is important to have frequency levels in caps on your retargeting. So if you are retargeting somebody you are not hitting them 25 times a day with your ads. Maybe it is one, two or maybe a max of three times in a day where your video ad is displayed to them, but consumers for the most part, they have no awareness of them as they have experienced but they have no way to identify or know what to call it. Many people, in my experience they think that companies are really smart, some of them are, just by their personality, might be a little bit crept out but the percentage is really low. And the people that don’t really mind, from the studies that I had, it is above 50%. People who don’t care about retargeting they’re actually fine with it.

James: I’d like to move forward in a moment and talk about some of the more advanced things that we can do with retargeting, perhaps some of the more creative campaigns, things like case studies that you mentioned but I think it will be worth drawing a little bit of a line in the sand to start with and talk about where we should get started if we haven’t got a retargeting campaign in place already. What do you recommend to your own students like the first campaign and the first step? Where should they get on with it?

Chris: So yes, that is a fantastic question and one thing, no matter what, is like everybody knows that you should have an email list right? If you think about retargeting, it’s the same thing. You’re basically building a list of people who most likely go to your website. There are other forms of retargeting that we could all talk about but it is all about building a list of people who hit your website so pick your vehicle for retargeting, whether you are using Google platform of Facebook – these are probably the two main ones. You grab your script from one of those platforms and at the very least to drop it in your homepage and start building an audience of people who are coming to your site because essentially those are people who raise their hand and have shown some kind of interest on some kind of level so that would be step one. Then once you decide, hey what’s the message that I am going to put out to these people? By that time you’ll have an audience that you can actually target to. And once you get to it, and you want to get a little bit more advanced, you can start segmenting based on the different pages and the call to actions that you have going on.

James: So what do you recommend for a basic campaign? Just lead with a generic branding message? Would it be a testimonial type of campaign? What would be the best one – just go with the broad message to all website visitors?

Chris: I think it really kind of depends but for what I am always trying to tell my clients is to build their email list. So whether they have an offer on their homepage or a certain landing page, it is always about trying to get people back to opt in because for me that is one of the most important pieces in your business and one of the most valuable assets that your business is your email list, so whether it is just an application for a consultation or a video download or whatever it might be, always trying to push people back to that offer so they opt in. That can say, hey grab this report on how to build a basket in underwater in ten minutes so whatever your offer might be and for whatever part of it too. I think it is important as well, if you can and legitimately do it, is build scarcity in to your offer, which I think a lot of people don’t put in their retargeting campaigns but is extremely, extremely effective.

James: Nice advice. I like that concept for the basis of best insurance too, right? If you can get people on to your email list and you can be retargeting to them and then potentially across multiple platforms which I guess we’ll speak about in a minute that is really the best way to go. So let’s assume for a second that we’ve got a broad campaign in play. We’ve targeted everything all website visitors, we’re driving our prospects back to some form of offer, hopefully we’re getting them to subscribe to our email list. What’s the next step? Where do we take our campaigns from here to really push it up to the next level?

Chris: Yes, so a lot of what we do is we build our evergreen funnels so it a lot of automation. So what we do is we have time sequences and a funnel might be 14 days for a front end offer and what we’re doing is we use different plug ins and stuff and this is a little bit more on the advanced site but we used plug ins where we remove the offer based on when they hit that page so what we’ll do is we’ll build an offer for let’ say our funnel is 14 days. We’ll build 14 different audiences and essentially every single day we’ll drop one of those days so they might say an ad on day 1 saying hey we’ve got this product on sale and it is only for 14 days. And this is like another topic that we can talk about. Creating burn list where when somebody hits day 7, all the other days are burnt off so they’re removed from those lists. So then they might see an ad on Day 7 saying hey you only have 7 days to purchase this product, right then on day 14 they don’t see other ads but the only ad they’ll see is hey today is the last day to purchase this product and this is something that is very, very effective that most people don’t implement in to the retargeting because it is a little bit more advanced and utilizing some different plug ins out can actually remove the sales page based on what they hit can be very effective because we know that true scarcity is a very powerful method of persuasion. If you can implement that in to your retargeting strategy, it is super powerful so that is a top notch strategy that pretty much anybody can use.

James: I guess something like that would be very good for an e-commerce type business. Perhaps kind of a second chance offer. If you didn’t buy to this price, hey, if you take us up with in the next 14 days you can get it at 25% off or that type of thing. Knowing that the first time around it wasn’t appealing maybe if you adjust the pricing if that didn’t go around the first time you could get a bite the second time around. So outside of scarcity which I can see would be very powerful especially to an engaged audience that already visited your site, what are the things that we can be doing to really maximize results for this stuff?

Chris: Definitely the branding. Just having your logo in front of people is really important and I think, two, we are being forced, especially with the sophistication level of people out there to build that rapport so branding campaigns, if you have any copy on there or basically just have a really nice image, a really nice ad that you are just running once a day and they see your logo, they see your brand, and that’s it, because the more and more they see it, the more and more they become comfortable with it and subconsciously that trust is built. So that’s one thing, the case studies are extremely important. Again, with helping somebody make that decision of purchasing that product or opting in, hey it must be a good thing. So this is where you can start utilizing YouTube retargeting. For me a video is probably the most powerful communication modality vehicle out there because we are vocal right now but if you are able to see me you can see my mannerisms and my emotions and that is one thing that is really powerful about video and here is a great thing. Most people are not using video in their marketing, let alone in their retargeting, so if you can get a case study 101 with some clients and customers and them providing a screenshot, even that can be powerful because just see the amount of video that is consumed online today. And it is pretty much on every platform where YouTube is. YouTube videos are on Facebook, on blogs, and obviously when people search for YouTube videos online or certain things online so out pops that YouTube video, and they’re on your retargeting list, guess what, you can run that commercial right before that video with a call to action and it is pretty inexpensive. And there are a few other things that you can do with retargeting as well.

James: Yeah I think video is something I’m sure many of our listeners haven’t explored yet. I’m sure there’s a big retargeting via display. There’s probably a few people that have also experimented going on to social and perhaps advertising on Facebook but video is perhaps something you see less often. Where do you actually set this up? Is it via the Google adwords platform or is ti somewhere else?

Chris: Yes, so two parts. You put your videos on YouTube and then you can enter a YouTube account with your adwords and then when you set up your campaigns it just gives you the option what video you want to select so you can get pretty granular on the YouTube Google platform. For the guys out there who are a little bit more advanced, you can basically set up audiences with Google analytics based on certain goals and stuff that you have set up so it is really, really powerful. But it is difficult because the adwords platform can scare people away because it Is pretty intense to actually set up the retargeting is really not that difficult at all and here’s the thing about video. In the past people are afraid of video but now is the best time to do video because it is extremely easy whether you do what people call the VSL or kind of just like the walk through video or you just get out your iPhone and have somebody record it any way you choose video is extremely powerful and definitely should be leveraged because a lot of people in businesses aren’t willing to take those extra steps so for you to be able to beat your competition that way is very powerful.

James: I’m glad that you touched on briefly platforms because I am sure it is a question that you get asked a lot, which is better, adroll, perfect audience, Google adwords, or whatever else. I am guessing you probably have an answer to this question so in your opinion what is the best platform to be using and why?

Chris: Back in the day I was a huge, huge fan of perfect audience as they started out but as they’ve grown and been bought out, I’m not such a big fan. One of the reasons why is because they don’t allow you to put a cap on impressions basically based on their algorithms so I’ll definitely lean towards referencing Facebook for sure, especially when you’re running traffic from Facebook is very, very powerful. The Google platform is such a giant and you almost don’t need to be anywhere else. But here is the thing I kind of want to throw in there. I think what we’re going to see in the future is a big shift in how this is all done. As these big giants especially in the social world are taking over other platforms, you’re going to see this cross pollination of platforms become, right now it is a little bit difficult to retarget somebody who may be in your site on mobile and not on a desktop. But what’s going to happen is these platforms are going to change the way they are building audiences. So for example, Facebook, it won’t be based on a script it will be based on somebody’s account ID, right? So if somebody hits you via mobile from the Facebook platform. You will be able to target that platform towards their desktop or vice versa. So this is something for people to really consider and look towards the future with retargeting and why they should start now as well.

James: And is there any pitfalls and problems to look out for, at least in the current scenario where we’re perhaps working cross platform, maybe with using adwords for YouTube and maybe using Facebook exchange or adroll for Facebook. Do we have any challenges there based on we might have huge amounts of ads appearing and then there’s no audience cap. What do we need to be sort of aware of in that regard?

Chris: Well the really important thing is to make sure and it is really vital that you create a burn list. So if somebody opts in to your offer or purchases your product, you want to remove them from the audience set they are being retargeted on. Because it is not very professional if somebody purchases your products and they opt in and you are still pushing that ad to them. You need to be more advanced and high level. You put them in some other kind of audience maybe you offer them a different product or service. One thing that is also extremely important is to make sure that you have that burn list created. Essentially what you are doing is you’re dropping that same audience pixel on the thank you page. So when they land there, they can be removed from the audience that you have that you’re marketing to them for that initial offer for your product. The other thing too is just make sure that you are offering high quality. Again, when you are looking at sophistication in the competition out there, it is time to up your game especially when you kind of speak to the IM community here which I am imagining you have a good amount of listeners from. It just doesn’t suffice to have a crappy looking brand and a junky looking image more. Things really time for us in the community and beyond to really put thought in to the message and the brand and how we want to be perceived in the marketplace. I think it is going to be really, really important especially going forward because people just don’t believe that hype and the crap that they’re used to.

James: Yeah, totally. Well let’s leave things on a few action steps Chris. For those looking to get started on retargeting and haven’t done so already, what one or two things could they be doing as a result of this conversation?

Chris: Yes, one I would look for where your traffic is coming from, if you are running Facebook ads, absolutely have a Facebook ad pixel. Don’t overthink it, just drop the link on the pages. It is really easy to set up the audience with Facebook ad center and also just get the script from Google. Just get these script drafts and just build an audience for your homepage and if nothing else, start running a brand campaign where your brand is displaying one or two or three times a day and then on that I really want to challenge people to go out there and look at creating a video and put it to market, just try and test it with whatever your products and services to get your video in front of your site, your offer, or your product page.

James: Excellent! Well I know Chris that you actually teach this stuff and are in the process right now of putting a course together to dive a little bit more deeply in to retargeting. Where can our listeners find out a little bit more about that?

Chris: I am finishing the final touches right now but iloveretargeting.com and I go in to great detail on all these stuff. We have done an extreme amount of research and actually implementation on retargeting and I think I could say with a lot of confidence that there is not a course that covers retargeting in the subject of retargeting like I love retargeting so it will be a great course and you’ll want to jump in.

James: Pretty self-explanatory as well. I think it also tells very much people about your belief in retargeting as well, right?

Chris: It’s easy to remember so

James: Absolutely! So I think you the listener can remember exactly what that URL is, it’s iloveretargeting.com but if for any reason you can’t head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/64 where there will be a direct link to Chris’s website plus some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show as well so that’s TrafficJamCast.com/64. Awesome Chris I think we’ll wrap things up there. Thanks so much for coming on the call, it’s an absolute blast and who knows maybe we’ll have another opportunity to do it all again.

Chris: I would love to man, I had a good time.

Thank you to Chris Evans from iloveretargeting.com. You can find out more about retargeting by going to TrafficJamCast.com/64 where you’ll find a special retargeting guide and of course the full transcript of today’s session and a downloadable MP3 as well.

And whilst you’re on the episode page, why don’t you join in on the discussion for this show too? Also, if you haven’t done so already, make sure that you subscribe via iTunes and or Stitcher radio. For iTunes go to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and for Stitcher go to TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

Of course we end the show with the traffic jam. It’s a musical jam chosen by our episode guest. Chris Evans has gone for a classic. It’s a Frank Sinatra track and it’s Fly Me to the Moon. Enjoy this one and I’ll see you back here for another episode real soon!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest. Chris Evans has gone for a classic and has chosen Fly Me to the Moon by Frank Sinatra.

The song which was written by Bart Howard in 1954 was originally titled In Other Words. The song became known popularly as Fly Me to the Moon from its first line, and after a few years the publishers changed the title to that officially.

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

To help take your YouTube, social media and banner retargeting campaigns to the next level download the special episode bonus below.

The training includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript.

Some twenty years ago it was easy to rank on the first page of Google. There were few websites competing for the top ten spots.

Fast forward to the present, there are now millions of websites, and competition is rife.

Smart marketers like Jonathan Mizel have turned to paid traffic with ever growing inventory, segmentation and targeting options available to them.  What’s more, the evolution of paid traffic is still in it’s infancy, with the birth of big data ad networks and marketers alike have more precise ways to serve ads to their ideal target market than ever before.

In this episode you will learn how release yourself from the shackles of Google search and learn how to buy traffic to your website that is predisposed to buy everything you got. Sound interesting? Listen on..

OUR GUEST:

Jonathan Mizel got started marketing online way back in 1993. At the time he marketed several different products, performed lead gen and provided traffic services. He now works with just a handful of clients and on a few captive offers..

Jonathan is responsible for coining the term “Squeeze Page” and was the first to use a squeeze funnel. He’s considered by many as a pioneer of the industry.

Jonathan’s skill and expertise, especially in the realm of paid traffic have been called upon by many large corporations such as Microsoft, Intel, American Express, and Barnes and Noble. He is also a consultant to many marketing ‘gurus’ such as Frank Kern, Rich Schefren, Perry Marshall, and Mike Hill.

Jonathan Mizel currently resides in Hawaii with his lovely wife, Lish and their cat. When he is not working, he paints, does skiing, surfing, and scuba diving.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 63  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Jonathan Mizel quote from the show:

You can also get Jonathan’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“If you are buying your traffic, you’re going to respect it a lot more.”@JonathanMizel
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

What’s up there listener? Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is episode#63 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online.

I am your host as always James Reynolds and in just a short moment from now we are going to be joined by Jonathan Mizel for a talk all about paid traffic among other things as well so that is coming up in just a moment.

Before we get to the interview, just a reminder that will all Traffic Jam episodes come a bunch of bonuses and today is no different so head on over right now to TrafficJamCast.com/63 to get your episode bonuses which today include my own personal notes from my discussion today with Jonathan Mizel plus a downloadable MP3 and a full transcript of today’s show also. So head on over there right now, download your bonuses, grab a drink, put a notepad to one side and let’s get ready for the show.

So as I mentioned at the top of the show, today’s guest is Jonathan Mizel and he’s been marketing online literally since the birth of the internet itself. He’s a true pioneer of the scene with a wealth of experience in both paid traffic, organic traffic, and offline and we are going to be covering each of those topics in today’s session. You’re in for an absolute treat especially so because this is the one and only interview that Jonathan is going to be doing in 2015. I’m extremely honored he’s chosen Traffic Jam.

So on that note, let’s welcome to Traffic Jam Jonathan Mizel from Cyberwave Media.

James: Welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#63 of Traffic Jam and joining me today we’ve got Jonathan Mizel. Jonathan, how are you doing?

Jonathan: I am great.

James: Awesome! Stoked to have you on the call today. We’ve had to move agendas and literally had to get you up at the crack of dawn so appreciate you taking an early morning off and tuning in for Traffic Jam. Let’s get stuck right in to the questioning. I think this is going to be quite interesting, you’ve been online for a long, long time, perhaps longer than most of my previous guests, I thought what we’d do today is talk about some of the things that perhaps worked in the past that no longer work today with some of the newer opportunities where we should be focusing our attention going forward. To kind of set the scene for the conversation and I guess it may surprise some listeners, when and how did you get started online?

Jonathan: I think my very first online experience was 1991. 1991, 1992 we had Compuserv, AOL. This was before the commercial internet actually rose up. When we first got online, in terms of the internet, I think there were maybe several thousand websites and here’s an example of where we were at, Yahoo did not have their own domain. They were located on the subdirectory of Stanford University and it was more of a links list with a little function to it and those were back in the very exciting days of the internet because you could do almost anything and you could dominate almost anything. But, on the other hand, there was almost nobody on the internet so that was a very, very different time and of course things just exploded and grew rather quickly from there.

James: I guess we are in two extremely different scenarios, before there was a different opportunity but perhaps a smaller market and now there’s massive markets but maybe less opportunity because it is overcrowded. Which scenario would you opt for it you are given the choice between 1991-1993 where you first got started and 2015 where we are now?

Jonathan: I would opt for today. One of the things today that is so different is that it seems to me at least, there’s an unlimited amount of traffic back then. It was easy to get traffic but you just did not have a lot of visitors, you did not have a lot of audience and the audience that was there was no real way to segment it and no real reason to either. If they were online you’d be selling them something that related to online like software would be one of the big things that was sold back then. Now because the audiences are so big, you just have tremendous opportunity to sell anything and everything. And you’ve got sites like Facebook or any of the big networks that have segmented things so well and know so much about the audience that no matter what you’re selling whether it is software or something to do with woodworking the audience is there and is ready for you. And also today there is so much more traffic, yeah you have to buy it, yeah, you just can’t throw a website up and everyone would sign up. This was back in the day when you could put a squeeze page or an opt in form up and people just didn’t know any better and you would get 70-80% opt in rates. The audience is more sophisticated now but now you have a real opportunity for segmentation and for real target marketing.

James: Yeah, those were back in the days where it was kind of a novelty to receive an email, right? So I am sure people would want to subscribe to email lists like wow, I got another email today, something to tell their friends about.

Jonathan: Right! I used to tell that to my girlfriend like, look at all the email I got! That’s amazing! Where are those people from? I don’t know! But isn’t that cool?

James: Yeah, times have severely changed. Anyway, I know you’ve got colorful views on certain sources of traffic, one for instance is SEO which you describe as bullshit! Why do you say that?

Jonathan: Again, when we started, you can go to search engines like Yahoo or Excite, most of the search engines aren’t even around anymore and you could make a page, you could submit it, and within 5-10 minutes, you can see it in the index. Back then, take a term like weight loss or lose weight or some very popular term today, something like has a hundred million plus searches, you only had a handful of people trying to optimize for that particular phrase. So it was you and ten other guys so of course you’d be able to have a lot of wins. Nowadays, you’ve got you, you’ve got the ten guys, then you’ve got the guys in the next town, then the guys in the next country and I would say the competition has really killed SEO. It hasn’t killed the long tail. There’s still, four, fix, six word phrases that you can get optimized for but that is not really scalable isn’t it James? You can’t build a business on that even if they are 50 highly targeted clicks a week, the way that we discovered paid media is we had some issues with Google and once you’re making a lot of money with SEO and Google decides they don’t like your pages or your sites, or whatever anymore, they turn you off! And there is nothing more depressing than going from a thousand to two thousand bucks a day down to twenty, thirty bucks a day and so that is how we discovered paid media and that’s where we really determined that the most important thing, at least for us, is salability. For a local business, it’s going to be different. I mean if you are a pet shop, you don’t want a million visitors to your website that are going to burn your servers down and they are just going to destroy your load times. You only want as many people as are in your local town to visit your site, but if you are selling something that has true scalability, something in a large consumer market, scalability is where it is at. You want was many visitors as possible so that you can really maximize your audience and then start working on your conversion.

James: Yeah, I guess it is becoming a smaller and smaller window with Google, right? Not only is that restriction of 10 spaces set, you’ve also got the issue that the fact now that there are so much content now online, I think the statistics now are that it doubles every seven to twelve months or something. You’re only increasing the nature of that competitive nation, it just gets harder and harder right?

Jonathan: And also you have – well we don’t call it web 2.0 anymore because when the social hit, and the user generated content, now there is such a great opportunity for advertising. Imagine being the advertising manager for Facebook, and I don’t know if this is true but I heard someone say that they got something like almost a trillion views a month. Now whether that’s page views a month or page views a quarter, there’s a heck of a lot of inventory out there. And then there is also the Pinterest and all the other social sites so there is such an easy opportunity to buy advertising now that you know, why would you spend your time trying to get SEO? You optimize a page and then three months later you figure out if you actually have something there.

James: It certainly is an interesting point, I mean whereas the opportunity perhaps narrows for SEO, it does widen for paid media because it does more and more are going online, they are surfing more and more places and there is more places to put advertising, right? And be more and more targeted in the process so I can certainly see why that would be the case and why you’re perhaps slightly vehemently against SEO as a traffic source.

Jonathan: Yeah and listen, if it works for you, I absolutely optimize your page for Google and I think you should have your address at the bottom and your name and you should have a relevant title tag but I wouldn’t rely on that to be the be all. I think we only spend about 20 minutes a month thinking about search engine, we want to make sure we are findable. But in terms of really getting a new audience, and really attracting the tight kind of people on to our site, we almost rely exclusively on paid media, PPV, PPC, email, some sort of search that is paid search, because it is something that we can control and it is something that we can scale and yeah, you have to pay for it. But you know, there is this thing that I learned a while back, traffic goes where it is respected. This is going to sound a little weird but if you are buying your traffic, you’re going to respect it a lot more than if you are getting it for free. If you are paying real money from your pocket to get visitors in to your site, you are not going to give them a crappy page and you are not going to say, oh, look, they were more engaged today than they were yesterday. You’re going to have a solid strategy, you are going to try to engage people, but in the right way. You are going to try to capture their information so that you can follow up with then later and you are going to give them information that’s relevant and that means something to them. And that is really the benefit of switching over to a paid strategy, it’s that you start to respect your audience so much more and conversely they start to respect you.

James: Yeah it kind of helps you raise your game somewhat when you’ve got a little bit of dollar in the game, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely!

James: You mentioned weight several times, I know you’ve got an agency called Cyberwave Media where you buy media placements in behalf of clients. Tell us a little bit of what you guys have going on over there. What do you do day to day?

Jonathan: Well, day to day we’ve actually really scaled that back and now what we do is we like to work with one or two clients or captive offers. These are offers that we either have a vested interested in or that we own ourselves and really start to do media buying and really start buying traffic strategy for those offers as opposed to being just a general agency. And a lot of that has to with the specialization in the industry. You have so many people out there – whenever I see the competition, I move in to a different space. And so when we were the only game in town in terms of media buy, then we started to do more captive offers or offers where we can make more money from them. And whenever we saw more people getting in to a strategy, we started to do away from offering strategy and teaching our stuff, and really start implementing our stuff. Now we still do teach stuff, we’ve got a course called Traffic Evolution, we teach people about email marketing, but in terms of the one on one stuff, with just a couple of exceptions, we like to limit that to stuff that we own, or control, or have an interest in. And I recommend that to everybody listening to this. If you are an agency or a CPA network or a media buyer, you probably have already figured out if you’re going to make more money, have more control, have more reliable income selling something that you have a vested interest in, and something that you own or control, or have at least some degree of control than just working for a client, because if you put yourself in a position, you hang your shingles out saying hey I work with clients that will come my way, you know, you can get fired. But when you own the business or have a vested interest in it, it’s impossible to be fired because it is something that you are a part of. And also, you really start to become an expert on one thing, we’ve really worked in the health space and it is something now that we are so good at not because we say we’re good at it but because we’ve done it so many times for so long that we’ve got our top stand and now we can really focus on that stuff, if you’re beginning or when you’re new, a lot of young copywriters ask me how did you learn to write ad copy, or media buyers, and I said, well bring on a bunch of clients, figure out who you want to serve, and then get hired by people. There is nothing higher than getting deadlines and and work that you have some accountability for. But over time, I would recommend moving from being a generalist to being more of a specialist role, whether you are the owner of the company or you are an agency serving a particular niche.

James: Nice! Good advice. Which traffic sources are either you or your clients having most success with right now? We’ve talked about some of you disfavor, which are the ones that you favor most at the moment?

Jonathan: I think my most favorite one at the moment and always have been is email marketing. It is shocking to people out there, a couple of things: it is shocking that email still works but this is a real big surprise that people think that with all the span out there that people wouldn’t really be any life in email but a lot of people, when they get their spam, they get mad. When I get my spam, I get excited and I look at it and I am like, huh, I keep getting spam for this thing. I wonder what this thing is. I wonder what this product is. I wonder who owns this list. I wonder if I can contact this list owner. I’ll wonder if they’ll mail for me too! I wonder if they are canned spam compliant and so doing a lot of reverse engineering has really helped me discover not only new traffic sources but new channels to really help me discover not only new traffic sources but also funnels. And then the other thing I really like about email is that we were one of the first people to use the squeeze page and we’ve been using it since 1998. And I think a couple of guys may have been using it longer but in terms of what we’ve been doing, we really love squeeze pages and the reason we love them is because it allows us to build a list, and when we look at all the different kinds of traffic sources out there and we throw that traffic in to multiple pages, the pages that you know you like the most as squeezes and the traffic source that works best with that is email traffic. and that is because those users and behaviorally predisposed opt in list. They opt in to the list that you are renting, or that is doing the list or JV and now they are coming to your page and they are going to opt in to that as well. So email is a huge one for us, we’ve also found that there are a lot of commercially available lists out there you can rent legally, ethically, honestly, and then also, our biggest strategy is finding list owners that maybe have a small list, five or ten or fifteen thousand people on it who have never even considered doing a joint venture or doing their list and when we were hearing a funny story about a guy that just rented a list and apparently the list owner was saying oh my god you want to give me a hundred dollars to rent? Oh my god, I can’t even believe. Maybe I should go in to the list rental business! And my friend was saying, yeah, you should. But only for me. Don’t rent it out to anyone else. I know Charles Kirkland was on and he was talking about PPV and we really like PPV. It is probably our second favorite traffic source because you can literally pop up a squeeze page or a web page over your competitor, if you are selling a weight loss product you can target weight watchers and you can pop up a web page and say, hey, weight watchers visitors, check this out! And so you can create all this fun contextually relevant bridges and almost sneak in there and really target people at the point where they’re about the make a decision like when they’re on the page of your competitor. And then PPC is still fantastic as well and we also rank native advertising which is more of a content based PPC along in the content based bucket but any sort of pay per click where you are getting people to click, you are sticking ads in front of them, either ads that are relevant to the page they are on or ads that are relevant to the keywords that they search for, all of those continue to work to bring people in to your funnel and those probably are our three favorites. Email, PPV and PPC.

James: Nice! I love when you spoke about list rentals and it reminded me of a piece I was reading prior to this interview where you said you have been influenced a lot by Jay Abraham and his concepts of doing host beneficiary types relationships that he spoke about in the offline world, gosh, I don’t know 15, probably 20 years ago now but it is very true to the point that there are people whit assets, with customer lists, inquirer’s list who have never, ever thought of actually emailing those people or making that available to someone else so outside the main channel, there are still opportunities that exist, right?

Jonathan: Right! And listen, that particular talk that Jay gave which I think I heard from a Gary Halbert letter which maybe I heard two decades ago, it blew my mind. As what Jay said, you need customers. They are a particular type of customer that you can either dig them out of the ground and it is great to do that by the way, I dig a lot of leads and a lot of prospects out of the ground. I dig them out fresh and they’re mine. I am not buying leads from someone. When you run your own lead gen campaigns, you get those leads and they are exclusive to you and that is a fantastic way of getting leads and bringing traffic and prospects in to your business, but it can also be quite expensive because the more targeted you want those persons, you know, when you want someone who wants accounting services, and they have got to be local and they have got to have a business that has to have at least 10 employees, and so you start to look at all this double and triple demographic qualifications that they need, you can pay $30, $40, or $50 a lead or you can just go to a business that targets that same kind of lead. If you are an accountant and you are looking for those kinds of business owners in your area, you contact a lawyer and say maybe I can share those leads with you. And I am already going to pay $40- $50 for those leads by digging them out of the ground, I will just give you the $50 or $50 and I am not even going to compete with you. And so a lot of it has to do with figuring out not just who your competitors are because first of all, your competitors will most often give you your data and give you your list. I mean, look at Click Bank or any of these affilitate networks out there. You contact these guys and they sell a weight loss pill or something like that and you call them up and say I sell a weight loss pill, and they are like, okay, I will mail your offer. I mean, how often before the internet would you see a direct competitor say oh you sell something? I sell the exact same thing and I would love to give you my customers. It is almost bizarre but you forget that there are also a bunch of other businesses that are not necessarily competitors for you, they’re not just selling the exact diet pill but they are competitors for that exact same traffic or they are competitors for that prospect or for that demographic and that’s where the real opportunity lie especially for small businesses and local businesses. It is almost like the Chamber of Commerce meeting and I don’t know if they have them where you are but in the US there are a lot of Chamber of Commerce organizations and the idea was traditionally, 20 to 30 years ago, the accountant, and the lawyer and the contractor, they would all get together and they would all be getting the same prospect but they would be selling something different. Same prospect but different products and different services, and they would share those services amongst themselves in order to further their businesses and that is all that Jay is really talking about and that is how we have made a ton of money over the last 20 years.

James: That’s a fantastic strategy! I actually build up a small photography company prior to doing what I do now pretty much based on this host beneficiary type sort of set up. We did family pictures and we did weddings and we literally went out the very best wedding seller, we went to the jeweler, we went to the bridal shop and we handpicked all of the businesses with the same target audience as us that we premium in our area and we incentivize them to introduce us to their customers and it was phenomenal, one because we are getting the right target audience but the second reason was that they were essentially endorsing us and introducing us to their customer base which made us toward a sale much more fluid. It works extremely well as you say for local businesses for sure.

Jonathan: Yeah, a lot of people don’t get that when you rent a list to that list owner and you mail on their behalf, they’re actually endorsing you. They’re saying hey I have checked this guy out and he’s solid. And even if they haven’t, I wouldn’t recommend taking advantage of people, I would recommend always doing a solid job with whatever it is you are doing, but remember whenever you have people who are working with you and unknowingly they are putting themselves on the line by recommending you. And you said something that was really powerful. A lot of business owners don’t get this, you incentivize those businesses, you don’t just ask them. You don’t just say hey mail for me, you don’t just say hey, recommend me or refer me or put my business cards on your counter or your flyers on your window. You say, I will pay you to do this, I will give you cash money. When you have someone coming in, the ring seller, and you know they are going to be married because you sell the engagement ring, now there is a three to six months window before the wedding starts getting planned. What a perfect time for that ring seller to say, have you found a wedding planner? Have you got a place yet, a photographer? And now the person is not only highly receptive because the timing is right, but this ring seller has just sold them a $5000 ring and so there is a bit of trust and a degree of connection there.

James: Yeah absolutely! How else are they going to make more money beyond that ring sell so it is certainly worthwhile for them too! Let’s get back to talking about online stuff. You’re a big fan of PPC and it seems to be that Facebook is the big flavor of the day now in terms of pay per click marketing, what do you see as the next big trend though, who’s the next one to kind of rival Google adwords and the like?

Jonathan: I don’t think Facebook has even started what they are doing to any big extent. Facebook last year launched their network which is an adword network, I think it is Fbx the Facebook Exchange, it is something that we had a lot looking at and what’s so great about Facebook just demographic is psychographic and behavioral information. I mean, we know that this guy is interested in woodworking and we know that he’s 44 yrs. old and we know that he likes BMWs but we also know that because Facebook knows that he clicks ads. I was talking to a large agency a while back and these guys do a ton of banner ads and they have started to aggregate information that is behavioral in nature. And the number one thing that they learned is that their action takers and there are looker list and what they are looking is that out of all the people in the internet like only 13 of them click ads. These is only 13% and out of the 13%, only about 25% of the 13% or 4% opt in to the ads and out of the 4% only 1%-2% regularly buy stuff. Now, we are not talking about Amazon, we are talking about, because we are not going to be competing with Amazon, we are talking about people who are selling a product, an e-book, a widget, or a physical thing off their website. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be only able to target those people and what he had done first of all is just eliminated all the non-clickers. Why would you want to show your banner impressions to people who don’t click ads? And in that case, why would you want to show banner impressions to people who don’t click ads or opt in to forms? And I think what Facebook has is this behavioral data and I did not really see them at first because I don’t think any of us had a clue how much data they were collecting. But now that they are able to aggregate that data in to a huge database and really big data as they are calling it and move that off of the Facebook environment and out of the Facebook site. I think that is going to be really the killer app and if we want to look at something that is not Facebook, it is being done off Facebook as well in native advertising which is native advertising in things like – there are a lot of hypey stuff there but there are also al of stuff that have proven interest type of thing. The videos, the viral stuff, anything that people come in to. You have a viral video of a cat and a hundred million people go to that website and when you’ve got a hundred million people to the website and you are cooking everybody and you have MAC addresses of everybody and you’ve got backend bases for everybody and there’s this giant machine running behind the scenes. Now you can say, oh out of a hundred million people here are the four million and five million that click on the ads. And out of those four to five million that click on an ad, here’s the conversion data on them. Google also does this and Facebook does this too. Facebook had a lot of issues with their conversion tracking at first and I think they even took their conversion tracking off for a while and they did not really understand. Hey here are the people who convert and the offers who convert so I think big data has been talked about in the last few years but it’s not really turning in to something. One thing we saw a couple of years ago was people talking about and last year we finally started to see this and this is really something for Fortune 500 people but it is quickly becoming for us too and that was for people coming to google.com. Google would like Ford to target them and Mercedes.com target them. It was all “anonymous” stuff so Toyota couldn’t say I want this person and this person and this person. It was all aggregated. But it wasn’t anonymous for Google, they knew exactly who those were and it is not anonymous for Facebook either. They know who is online and who is buying and who is clicking and what they are interested in and I would say that the biggest change that we are going to see in affiliate marketing over the next few years is people going to compete with Google and people starting to compete with Facebook. I remember talking to a guy, a great marketer and he said, why does Google hate affiliates? And he said, oh they don’t hate affiliates, they love affiliates. How can they love affiliates? They ban them and they shut them down and stuff, they are not allowed to do case affiliates. And he said, oh no, they love affiliates because affiliates taught them all the verticals and they show them all the profitable ads and they taught them all the profitable landing page strategies and they taught them all the profitable sales funnels and now they don’t need them anymore. And I see if you are an affiliate, now this is bad news, if you are a merchant, this is good news. Facebook and some of these large networks, the out brands, because of the conversion data, I see these guys getting in to the affiliate base and saying if you want to sell supplements, don’t hire 50 affiliates who will rip you off and send you crappy traffic and so on, just hire us. We’ll send you good traffic and we’ll send you real conversions and we know exactly who you want and we know exactly who will buy and we only have to annoy the 4% of the people who buy supplements online. That’s what you’re selling.

James: Interesting stuff. Well, thanks Jonathan. It has really given us a sneak peak in to the future and also a good look back in the past. I think we should wrap things up there because we’ve covered so much ground. Where should we send our listeners off to as a result of this show just to find out a bit more about you and see what else you’ve got and offer?

Jonathan: I would say the best place is trafficevolution.com. That is our main site, it is our course on all the different ways to get traffic on your website, all the different paid traffic sources, so Traffic Evolution is our main site at this point. You can opt in and there are some free lessons, some great content and that will help you get started.

James: Awesome stuff! Well to you the listener, the link off to traffic evolution and some of the other resources mentioned by Jonathan in today’s show will be included in the show notes for episode#63 which you can go to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/63. So yeah, let us wrap things up Jonathan. I am going to leave you to a morning, it is probably 8:30 where you are now so you got up super bright and early for today’s session so I am going to leave you to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and scenery in Maui and I hope to you see again soon.

Jonathan: Thank you very much. What an honor to be on your show and to talk to you too. Really appreciate it!

James: Thanks Jonathan!

So there you go that was Jonathan Mizel from CyberMedia.com. Got to say, super honored and delighted in fact that Jonathan chose Traffic Jam for his only podcast recording for 2015. And also extremely grateful to Jonathan for waking up at the crack of dawn to record that session, so thank you to you Jonathan.

To you of course the listener, the interview itself is not the only bundle of goodies you get on this episode when you head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/63. You’ll also get my personal notes from the show plus a downloadable MP3 and a full transcript of today’s training as well. So head on over there right now, it’s TrafficJamCast.com/63.

If you haven’t done so already, just a reminder to subscribe to Traffic Jam via iTunes or Stitcher radio. There’s direct links to find your way to the subscription pages which are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher.

We of course end the show with a Traffic Jam chosen by our special guest Jonathan Mizel who’s chosen The Wind Cries Mary by Jimmy Hendrix, a classic track. I hope you enjoy it and I’ll see you back here again real soon!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest. The Wind Cries Mary is the track chosen by paid traffic expert Jonathan Mizel.

It is a song by the American guitar legend Jimi Hendrix. This track was released in 1967 and is included in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW:

To help you get the most out of this podcast, I’ve put together a special bonus bundle…

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To get your bundle, simply click download and tell me where you’d like the bonuses sending:

There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the internet which makes standing out in the blogosphere hard.

With an ever increasing number of bloggers vying for consumers attention, what does it take to stand out above the crowd and be heard? Kristi Hines seems to know how, but then again she should.

Aside from her own content Kristi has written over 400 blog posts for others in several different markets, on topics as far reaching as finance and search engine optimisation. Her content has appeared on more than 60 popular websites which gives her an advantage over others.

On this episode we ask Kristi Hines to reveal how to do blogging effectively. The type of ‘effectively’ that’s resulted in over three hundred thousand social media shares and one hundred fifty thousand Google search clicks for Kristi to date. Listen in and learn how she does it, so you can implement her learnings in to your own blog content.

OUR GUEST:

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer who has worked with many well-known companies like American Express, Capital One and Freshbooks. She has been writing about social media, search engine optimization, web analytics and online marketing since 2009 and her blog Kikolani has been recognised as a Top 10 Social Media Blog.

When Kristi started freelance writing, she wrote first for Sprout Social, KISSmetrics and Unbounce to name a few. Her freelance writing portfolio contains more than 400 posts which have been shared more than 300K times on social media and received over 150K clicks from search engines.

If you want great quality content that actually works, Krisit Hines is a person to go to.

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Here are some of the highlights from episode 62  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Kristi Hines quote from the show:

You can also get Kristi’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Social media gets immediate traffic but search engine traffic is what you want long term.”@kikolani
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey what’s up listener? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is show#62 of the podcast that helps you get more traffic to your website and make more sales. I’m your host James Reynolds and what an awesome show we’ve got lined up for you today.

In just a moment from now we are going to be talking all about how to do blogging with Kristi Hines but before I introduce Kristi and get to the interview itself, there’s a couple of things I’d like you to do. The first is hop on over to iTunes or Stitcher radio and give a rating and review for Traffic Jam. Giving a review really is the number one way you can show support for the show and help get this content out to more people. Plus, when you leave a review, I am more than likely to read it out on a future show so a great way for you to get some exposure for yourself as well so I’d love for you to do that. The second thing I’d like you to do is head on over to the episode page for Traffic Jam#62 which is at TrafficJamCast.com/62 and download the special bonuses that come with this episode.

Aside from a special MP3 download for the show, full transcript of the show today, we’ve also put together a special resource guide with several tools that will help you create content topic ideas for your blog post far more quickly and easily than trying to muster them up yourself. So head on over there now to get that – TrafficJamCast.com/62 then let’s move on with the show.

Allow me to introduce today’s guest. Her name is Kristi Hines and she’s a freelance writer and professional blogger who writes on topics such as content marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and web analytics. Her work has appeared in more than 60 online publications including Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Examiner. Kristi is the writer of the likes of Kissmetrics, Sprout social and Unbounced quality content that gets results. Her freelance portfolio contains more than 400 blog posts that have generated over 300 thousand social shares and over 150 thousand clicks from Google search visitors each month.

Today we’ll be tapping in to Kristi’s knowledge to understand what it really takes to write blog post that generate more traffic and exposure. So let’s welcome now on to Traffic Jam Kristi Hines from KristiHines.com.

James: Hey there listeners! Welcome back to the interview section of Traffic Jam. Today we are joined by the very experienced blogger Kristi Hines. Kristi, how are you doing today?

Kristi: Doing good! How are you?

James: I’m awesome and super excited to have you on the show. Definitely looking forward to tapping in to your experience today. Let’s begin, let’s talk about what makes effective content because you’ve been blogging a lot both at www.kristihines.com and www.kikolani.com but you have also written well over 400 blog posts for others in several other different markets and on topics as far reaching as finance and search engine optimization. So let’s begin by tapping in to some of that experience. What would you say are some of the key elements of a blog post that kind of remain regardless of topic and regardless of market? What are the mainstays of every content?

Kristi: The mainstay is basically knowing your audience like knowing who you want to attract to your business website and creating content that is going to be of interest to them. And so I always like to suggest maybe survey the people that want to come to you and say what kind of things are you interested in and do some research to see, because there are not a lot of unique ideas are out there and a lot of topics are being covered because there are millions of blogs and everything out there. So I would suggest people kind of research people who have already talked about certain topics, see what’s the best mix for those and make sure you include yours and make sure that yours has that unique element.

James: Nice! Do you use any particular process to do that? Some things that we found effective here is using tools like Buzz Sumo for instance to kind of see which pieces of content have gained social traction and then to try and understand what topics or elements of those pieces of content have really kind of generated rapport and struck home with readers. Do you use any tools in the process like that to really zero in on those effective topics that might be?

Kristi: I do use Buzz Sumo, that’s been a recent favorite of mine for finding out which posts are most socially engaging and I also look at what topics ranks the first page of search results for keywords because sometimes they are not the same posts. And you kind of want to get a good idea if somebody is looking at Buzz Search, will you be able to get your post in to that first page and make sure it is unique enough so I kind of use both.

James: Yeah, it’s this simple but effective trick right? Google themselves are looking at all those signals as to what makes a piece of content actually a good piece of content and needless to say, those pieces of content that make it up there in the first page, they must be doing something pretty well.

Kristi: Exactly! Social media gets you the traffic immediately but in the long run search engine traffic is what you are going to have so definitely that is where you want to end up – that first page.

James: Absolutely! And some other things that have worked kind of nicely for us from an SEO standpoint and looking at what pieces of pillar content that really work is actually just then is going to the biggest sites and the most well-known people in the market and seeing which pieces of their content perform best and perhaps use tools like AHRefs or some of these search engine optimization links and analysis tools to effectively see which pieces of content which content gets linked to most and that has also been a good process for us for sure.

Kristi: Yeah! One of the tools I use is cognitive SEO and the reason I like it is instead of just looking at an excel table it actually gives you these little dots and if you see a big dot it means that it’s got a lot of links. You can kind of drill down to it and see the links so it kind of helps you visually identify the content that gets the most SEO action.

James: Yeah, nice stuff! What’s your best-ever performing piece of content and what made that so successful?

Kristi: I don’t know overall but in the past year I know I have done a series of Google analytics post for Social Media Examiner and those have done really well and I think one of the big reasons is that Google Analytics themselves tweeted it – like when that platform tweets and it has like hundreds of thousands of followers so it just got tons of traffic and a ton of social engagement.

James: Yeah. That’s nice and that’s a fantastic tip in itself. If you can create a piece of content that includes or is around someone who’s on a social cloud on a good following , it can get them engaged on the content and also helping with distribution, it makes life a little bit easier, right?

Kristi: Exactly! You just have to notify them too because sometimes they are not checking the entire web for content so sometimes you have to be like, hey, we mentioned you in this post and that definitely goes a long way.

James: Yeah absolutely! Let’s extend conversation around that topic, what types of posts are working really well because one that gain is used a lot by bloggers the world over is list post or expert round ups which would be kind of along the lines of what we just mentioned. Is there any kind of structures or formats on the posts that you yourself are finding the most success with?

Kristi: Usually list post, like the more number you can put into the type the better. If you have a hundred sources or whatever, people think it’s interesting and they read it and they are like, oh, wow it’s got a hundred things it must cover everything and then they start sharing. That obviously works very well. How to posts usually do very well too because if somebody is looking for a specific piece of advice that’s the kind of title they are going to click on.

James: Yeah, definitely! A past guest who came on talking about guest posting and a particular method that he was using was Brian Harris and he says how to posts are just the way forward for him. He pretty much writes nothing else and that is because while people are searching for it and secondly it is inherently useful. If you can show somebody how to do something and that in itself is extremely valuable and gains a lot of traction so I can see why that would work.

Kristi: Exactly! Especially with online marketing people, everybody asks questions and titles and search and sees how to do this then that’s what’s going to get clicked on.

James: Yeah totally! So how about laying out the content? I am sure for a how to post that would be extremely important having a mix of actual instructions and then perhaps screenshots and diagrams to show people how to do something. How much attention do you put in to actual lay outs of posts versus the writing itself?

Kristi: It is really important to start those types of posts to let people know exactly what they are going to get out of it like within the first paragraph or two because somebody like you can write how to posts like two thousand to three thousand words long and you want people to know immediately that this is the result that you are going to get by the end of it. so you definitely start out with that and then you want to get a clear headers all the way to it just like generic step one, here’s how you do this and step two here’s how you do this, that way if there is somebody who knows most of everything, they can kind of skip through the instruction and get what they really want to get to. Even if they find just one section useful, they are going to probably share it with people because they know that it is complete in like everything. And screenshots are definitely important. If you have a how to post without screenshot for something that is like on the computer then people are just going to leave because they can’t really visualize the information. I have people telling me that they love my post just because the screenshot directed them exactly to where they needed to go.

James: Yeah, absolutely! And I think visual content is extremely important. The information is important in itself but when you can also illustrate that and engage people a lot more often with imagery. It really makes that well rounded post effective, right?

Kristi: It does. And even if you think about things away from a computer like a recipe, if you’re not a good cook, sometimes you just want to see a picture of the step that is going on so you can be like oh, this is what I am doing so it just makes it easier actually to do.

James: Yeah totally. Well my girlfriend will vouch for that, she was never much of a cook until she found instructional how to’s on YouTube and can actually see it being made. I think that element is extremely important. And I guess it also appeals to different modalities. Some people are kind of naturally more visually led and other people like the written word and text so you have to make sure that you have all people covered in one post.

Kristi: Exactly, yeah. I like writing but at the same time I really like to have that visual reference if somebody is talking about this and here’s where to go to do it or here’s how to do it. It definitely helps.

James: Now content length is certainly a huge case for longer content performing better, generally it does perform a lot better than short form content and I think generally there has been studies that longer content generates more social shares as well on average. In your opinion, is there an ideal word count or range that we should aim for? Perhaps one that you typically aim for for yourself?

Kristi: For the bare minimum, for people who are like just looking for content it’s just like 600 words but for people who are like do really well like ad search and social, definitely like 1500 to 2000 words is definitely a good range. I think it’s SERP IQ did a study on this and they said that most content that did on the first page is usually like 1500 and up on word count and I think Buzz Sumo did a study and said that the most viral posts are like 2000 – 3000 words.

James: Yeah, and I guess that probably in itself is a suggestion that just because it is longer it is more valuable, I think it’s probably just a substance factor especially when it comes to social sharing. Someone will look at that and go yeah, this looks more valuable maybe I am going to be more inclined to share it with my own audience.

Kristi: Yeah, I still go with a theory with a lot of people probably don’t read what they figure for that long it covers everything.

James: Yeah, I am sure that’s the case. I have been guilty sharing that stuff, reading it probably a quarter of the way through and realizing it is pretty good stuff but maybe not having time to go through and read the whole lot and sharing it out there on social media. You didn’t hear it here by the way but I’ve done it a few times.

Kristi: Yeah, Neil Patel does a really good job and he has these things like huge guides and he breaks them in to little sections and I look at them and I’m like ten thousand words, these are all the topics it covers, it’s good.

James: Yeah absolutely! And it coming out, knowing that it’s going to be someone from Neil Patel I know it is going to be good stuff anyway so you probably don’t need to read too far, huh? So what sort of formulas have you got for headlines? Because that, probably as we all know or at least any of the Traffic Jam listeners would know is extremely important for driving traffic and getting people actually in to any content itself. Do you have any formulas for writing headlines that our listeners might be able to follow?

Kristi: There’s actually a lot of tools out there if you just do a search for like headline generator or title generator or blog topic generator. There are tools where you put in a keyword and it will give you headlines that kind of work with that keyword and I kind of used a lot of those to generate hundreds of different headlines in that way I can just have quickly go through and say, that’s a good one and I squeeze it to the topic.

James: And would you agree with the approach that perhaps you should be spending more time on the headline than the content itself? Several people kind of vouch for that that really is the key critical point of a piece of content and getting that right should be where all the attention is or is that taking it a bit too far?

Kristi: I think if you are writing a 1500- 2000 word post you are probably going to be taking more time on the post than the headline but I think there is the up worthy strategy where they re-write the headline 25 times and out of that you get like a couple that are really good. And you can kind of use those to test social media like which ones gets the most clicks and things like that so it is nice to get a couple of ideas, try them out, see which ones are the most popular.

James: Yeah, definitely. And looking at the overall concept of blogging, I guess I have two questions around, first one, should everyone be blogging? And the second one will be, can everyone blog? Is writing easily learnable and can someone become an effective blogger even if they are totally adverse to writing a single word anyway?

Kristi: I think it kind of depends on your kind of industry. Most businesses have a blog because there is going to be somebody who is interested in some form of information either about their product or about their industry as a whole so I mean there is definitely room for just about everybody to blog out there. As far as writing being easy, it’s not always the easiest thing for people to do but there are ways to kind of get around it; being a freelance writer, there are a lot of people who come to me because they are like, I have this great idea, here are the points I want to cover, I just don’t have the time to actually sit down and that’s when they hire outsource out basically to do it. And there’s also people who speak a lot easier than they can write so they actually just like talk about their idea and then just have somebody transcribe it so there’s lots of different ways to get your ideas in to written content without having to write it. If you enjoy writing, if you have time to write obviously it is a great thing to do but if you don’t there are ways to get around that and get the blogging going too.

James: Well you are obviously someone who enjoys writing so if there are people out there who would be interested to engage a writer like you, how would that process work? What would you need to know to write a piece of content that would be effective for a business?

Kristi: Typically what I ask people, I ask them if there is any topic that they are interested in putting out in their blogs because there are some people who really just have these great ideas and just don’t have the time to actually put them out on the screen and everything. And I also ask people who their competitors are and I go look at their blogs to see the kind of topics that they are covering because that can be a great insight whether things are going to be popular with your target audience or not. Sometimes you’ll find out your competitors are really writing for other people in the same industry and really, your focus is to write for your customers so there is a lot of insight you can get just from that kind of research.

James: Just before we wrap up, let’s turn our attention to promoting our own content. We’ve gone to the process of writing a blog post, we’ve written a topic that we know are going to engage, we’ve got it laid out correctly, we’ve published it on our site, what are the steps after? What do we do next in order to get that piece of content out to the widest and most relevant audience?

Kristi: Definitely social media promotion like you would have promoted to all your channel and everything. People think that’s probably overkill but at the same time there are just people who like to be on Facebook and they just like to be on Twitter and if you’re not posting to all of those channels you’re going to miss those people who have like their preferred networks. So social media, if you have the budget you can do the advertising. It is always good to do that too. You just want to make sure that you target the audience really well. You don’t want to be just like oh I want to be telling this to people I don’t care who they are but some people do that and it’s not exactly the best approach like you want to kind of use all the advertising targeting options to like find your ideal custom audience to make sure they’re the ones seeing your ideal content and if you have an email list, definitely send it out to them and if you don’t have an email list start one that way you have people to kind of promote it to like get it directly to their inbox instead of using Facebook reach to get to them and everything. And I have also found discussion marketing really works well so if you kind of set up a Google alert for people talking about a specific topic like if you can find people that are asking questions about it and you can like cover the discussion and be like, well, here’s the answer to your question if you want I have a blog post about it. That kind of thing works really well too.

James: Yeah, nice. That can be very effective and actually going back to mentioning the tool that I included at the start of this recording, Buzz Sumo, that’s quite a good way to also see who’s been involved in conversations around other pieces of content, perhaps similar to your own and it is actually quite nice sometimes give a people a heads up and say, hey, I know you are interested in this type of content, I have just created a better post or an even better guide on it, perhaps do you want to check it out and it might seem quite sort of interruptive but actually it gets a very good response because you know those people are interested in the topic that you are presenting them with so try that, or try not, depending on your position but I have also found that to work well.

Kristi: Yeah that is really good but just don’t go overboard on it. You don’t want to be that person who’s Twitter stream have like a hundred tweets like @thisperson check this out, @thisperson check this out.

James: Absolutely! And certainly be targeted around that, it’s certainly not a blanket approach and I am sure you as I, have been turned off by people who blatantly have been spamming content @me or @you with just a direct approach. I think if you can enter that conversation appropriately with something that is extremely relevant then it can be effective. I know that you’ve got a course coming out quite soon at www.contentpromotionplan.com, without divulging the entire course content, what are some of the biggest content lessons you’ll be sharing in that course?

Kristi: The main goal is to help people generate traffic and engagement for their content because it doesn’t really matter what your content goals are if you’re not getting traffic to your content, you’re never going to achieve them. So basically you’re just going to go through all the different steps I use to promote my own content through email, social media, discussions and other different strategies.

James: Awesome. We’ll make sure that the link to that site is included in the show notes. I know you are not quite ready for the re-launch just yet but it will be included there so our listeners can keep a watchful eye as soon as it is ready and available. So aside from that I am sure that we’d like people to know that they can find you at www.kristihines.com, where else can our listeners find you out there on the web?

Kristi: My Twitter is @kikolani.

James: Awesome! We’ll make sure that all of the links to Kristi’s websites, social profiles, and some of the resources mentioned in today’s show are included within the show notes of episode#62 which you the listener get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/62. Thank you so much for coming on Kristi! Thoroughly enjoyed today’s conversation, all that remains is for me to thank you and hopefully sometime in the future we can hook up once again.

Kristi: That sounds great. Thanks for inviting me to be on your show.

James: Thanks Kristi!

So there you go that was Kristi Hines from kristihines.com. Remember to accompany every episode of Traffic Jam comes a special episode bonus. To get your hands on this show’s bonus go to TrafficJamCast.com/62 where you’ll find a special resource guide with several tools that will help make your job of coming up with content ideas for your blog post that much easier. So head on over there now, go to TrafficJamCast.com/62, grab the bonus and also join in on the discussion for this episode. In the coming week, if you’ve not done so already, remember to subscribe to Traffic Jam via iTunes or Stitcher and you do that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

Now we end this week’s show with a Traffic Jam of course chosen by our guest today. Kristi Hines has gone for a track chosen by Lindsay Sterling, it is a violin track and it is called Round Table Rival. So enjoy the song to play out the show and I’ll see you back here real soon!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

The Traffic Jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest Kristi Hines has chosen Roundtable Rival from American violinist, dancer and composer Lindsey Stirling.

Stirling’s professional career started in 2010 when she joined America’s Got Talent and finished as a quarter finalist. She has been making waves since then.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW:

For content to be effective, it first needs to be read. In order to get your content read, you need an interesting topic and a compelling headline.

However, we all know that coming up with topic ideas, more so headlines, can be a tedious task.

Well, what if there were tools that could do it all for you? What if there were several tools and all of them free?

This has to be your lucky day!

As a special bonus for this episode I’ve created this resource guide:

Kristi Hines’ Top 5 (Free) Headline Generator Tools For Content Marketers

Using these tools will help you come up with topics for your blog posts, with little effort and a small amount of clicks.

You can get the guide containing links to all of these tools immediately below. Go ahead and click download now.

Content Syndication is a term that heralds from broadcast television, and is the reason why shows like Seinfeld and Friends gained such wide exposure.

In the same way that television networks licence their shows to other providers, you can licence your own website content to other publishers in order to increase your audience share.

But larger audience share is not the only payoff from a well devised content syndication strategy. Syndicating your content to the right sites will also provide you SEO and authority building benefits too.

Listen in to episode 61 and learn how Brian Honigman has leveraged his owned media content to sites like Huffington Post, Mashable and The Next Web and gained over 500,000 search engine visits in the process.

OUR GUEST:

Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, speaker and freelance writer. He helps business with their online and content syndication strategy. Brian has worked with several startup companies as well as established businesses such as Dell, Citibank and Toyota.

Brian used to be Marc Ecko Enterprises’ Digital Marketing Executive doing their global social media strategy for their fashion brands, overseeing the company’s SEO, and managing a team of designers and marketers. Before Ecko, he was LunaMetrics’ Social Media Manager and a Marketing Consultant for Sampsonia Way magazine. As a speaker, he has spoken at conferences such as Huff Post Live and American Advertising Association on topics such as how to find success with social media and the value of guest blogging.

When Brian has some free time, he volunteers for the American Red Cross by doing their social media.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 61  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Brian Honigman quote from the show:

You can also get Brian’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Content syndication isn’t for everyone. Do it consistently or not at all.” ~ @BrianHonigman
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey what’s up listeners! Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode#61 of the podcast that helps you build and grow a profitable audience online. I am, as always, your host James Reynolds and I am excited for another awesome show that we have lined up today.

But before we get to the show today, let me just send a couple of high fived out in to the Traffic Jam community. The first one to Julie who commented on the Yaro Starek episode and the second one to Chall who commented on the Mike Rhodes episode. Thank you to you both for providing such awesome feedback. I really do appreciate that.

And remember to you, the listener, the episode page for each show is the place to comment, ask questions and to access all the extra bonuses that come with every single show. Because each week we painstakingly put together a full word for word transcript to the show, we add a downloadable MP3 file just incase you want to save the show to your computer and don’t want to stream via iTunes or Stitcher or one of those places. And we add some special bonus training to really help you take the ideas and methodologies that are presented in the show to even greater heights, all of which are available to download for free from the episode page itself.

So you may be asking, well, how do I get to that? It is very simple, in this instance go to TrafficJamCast.com/61 and to access the bonus training for the other episodes, same thing, TrafficJamCast.com/ the episode number.

So before we get started today, head on over to episode page, grab the MP3 if you wish, grab the transcript, but also grab the special bonus upload, the content upgrade that comes with the show and then be ready to listen on to this episode.

Okay, so now to introduce our guest for episode#61. His name is Brian Honigman and he’s a marketing consultant, freelance writer, and professional speaker. He worked with both startups and brands, improving their content marketing, social media and search engine optimization efforts; NYU, UNICEF, Huffington Post, Live, The American Advertising Federation, and for organizations and conferences all over the world. He’s also a contributing writer to Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Forbes, The NextWeb, Wall Street Journal, and others.

Are you interested to know how he got those writing opportunities? Well, it’s your lucky day because that is the topic of today’s interview. We’re going to be talking content syndication – how to take your own content and get it syndicated to major media channels for wider exposure. That’s what’s coming up. So without any further ado, let’s introduce our guest today, his name is as of course, Brian Honigman and we’re talking content syndication.

James: So hey there! Welcome back listeners. You’re tuned in to Episode#61 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Brian Honigman. Brian, how are you doing?

Brian: I am doing great! Thanks so much for having me James.

James: Great to have you here. As always, I want to drive straight in to the content and it’s actually content syndication that I want to talk to you about today. Just to kind of set the scene because these types of terms do get banded around quite a lot. What’s the difference around content distribution and content syndication?

Brian: Content syndication is actually a form of content distribution. So content distribution is just utilizing the content that you have in behalf of your brand or to reach your audience and distributing it where they give their attention where they are active or where they are reading or watch video etc. Wherever your audience is at the same time. The active content syndication as a form of content distribution, content syndication is basically producing your own content on your own properties and then having different partners republishing that content elsewhere. So I think listeners would probably be most familiar with content syndication on TV. Seinfeld is probably the most syndicated television show ever. I don’t know at the top of my mind what the initial channel they were on, but years and years after their show is replayed on other networks giving them more visibility on a wider audience to see their show so business owners and marketers can do a similar thing on a variety of ways – video content, blog content which will be the main content as I describe content syndication. Basically in a nutshell it is a way of producing your own content and making a way to post it with your permission to achieve common goals.

James: Nice! You’ve begun to answer my next question which is why after putting all this time and effort and energy in to your content then why give that content to other people for them to gain the benefit of it and I guess it is that exposure, right? I mean really what we are talking about is taking an asset that you own and giving it wider distribution and getting it more eyeballs. Would that be fair to say?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely and I think you brought up a common concern. I think the whole process of content syndication has to be very strategic. I wouldn’t say creating a blog post then having it republish on these blogs is a real worth. I think you have to have a very specific plan in mind and understanding why you are doing content syndication you give it greater visibility but in a nutshell you republish your content with partners that reach the audience that you are trying to reach. You want to ensure that you get credit for as the owner of the original content and you want to make sure that your content partners actually get traffic and engagement with their content because what’s the point of publishing a blog post on a website that doesn’t nearly get any traffic or doesn’t get searched with the same audience then that’s when spreading the content is taking much time but it isn’t worth it. So you have to be very strategic in that approach and you can choose what you want to keep as your own solely or other copy you want to syndicate. I have seen blogs that do not practice syndication with all of their content. They only choose some of it, they think that it will do better than others. It is important to incorporate content syndication as part of a greater strategy. It isn’t like the sole channel but one of many that can drive results.

James: Yeah, well let’s loop back to the strategy in a moment. I certainly want to dig a little bit deeper on evaluating syndication partners and what quite you might have in place to sort of pick out what would be good syndication relationships and what might not be. But let’s move things forward by talking about the kind of the nuts and bolts process of getting your content syndicated. Do you have yourself Brian a formula that our listener could follow for hooking up these syndication relationships?

Brian: Yeah, sure. It definitely is a long process, definitely not something that happens overnight. Let’s talk about blog contents specifically. There are many types of syndication videos but this definitely is applicable to different types but I will be talking solely with your blog. With your blog, I think it is important for when you are producing your content for the long term. So consistently creating valuable assets that drive interaction with your audience. From that point, you want to start your transition to building relationships with other blogs, publications and voices in to space that industry that would potentially be interceding in syndicating your content. So that process involves a lot of relationship building. Also guest blogging. Guest blogging is typically when it comes to the syndication of your blog content, one of the best ways to transition in to this whole process. That is something that I had done and I worked with many clients in the past for my consultancy. Basically, you are creating your own content then in order to reach out and reach the similar audience to your own and generate reviews and your content visibility and is creating content to serve a particular audience, it is great to use guest blogging. Guest blogging is a lot of work because you are not just writing your own blog. You have to create content for the blogs of others that drives results back to you as well. It’s a great tactic and I definitely think that there’s great benefits to it in the long term but it requires a lot of work and a lot of asset and time which are blended for everyone. So syndication is a natural evolution from guest blogging where once you have created content in your own site, you start to reach out to other relevant sites. They are allowing you to blog on their platforms and once you kind of buildup rapport with these editors, blog and content managers, then it would be much more easier to say, hey, are you open for the potential of syndicating content as opposed to an additional content I had been producing for your website up to this point? So it typically requires a little bit of trust or a higher level of trust than just reaching out to a website blindly and that’s unless you have a really, really big brand behind you, a large audience where you can demonstrate the value of syndication so it can work but it is easiest to work once you have already established relationships with the other blogs and publications that you want to syndicate with and guest blogging is a really great way to bridge that gap and establish that relationship.

James: Yeah, it is certainly sounds like a sequential process. It’s not like a shortcut here? You’ve really got to first of all, have some proof of quality content before you can even approach those guest blogging opportunities and I guess once you’ve managed to hook up those guest blog post you then have the opportunity of a piece of gain with a little bit of traction. We also have perhaps a bit of interaction, people have enjoyed them, then the next step is, hey, how do we leverage this and perhaps I can give you regular stuff which you can just re-syndicate. Seems to be how it works, right?

Brian: Yeah, it’s definitely a slow transition and I don’t want to say that that initial proof that your content will resonate with their audience and it has resonated with yours in the past, that doesn’t mean your blog has to have three million unique visitors a month but what it does require is that you are consistently publishing and that your content is of quality to a particular audience. I think those are without a doubt requirements. Yes, the larger, if you have a very active blog with a large audience that it is very easy to illustrate, yes that certainly will help. But at the end of the day, what’s most important is the quality.

James: Yeah and I guess the other opportunity if you don’t have a good blog following and a proven track record of content, you can just go out and create something and submit that as your proof I guess that would be another strategy you could implement. So what are some of the key points then to evaluating syndicating potential partners? You did touch upon a few and that is of course that they have an audience because there is no point syndicating to a blog that has no one actually looking at, but what might some of the other criteria be in selecting who might be an appropriate partner for syndication?

Brian: Sure. So I touched on this a little bit already in a sense that you want definitely to choose partners where they’re reach is to a similar audience to your own. So if you are in one industry and the other blog and publication reaches a completely different industry that you are not trying to reach and has no value for your offering as a business that really doesn’t make sense. So first and foremost you want to pick a match in terms of the audience that they are reaching. It doesn’t seem to be a hundred percent exactly the same but if you are trying to reach email marketers. Let’s say you are trying to reach blog managers and this blog and publication reaches in general role, then that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be a 100% match but it should be pretty similar on audience reach or you won’t get any value on this effort. Another really important consideration is does this publication or blog really syndicate content? Not all blogs choose to do so. So how do you find that out? Looking at their content, seeing if you can see any content on there that has been syndicated in the past, just simply illustrated within the article, it will either say at the bottom or at the very top of the piece it will say something along the lines of – this article was originally published on this blog, and will have a link to that original article making sure that they get due credit for their work. That’s always a good sign as to know if the blog does actually accept syndicated content. Also, kind of pointing back to establishing relationships. When you have a relationship with this blog, in any capacity and you have individuals reach out to you, you can just kind of ask them since they are already in touch with you in some capacity. Whereas in other cases it is going to have to be a blind outreach. Some places love to do it, others are against it. it really just depends on where the publication is at and what they are looking to accomplish so I know a big publication like Huffington Post often syndicate content from other sources and I found that out just by looking at following writers on there that I valued their insights and I saw that the article was originally published on their blog or for some other place that they writer for and that was indication enough to do it on my own but yes, understanding if it is an audience match, if they actually do syndicate and then just getting the right contact info. It probably is the best way to do so. It’s the things that I consider when matching up with partners and kind of a tactical approach to the whole identifying partners aspect of content syndication is when I am creating content for my own blog or for another blog for a client, I often think about, okay, so we are writing this blog article, and I always want to ensure its relevancy as it is relevant to my own audience but at the start I begin to brainstorm this article and start to think beginning to write it, will it benefit another audience of the places I am currently or in the future would like to syndicate to? Let’s say I am writing an article on my blog that I plan to have ideally republished in Huffington Post, I will keep that in mind to ensure that from the beginning my article is of worth to my audience but also I am catering it to the style guide and audience interest of the Huffington Post in this example but that’s something I always like to keep in mind so that in the end when I produce this article for my site I want to make sure that it still matches other audience as well otherwise they can potentially say no it is not a match and that is something in the world that will happen but if you plan to really tackle syndication it really is important to keep that in mind from the beginning.

James: Yeah, interestingly as we talk about Huffington Post, I know of course obviously that it is one of the sites that you syndicate to. Another one to my knowledge is nextweb and those are quite different right? You’ve got Huffington Post which is kind of a big behemoth of a site with a huge audience spanning a lot of different topics whereas nextweb is a smaller website with a lot more niche focus so I guess one is going after the audience and one is going after the particular demographic audience type that you want. What have been your differing results between the two like if you were to weigh one up against the other, which would you take first?

Brian: I think that is a pretty example to pull out there and something for others to definitely keep in mind. You want to be syndicating content to different types of blogs in different locations in your space so for instance the Huffington Post is a much more well-known brand, larger publication, add a lot of credibility for the content that we are producing for. It is a great way for myself or anyone else who syndicates on Huffington Post to say hey, I contribute content regularly to the Huffington post. The difference is that since it is such a large publication at all, once you do have content published on it, it is far more difficult to give that content the visibility that it deserves because there is a lot of other competing content on that website. Let’s say for example Huffington Post is a massive content producer, they probably publish a thousand content a day whereas a smaller niche publication like Next Web probably does something closer to a hundred or less. So you are competing on a far larger scale in a site like Huffington Post so it is likely that your content on there won’t get as much traffic and traction and engagement, social media because you are competing with a lot of other content on their site. But, if for some reason you right something really wonderful, and it gets the visibility you deserve on the Huffington Post or a publication of that size it will be seen by a lot of people. It has potential to reach a massive audience but you will have that less likely to happen on a large publication like that but you’re still so it is beneficial to publish there. You do get the links that are high value, the publicity stamp is there. But whereas with a more niche site, the more industry specific site like Next Web which is kind of tech marketing focused designed for marketers’ publication. It has a much smaller publication. It is not as well known outside of the tech space, still highly credible, still a wonderful place to pitch your content, but it is far more likely that each post will drive more traction for your business if you are in a particular industry. Because they are publishing a far less amount of content so you are competing with a lot less content, the entire audience of the site is more likely the audience you are trying to reach. When you are publishing on an industry niche publication, the entire website is focused on the subject that you are publishing and syndicating content about. Whereas on the Huffington Post, since there is such a large major publication, they are not only publishing tech for this example, but they are also covering politics, business, food, religion – all this different posts that they have, all the many audience that they are attending to. Whearas slightly larger number of the Next Web audience and other industry niche publication audience is relevant to the content that you are producing. Also, with the fact that they are producing a lot less content on a daily basis, your content is far more likely to get published on the homepage on their site, be featured on some capacity, be shared on social media with attribution to you whereas the Huffington Post, or a larger publication, he’s far less likely to tweet that article on your behalf or share on their Facebook page. They are far more likely to share content that they produce in-house and content that’s generating a lot of traffic building for the site so I think the best approach for someone who’s approaching syndication, the best time for the first time is to syndicate with both large publications like the Huffington Post as well as niche publications like Next Web so you get a variety of mix and it is a part of your content syndication plans.

James: Yeah, that would certainly be my experience too. A couple of the sites that I syndicate to, one is Entrepreneur Middle East which is relatively broad. It is obviously business focused but it is relatively broad topic related and another that we work with is communicate by advertising page which is a smaller site by comparison but is far more focused. Everyone that’s reading that magazine or looking at that website is in the marketing space and therefore it’s a very applicable audience to me. But would I trade either one of them? No of course not because Entrepreneur is that kind of nice credibility and authority building site that gets big exposure but the other one hits my perfect target audience so I think that is kind of excellent advice. If you can certainly strike that balance, that’s the perfect scenario to be in. Let’s talk about types of content. I’ve found particular success with visual content for syndication especially infographics and things like that. But in your experience, are there any types of content that particularly are well suited to content syndication? You’re obviously doing a lot with blogs, you’ve also mentioned videos, but what types of content might work?

Brian: it depends on your goals and the goals of your blog and your organization but I found that blog content – online at least, is one of the most syndicated. I think second to that is videos and visual but everyday videos and visuals are quickly rising in popularity in comparison to the written word and blog content but at the end of the day articles and written content still gets far more visibility so across the web and a lot more readership than a lot of these other forms of content so that is going to make a lot of editors and blog managers far more understanding in integrating blog content in many cases includes video and visual elements as well. But I think one thing that I found that’s worked is, also from a networking perspective, is including perspective of others in your industry. Not just like a roundup post or something like that, but let’s say, if you are talking about email marketing, including the insights of a prolific, influential email marketing expert within an article, you’re not only networking with that individual, but I found that it makes a feast of written content like a blog post gets far more accepted often for industry blogs because they take that industry voice and credibility source for your argument, you’re making it a piece and further encourages them to syndicate it so I would definitely consider a different source of information quoting different sources of info and individuals in your pieces because that is a great way to further encourage your content to getting accepted.

James: Yeah and I guess the real smart thing about that is if you do quote industry experts who themselves have a large following and an influential reach if you happen to tell them the fact that you’ve included them, there is also an opportunity they’ll send plenty of people and traffic and visibility your way as well, right?

Brian: Exactly! It’s a networking move for both of you and you being generous in the form of content, actually funnily enough, I wrote an article today for my blog brianhornigan.com/blog, about using content marketing to grow your professional network and that is kind of one great way, that is syndication in a sense by including them and featuring them prominently and giving them some additional visibility which they are more likely than not share with their audience which is another great move for everyone involved.

James: Yeah cool! Of course content syndication also has SEO benefits, right? It can also support search rankings. What are some of the SEO related syndication tips that you might have and of course are there any pitfalls to avoid as well when you are kind of putting the SEO slant in to some of this stuff?

Brian: Right. With anything with SEO, I always, always, always, always encourage to be cautious. If you do anything that is kind of gaming search engine capacity it is highly likely that it will be flagged and not actually help and potentially hurt your efforts to optimize for the search engines. But it is important that all your content, you have this in the back of your mind you have to focus on the right approach. So in terms of SEO I think one really important concern is when possible, I know it is possible, but when syndicating with a partner there is a canonical tag to have them add whenever they republish content to their site of your own. They can add a canonical add that tells this search engine that it is a further indicator to let the search engine know that this is the original home of the piece and to give the original piece the authority and the greater visibility for search engines. So yes, both pieces will rank if you have a piece of content syndicated on three different places, all of those pieces will rank for keywords related to the subject but with the canonical tag, you are telling Google, hey, we’ve given express permission for this to be published out there but we’re the original piece so this is what should get priority in search results. That is an important concern. I don’t think you’re going to get hurt if you don’t use that in some publications. Some blogs that I have worked with and syndicate with don’t even know what that means and they are not really open for such changes but other ones, there’s a lot of plug ins that you can use if you look at this but typically in the instructions given by Google in the topic of syndication, they say that as long as you include that link on the post either at the bottom or at the top that says hey, this article is originally published in Brian Harmon’s blog. A version of this piece was originally published to Brian Harmon’s blog and a link to this piece. Typically that is good enough for the search engines to understand that this is a syndicated piece and to rank it accordingly but the canonical tag is another separate piece to have but not a 100% required. It is a nice to have rather than a must have.

James: Yeah totally and I am sure plenty of people’s eyes will be spinning a technical code on things like what exactly is a canonical but –

Brian: Yeah, it is a little touchy.

James: Totally, but let’s get wrapping things up. Before we do that I want to ask you about how this perhaps applies to great local business owner for him to kind of to get only a small percentage of the potential target market. It might be on some of this bigger publications especially Huffington Post or a site like that. Where do you suggest that they get started if indeed you do suggest they get started with content syndication?

Brian: It is not for everyone. I want to make that clear. It depends on what your goals are and your bandwidth for creating content. You don’t want to create it once, you want to do it many, many times and very consistently so if you don’t have the bandwidth to create content on a regular basis and then continue syndicating on a regular basis. It is a long term thing. For everyone who don’t have the bandwidth then it is certainly okay to skip it. Blogging on your own is still valuable as well. This is just an added tool for distribution. What I would suggest for small businesses is mainly using content syndication to help build their visibility online so getting the links, the traffic to your site can help build a more robust profile for your website. They may not have many links to it or may not even often be visited by members of your audience. It can be a small blog in your area, it can like in Brooklyn for instance, it can be a little Brooklyn blog that covers small business needs. See if they ever syndicate content, see if they ever are interested in anyone producing content for their site. Just start to build a relationship with them. Either way, it will be beneficial in some capacity. It is just really important to start small, realize that if that one article doesn’t move a needle for you that syndicated, over time, this whole process can help your website a more powerful than helping market your business and not to mention a stamp of credibility. Which business owner would you be more interested in doing business with? If one has written for the Huffington Post or some other publication or industry, as opposed to the same business owner who owns the same type of business but hasn’t been published anywhere. So it definitely is a great credibility tool like another stamp of approval that you can get from a third party source to help further validate your expertise and your standing within the industry.

James: Yeah, well that is something that I am sure that has been of huge benefit to you Brian. You’ve got those relationships in place and you can say that you’ve been published on Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal and some of the other places that you’ve appeared, but to just kind of wrap this whole topic, what have some of those spin offs been? Have you been able to attribute some of this content syndication down to revenue in your pocket or increase traffic to your website? What have been the spin off results for you and your business?

Brian: I definitely think without a doubt that using content both on my blog, guest blogging and having it syndicated has been one of the main growth drivers for my entire business. I have been blogging and writing for probably 3+ years now and that content across my site and elsewhere ranks for relevant keywords in the search engines, is shared on social media often so that typically, like 80% of the people that reach out to me are close to other people within my network or from referrals reach out to me because they saw my blog content that was ranking in the search engines or they saw it in social media because someone shared it. And that is typically a source of all my inbound leads. These customers are already interested in my offerings. It is not a hard sell now that they have kind of learned something from me. Sometimes a client will reach out after having followed my content on a particular site for months or years and they’ll say hey I have been following you on the site for a long time you’ve taught me a lot, now I need your marketing expertise for XYZ we’ve got to work together. That helps me make clients, that helps make initial conversation a lot easier because we already kind of have an established rapport if you will, and I think it has been really wonder and a lot of great things, having been able to establish relationships with great individuals in the industry, I have been able to press mentions just because you produce enough content on a particular subject matter, you slowly get started to be associated with someone who knows what they are talking about in that particular field. So it’s been a really great benefit for my efforts and I can’t recommend enough. Just as an example, of the content that I am producing, last year just on the search engine, so content on my blog, content on other websites that I have written when it is ranking in search engines on Google, it’s clicked on over five hundred thousand times a year so that is only a metric of someone clicking on an article and reading it, it doesn’t necessarily mean they read the whole thing, they bounced right away, etc. but that is a lot of potential interaction that has led to a lot of visibility from that so I certainly implore others to definitely experiment with creating content on a consistent basis and seeing what works and seeing what doesn’t.

James: Okay cool! Also, it really is inspiring for someone who has only really been writing in the past two or three years and from what I understand kind of hated writing until he passed through school, a bit like me. I think it is quite inspiring for us to get on board and try some of this stuff themselves. Brian I think this a good juncture to send people off somewhere where you live on the web, I guess that would be your website, www.brianhonigman.com or is there anywhere else that you would like to suggest our listeners head on off to?

Brian: Yeah, www.brianhonigman.com/blog, at this point I am producing content on there once a week on all these different subjects so I have an article about content syndication if you want to review the process we went over today, that would be helpful. I’m also very, very active on Twitter. You can always reach me there just www.twitter.com/brianhonigman.

James: Perfect! Well to you the listener, Brian’s website, his Twitter profile and some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show will also be listed on the episode page for this show which you’ll get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/61. That’s it! I guess all that remains for me is to thank you Brian. Super stoked that we connected and this was a blast! Thanks for sharing so much.

Brian: I had a great time, thanks for having me!

So welcome back listener. There you go that was Brian Honigman from www.brianhonigman.com. Now be sure to check out Brian’s website and his social profiles which are included in the episode page for episode#61. And also contained on that page is a special bonus for you. To help you really get started fast with content syndication, I have prepared 52 of my favorite Google search strings that will help you find guest postings and syndication opportunities faster. So to get your hands on that, and of course to join in to the discussion for this episode, go to TrafficJamCast.com/61.

Now of course we will be back on Traffic Jam next week with another awesome guest lined up for you, but to play out this week’s show we do have as always, a traffic jam. It is of course chosen by our guest, Brian Honigman and he has gone for a very recent and up to date track. He’s gone for Charlie XCX and the track Boom Clap! So enjoy that and I will catch you again here real soon.

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

Brian Honigman has chosen a track called Boom Clap from the soundtrack album of the hit movie The Fault in Our Stars. It is by the British recording artist, Charli XCX.

The song may not have have reached the no. 1 spot but it did peak at number six on the UK Singles Chart and number eight on the US Billboard Hot 100.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW:

As a result of listening to this podcast you are probably excited at the idea of syndicating content, but what’s next?

Assuming you already have content, you are now ready to locate suitable syndication partners.

CONTENT SYNDICATION STRATEGY DOWNLOAD:

I like to make things easy for you, so to help you do that faster, I have collated 52 of my favourite Google search strings that will allow you to identify content syndication partners quickly and easily.

Copy and paste these search strings in to Google and you will have a long list of partners within minutes.

This list is available for free below, so go ahead and download it now.

Since banner ads are largely ignored by consumers, you might assume that you, the marketer, should ignore them too.

Whilst this is largely true, due to developments in technology giving us better insights in to our audience and more precise ways to target them, online ads in the right hands are perhaps more effective than ever before.

In this media buying 101, Charles Kirkland opens up and discloses some of his best paid traffic tips acquired from years testing in a multitude of markets, across many networks and for both B-to-B and B-to-C products and services.

If you are new to media buying and worried about getting your fingers burned, this podcast will teach you how to set things up right from the start and get the maximum ROI from paid traffic.

OUR GUEST:

Charles Kirkland is the founder of the Media Buyer Association. He is fully committed to helping entrepreneurs and small businesses build successful media campaigns by providing advanced training and resources from real world experiences.

Charles used to work for an engineering company but had to quit his job when he was diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in his late 20’s. He took different kinds of jobs including teaching and selling products but continued to educate himself in online marketing.

After years of learning, Charles took a risk on a media buy and saw his traffic and sales rise in just 30 days. Stunned by these results, he made further studies and realized how powerful media buys can be. With all the ups and downs that he experienced, Charles wants to make things easier for other businesses by giving them training and real world advice.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 60  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Charles Kirkland quote from the show:

You can also get Charles’ quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Your business doesn’t work on clicks or optins, but the ROI you are generating.” ~ @TheSEODude
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey what’s up there listeners? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode#60 and of course it’s the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online.

I am your host, as always, James Reynolds, and I want to start this show just by giving a quick thank you to Jimmy Daly who left a five-star iTunes review for the show, and he said, “I would describe this podcast as action-packed. James brings on really smart guests and asks really smart questions. The result is a high-energy podcast with tons and tons of information.” Thank you to you Jimmy. I really appreciate that glowing endorsement for Traffic Jam. I also want to thank Ferds, Sef and Thomas Dylan who stopped by the episode page for episode#58 and joined in on the discussion there. Thank you to you guys. And that is the place that you too, the listener, should be heading off to each time you listen to Traffic Jam. The location for this show’s episode page is TrafficJamCast.com/60 and there you’ll find a full transcript of today’s show, you’ll find a downloadable MP3, you’ll find episode artwork, plus a special bonus that accompanies the show, which in this case is a paid traffic calculator. You’ll find out why that is important in just a moment but right now I need you to head on over there, download your bonuses and then listen on to the show.

So today we are going to be talking paid traffic with Charles Kirkland and he’s the founder of the media buyer’s association and according to Charles’ bio, he is fully committed to empowering media buyers to create successful campaigns through real world education and hands-on training. Charles is a walking, talking, networking blend of credibility and know-how. Me and Charles, we have been connected for some time and I know he is a regular listener to the show also so I thought it was about time we brought Charles on to the show to share his paid traffic wisdom and a lot of that wisdom he has got! I am sure you are going to love this interview, Charles is hugely passionate about paid traffic and I hope his brought some of his passion in you too.

I guess that is enough of an intro today, let’s invite on to Traffic Jam, Charles Kirkland from the Media Buyers Association.

James: Hey listeners! Welcome back to episode#60 of Traffic Jam and you’re right here with me and Charles Kirkland today. Charles how are you doing?

Charles: Doing good! How is it going?

James: It is great! I am super excited for today’s session. Let’s jump right in to some jargon because there seem to be a lot of terminologies swimming around the media buying arena and you too have coined some of your own interesting terms in the past. Let’s do a quick-fire round to get this media buying 101 started. For each of the following strategies, I’d like you to explain what they are and who should be using them. First one out the hat is PPV, what is it and who should be using it?

Charles: PPV is pop ups so if you’ve been to a site, you’re just browsing around and all of a sudden this pop up, usually 600×800 pixels, and what happens is PPV is basically pop ups. People install adware, people confuse it with spyware, and there is a difference, adware you’ll say hey I’ll get a free weather report because it’s raining but they get a free weather bug, free coupons, free shopping and free video games and because of that they install this little piece of adware and you’ll see a handful of pop ups a day. And then when they visit these sites, the people that control the pop ups will allow people like me and you to bid on it so let’s just say we want a pop up on top of weightwatchers.com because people who are at weight watchers are there for a very specific reason. They are not there because they need whiter teeth, prettier hair or longer lashes. They are there to lose weight. Because of that, it is called contextual priority wherein we are going to target people on a particular site knowing they are only there to interest so really the power of that is massive. If you are an affiliate and you want to promote a weight loss product, or a fitness product, you can target literally a weight loss site. And the more contextually relevant your ad is, your pop up to the landing page and the more that your ad looks like the landing page, the higher the opt in rate. So it is a great way to build a list from affiliate marketing. You can make a lot of sales with CPA. The problem that you get with this is the quality of your prospects aren’t exactly the highest. Let’s just say that if you just go to traffic events and look that the people who are winning these cards. Most of them aren’t exactly sitting there, you’re dealing with typically a very different demographic so they like free gas cards, free games. They have a free mentality, if that makes sense. So if you go if you want to build a high end $20,000 culture program PPV, it would be an epic disaster. Typically, these people, they work like general types of things, like weight loss, sex, regrowing hair, make money online and that kind of stuff. It also falls apart if you want to do things like hey, I am going to show you how to build your own bow cabinet with scrap wood made from pallets would be a disaster like all grooming would be a disaster. So that’s the path but I tell you from the standpoint if you need a hundred thousand visitors a day, you can go to PPV and you can get it.

James: Got it! So we’ve laid the ground work there, it’s a volume market and it’s probably not going to be best positioned if you’re selling high priced products, Charles the next one out of the Traffic Jam hat is CPA. What’s that and who should be using it?

Charles: CPA really is cost per action and you have a variety of CPA networks. And the reality of this, let’s just say that you’ve got a product, let’s say that we’ve got a product of how to lose weight. What we can do, we can do to the CPA networks and say you know what, you’ve got a product and you can say I will give you $47 of every sale you make of a $2.95 track, 9 days in, you’re screwed up, you have too many hits on the ad, too many hits on those numbers and it doesn’t work out. But just trust me for a minute. So the CPA network says, okay, we’ve got a product we will put it in our network, and we can also distribute it to other CPA companies, so you have what’s called agent of record which is the main CPA company that is basically getting out your product. The beauty of that is that it’s not for beginners and if you’ll tell me Charles I need to figure out how to make my house payment or I need to like sell on internet marketing, it’s not for you. Basically it’s for people that have an advanced system because of the power of this and I know you’d say you’re mad, you’re dumb as ever, I hope you’re not an accountant, don’t ever try to do accounting but what happens, let’s just say we’re paying $47 to the CPA network and we’re selling at $2.95 trial, the reality of this, is you are getting a sale for $2.95. There is a huge issue with the money that we are paying out with what we’re about to make but the reality is, once we can get them to purchase the product, we can run them through which we’re talking literally $400 – $600 upsells potentially, typically it’s not that high. So we’ve got upsells, we can push them to continuity. Once we’ve got a buyer we can have a rep call them on the phone, hey Janet, it looks like you’re trying to lose weight, have you tried the African green mango chai berry, would you also like to get personalized coaching for $97 per month? Yes of course, that sounds like a winner! Or, you can find out that Janet’s recently divorced and bankrupt, you can take that data and sell that data to somebody else who will give you a call about bankrupt problems. The reality is once you’ve got that data, there is so much stuff you can do with it, if she just bought a weight loss product, maybe you can sell her a teeth whitening product, and maybe instead of one month supply we can sell her a six month supply of that for $200. The reality of that is that you obviously paid the money to get you a buyer. It is your business to maximize the revenue from that buyer and they can do this on a scale of thousands of buyers per day.

James: Yeah so again perhaps more of an advanced strategy and we certainly need to know our advanced numbers when we dive in with CPA. Good round up Charles. Next one out of the hat is Yahoo Stream Ads. What are they?

Charles: That’s beautiful. This is like the greatest thing since Facebook! The reality of this thing is that the truth of the matter, yahoo used to be the dominant player and google kept them in the tail end and took the number one spot. The reality of this is that Yahoo still has got a massive amount of traffic and the most important thing to me is that they’re not the traffic Google has. Typically we say google this, google that it’s like Kleenex, Xerox. The reality is that people who go to the Yahoo homepage, most of them re your average everyday users and there is nothing wrong with that! And Yahoo has this particular scenario where they say, hey, we will take what we call a native ad and we will put it on the Yahoo homepage or the Yahoo pages so you’re on Yahoo and you’re like strolling down and there’s this big list of stuff coming up and you call see this strange stuff but the reality of this is using Yahoo we can now with the native ad formats, we can get our ads in to in Yahoo and I am just going to tell you is that the average person in Yahoo seem to be a better buyer while the google buyer are like I know what I want, I want a clean screen and go from there, the Yahoo prospects are typically a better quality prospect. And truth matters, they’re there, they’re browsing through, they see the content, at that point, they’re reading it, they click on the link which appears to be an article. They’re reading a link with a minimum of 50 words about how simple it is and how the product that can help them, and how it was discovered and how it is made, and clicking on the link by the way they go to get a free trial of Super Testosterone Booster 2000. Plus they have the ability to get it in to their mobile network. The big thing that a lot of people are not really understanding mobile and desktop are two totally different environments. It is also two different buying paths. When you are in the desktop environment, you don’t mind filling out 4-6 to 15 fields, name, email address etc., but when you are in a mobile environment that’s a massive turn off. I don’t know about you but my fingers aren’t all that big and I have like a big sized apple, a big iPhone and it is bigger than the normal thing, and my finger still like hit everything under the sun. So you need to make sure you have a different path. Make sure that especially if you’re using a mobile friendly page, a lot of people end up with desktop native ads building content on the left hand side and ads on the right. What’s interesting is when it goes in to a mobile format, all that you’ll see are the stuff on the right on top of the article which will kill your conversions. So definitely keep that in place. And from a standpoint, if you are doing mobile, make sure you understand that the user who has an android is different from the user who has an apple and even the operating systems that they are going to use are going to be completely different. You are going to have some people who are like if something comes out, they buy it. We also have the people I meet at yahoo, those are two different buying habits or two different buying cycles. You need to make sure you are catering to that group. Also, apple users spend more money than android users just as a side note so make sure all users know that even the device that they’ve got, whether you’ve got the latest Samsung or the old Nokia, it doesn’t make a difference. All that makes a difference when it comes down to when you target them they will give you a different moolah.

James: Nice! Well we’ve touched on different few topics which I think I will come back to in a moment or two but I want to pull out the last term from the Traffic Jam hat and I believe this might be a Charles Kirkland term, correct me if I am wrong, but the term’s the traffic death wheel, what’s that all about?

Charles: That’s a good one and it is really weird because I started thinking about this, one of the biggest issues that people run in to is only having one traffic source. And I have taught people they have to get Facebook but no they say they know what they are doing on Facebook so therefore I don’t need anything else. The reality of this, at the end of the day if your prospect is using Facebook, okay great, maybe you can communicate with them via the email. Okay, if you’ve got them on Facebook or email could you communicate with them via SMS text message? Yet if you’ve got email or Facebook then it becomes another method of communicating with them. Can you get them to purchase? Do you have their full name, their buying data, their home address, their zipe code? Yes! Have somebody, we have a girl from our office who gives them a call and say hey, I’m calling from Charles’s office, welcome! People freak out over that! We’ve got automated posts going out to our buyers going out to just say thank you and not enough people ever say thank you and they get a post card and they get a call and they get a postcard, you are going above and beyond what everybody else is doing in this space becomes a huge factor because now even if email blows up and let’s just say also you can’t deliver email because everything has been triple opt in and spam compliant. As much as we would like to thank people on our list, if you’re willing to do that, I guarantee it would be to your advantage. So also you have the ability to do direct mail which has the least competition. SMS messaging, lead pages roll out – huge opportunity. Email, Facebook, we then start looking in ad roll, there is a huge opportunity and most people end up using one traffic source and that traffic source eventually will die no matter how you slice it, no matter how you dice it. I know people who thought that the days of Google cache would never end and the guys who are really working the 9-5 job because they made half a million dollars a year with Google cache when it blew up, they had nothing else going and anything else out.

James: Yeah. And this is a topic that we do touch on in Traffic Jam and there certainly is a school of people who would say, find one traffic source that works and then maximize it. Just ramp it up as much as possible. But you’re not giving yourself too much insurance if you are single source dependent and as you said, it will soon become a time where it dries up or the rules will get changed and you’ll leave yourself high and dry. Certainly worthy advice Charles. Let’s move on from there. I want to talk to you a little bit about native ads because it is something that you have mentioned already and it is something that people have been literally waxing about for this whole past year. What’s the scoop on native ads? First of all, what are they? And secondly, do they actually work?

Charles: Yes and yes. Native ads, people think they are something new. Unfortunately they are something that the old school guys look up to and use let’s just call it an ad camouflage, that’s the easiest way to put it. if you walk up to a store and a guy walks up to you and say just stand back I’m going to make a private space, I don’t want you I just want some private space. Their stuff is like buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. What’s wrong why are you not buying my stuff? Native ads are completely different. Native ads basically fit in to the format wherever you’re at so if you’re reading a blog, you’re reading content and you see native ads at the bottom and on the side, and native ads are designed to blend in to the content and appear to be content! The magic part of this is when we see ads, immediately our defenses go up like some marketer is trying to sell me something. There are people who leave really nasty comments on Facebook calling me everything but a sanctified child of god. People just send hate emails, I just can’t believe that people hate marketers. We’re not as low as a used car salesman but people don’t really like marketers and when they see marketing their defenses go up, but when they see native ad content that appears to be just more content, they are more inclined to read the content, their defenses are up and it means basically being stabbed and pouring salt in the wound and then the wonderful thing about the native ad is that it also loads you up in the ambulance, gets you to the doctor and gets you fixed at the same time because a native ad will lead you to buy your product that you probably did not even know you needed 10 minutes ago and a good example of that is advertorials. Also tool advertorials work great if you are looking some of the original advertorials, they were in magazines. Nobody reads the word advertorial at the top if they do, they don’t pay any attention. They read the content and they create sales. Give me an example, even Ink magazine, a fast company, you go through it and you see it says advertisement at the top and it will be laid out as an ad. The reality of this, people consume ads and they go it’s an ad. Native ads, they are reading it, it is so much easier to sell and if you want to look at even just more proof positive here, not I would ever recommend you doing it, fake blogs or whatever you want to call them, why they work so well is you read the story of a stay at home mom making $700 per week, whatever, it is because it was presented in a story format. These advertorials and the native ads, typically it’s a story format and people will read stories. People can read stories and recite stories where they could not recite an ad.

James: It’s pretty interesting that even this far there’s plenty of places where we can buy media and lots of ways we can go about it. For someone who’s kind of browsing new and getting started I am sure this can be quite overwhelming and I know you’ve got experience teaching others how to do it, where do you suggest that someone doing paid traffic and doing media buys get started for the very first time?

Charles: It’s really going to depend on your niche because there are some niches that are more family friendly and they’re just more family friendly than others, if you are just going to say, hey, I am wanting to get started, if you try to come home to Facebook and speak about weight loss, especially before and after weight loss, when they place your ad, they will pretty much keep you to the curb, blacklist your account and tell you I don’t want your money regardless of what. Or if you came in to adwords and say I have to make money online on my business opportunity, with affiliate marketing thing the problem with saying is that the key is really going to depend on your niche. Every niche is different. Like if you are in to finance, you can do great with Facebook. If you are in to weight loss, Facebook is probably not going to be the answer. Fitness, weight loss, business opportunity, make money online, internet marketing, that type of stuff generally, as a general rule, will be better off using PPV to do your first media buy. Somewhere like media traffic because leader pack has probably a thousand dollar buying end to get started with so I would say media traffic. if you are doing something like hey, I have a product, I own a business and I am trying to promote it, then I would say start with adwords. It gives me the best quality traffic you are going to find because they are searching the solution to their problem. The issue that you would have to fight with, adwords is a very mature traffic source so you pay a lot of money per click so you better have a deep funnel, a deep backend and know your numbers. Facebook still has plenty of traffic and has definitely got a lot more expensive. But they have got plenty of traffic and they are very easy to use as long as you are neither some of their banned or un-family type niches. So if you can’t start with Facebook, if you can’t go to adwords, from there PPV. Also keep in mind that once you get started the magic really is in the numbers. What does your tracking tell you? Or the people converting? Because a lot of people make mistake use Facebook. They’ve got a leadpage landing page, they’ve got a leadpage sales page and then they’ve got a thank you page. A lot of times people say it is not working! Did you get any clicks on your Facebook ad? No? Well you can’t tell if it is working or not. Did you get clicks on the Facebook ad? Okay then at least it tells you your Facebook ads are working. Did they land in to your opt in page? Let’s just say that we’re using a squeeze page, well no. then that means there is a disconnect between them clicking the ad because apparently they clicked the ad on Facebook. It had to appeal to them in some way, shape or form. If they are not opting in, we need to sit down and say, okay, what is wrong with our opt in page? Maybe the opt in page is hideous, maybe it doesn’t work, maybe it’s worse than buying mobile traffic on Facebook and the page doesn’t look right. Maybe you’ve done something to the page. Maybe the best thing that you have to do is have the headline match the headline that is on the landing page like the ad. So it follows so consistently. Headline matches the landing page? Okay, so if they click the ad, they opted in but they are not buying, we have to look at did we get enough clicks to determine, if you have a 1% conversion, it takes hundreds of clicks to make one sale. So if you’ve got 50 clicks and you’re saying it’s not working, you don’t have enough data yet. So the next thing you want to look at is maybe the landing page and the sales page or those headlines congruent? Is the offer congruent? If it is, you should be getting sales. And a lot of people don’t really sit down and try to backtrack. If they look at it, they say, o it’s not working. They don’t have the data to determine if it is working or not and that is one of the big things. The big thing especially with beginners is like I got 50 clicks and I did not make a $1000 sale, what is the problem with this? It’s all a scam! I hate to say that but the bigger issue is people.

James: Yeah, well hold that thought for just a moment, because we will come back and talk about testing and tracking in just a little bit but for now I want to throw a little bit more jargon out there and discuss how we can essentially buy or pay for traffic because there are several models. These things like pay per click, pay per view, pay per thousand impression, pay for acquisition as we spoke about and many others. What are some of the key considerations to look out for when choosing which model of buying traffic is right?

Charles: It really will depend on what you got. I know it is kind of a vague thing but let’s just go from the standpoint of I want to buy traffic. The first thing you need to look at is – is the offer acceptable to the network? If it is acceptable, okay, then go with it. The reality of it is for a CPA basis, you are really looking at needing a bigger budget. You go to a network, you had a thousand dollars, give me some CPA sales. It is going to be crickets. And this is the thing, a lot of people when they are getting started, you don’t know the commercial rate of your landing page, your sales page, your upsells. You don’t even know how much you can truly pay per click. You don’t even know how much money you are going to make from the offer to begin with. So the easiest thing to do is to go in and do pay per click cost per click and say okay, and I am just going to use round numbers here, if I make a dollar per click with a conversion rate of 40% on my squeeze page, with a 2% conversion on my sales page, could I make money? The easiest thing to do what is called predictive modeling. My wife is in accounting, she can do this wonderfully, if your wife is an accountant you’re probably are as lucky as me but what you need to have to do is sit down with any kind of spreadsheet and go how much are you paying per click? What would be the best conversion rate of your squeeze page? What would be the worst case scenario, what would be the average? What is the best case scenario for your sales page? What do you think the average would be and model that up and when you start looking at that you’d be like – a lot of people would be in shock because if you look at the average and the average across the board, you may discover you can’t make money in a dollar per click. You need to get them at least under $0.50 per click. And let’s just say that all of a sudden our numbers are horrible across the board, we can’t pay any more $0.50 per click. Once you look at that, that is going to really limit where you could buy traffic at. That would immediately rule out Google. At $0.30 per click you are probably going to get a lot of stuff. So that may also say if I can’t do Google’s search network, maybe I can do Google’s display network. So then that kind of looks like from a totally different scenario. Can you do display network? If you are looking at Facebook and you realize I can only pay so much per click, I probably can’t advertise on some of this more popular terms. If you are truly limited to PPV, what have you been doing pay per click. If you can do more pay per click then you need to set up a whole new world because then I can say I can go in to Google and I can go in to Facebook and it gives you so much more opportunity but the reality of this is, what can you pay per click? Once you figured that out, the easiest way is to just build a spreadsheet and model it. Start with pay per click. Once you’ve got your numbers tuned in, once you’ve got it optimized, then maybe go to calls per thousand. You can say you know what, looking at what we are at, we would be cheaper if, let’s say we are paying $10 per cost per thousand. So what happens, you say, okay, $10 CPM we know we can make sales, or 1 sale and those numbers begin to work out. But it is hard to do CPM where you are paying per impression to start with unless you know your numbers are ready. So to get started with, go cost per click, then go to CPM.

James: I can almost imagine people’s clicking over trying to do some of those numbers in their heads so perhaps we can actually make available a resource or a spreadsheet where people can track. Perhaps you and I will have a conversation about that after we finish recording but for now let’ turn the conversation to the media itself because there are a lot more options available now than just the old static banners of the past. There are things like videos, interactive banners and a bunch of others too. What are some of the most innovative media types now available to advertisers and what are you finding most success with yourself?

Charles: I tell you, as much as banners have been around, people have discarded banner ads. Truth of the matter is, banner ads are still converting like crazy. And from a marketing aspect of it, it is a huge opportunity. Another thing to look at is okay, I went to your site, I opted in, didn’t buy your product, retarget those people with banners across the web using Gooogle adroll, using perfect audience, retarget them inside Facebook because they’ve been to your site, they’ve clicked, they’ve opted in, but maybe they didn’t buy. Maybe they’ll just come back and finish the check out. Maybe you need a coupon for a free shipping. You’d be amazed at what that can do. Another thing that a lot of people don’t realize is the power of YouTube. When you go there and you watch that, and we all like a lot of people complain, I have to watch a 5 second commercial before and hit skip on YouTube, that’s some crazy traffic because the typical YouTube person is there searching for something. It’s like in Adwords when they’re searching how do you cure XYZ, when they’re on YouTube, they’re doing reviews on products, how to fix something, how to do something, and how to learn something. How to remove some sort of pain in their life, such a huge opportunity so take advantage of YouTube and basically have an adwords compliant account and an adwords compliant landing page and everything needs to be adwords compliant. But having that adwords compliant really open up to get brand new opportunity for you to get traffic you never could have even imagined. Another thing that a lot of people just overlook the internet marketing is solo emails are basically beat to death and it is not bad because the problem is, most people go in to the same people and buy the same low quality pieces of traffic they can find and go, this is just not working for me. Go to some place like Archemax, contact Bill Archemax, contact Richard, he’s the CEO and they can sell you solo email which are not beat to death and are not double opted in and that people will buy the first time we use archemax. Me and my buddy a number of years ago made like a thousand dollars for the solo drop. We made about $12000 promoting something called FAP robot, it was a forex product. In click bank, we didn’t even have a list in that. We just went bar solo and tested it out to their financial section and sold that Avril Lavigne album Cest’ La vie it was a quick sell of the product and we did not even opt in so I tested it, it proved positive so you know that is another opportunity that people are looking for solo emails. If you buy from same old solo email sellers that are like sending five emails a day to their list saying please click this because it’s a free resource and you are not going to get great result. Go to a place like Archemax or newsmax. They will sell you high quality traffic and yet it costs more than the internet marketing business opportunity but guess what, it is a huge opportunity to get quality traffic. another opportunity, look at degas smith, he’s got a solo ad agency and those guys have quality traffic. I mean, it is out there but I think a lot of people are looking at banners, overlooking native ads, totally overlooking solos and not taking advantage of YouTube traffic. It’s just massive!

James: Yeah! Well we’ve touched on several topics and I think for the benefit of our listener we’ll include some links to other Traffic Jam episodes where we explore these topics a bit more and also off to any other relevant training that you’ve got Charles because it is a broad, broad subject. I want to ask you though about testing and tracking because you did touch on it very briefly a moment ago, I’m sure you agree it is critical especially for paid traffic campaigns where we’ve got money in the game. What are the key metrics that are important to track and what tools do you use to monitor then analyze those numbers?

Charles: I think the tools you want to look out are like excel, almost everybody have got it on their computer anyway. When you use some kind of traffic something called improve.ly, I absolutely love it. I wish it did more but I absolutely love it because one of the big things that we are looking at from the standpoint of did somebody click? Using improvely you can start to see how many times did they come to the site before they opted in? and when they opted in did they complete the funnel going down? Okay, they opted in, did they buy? If they bought, how much are they worth? Did they take upsell? Were you able to actually monitor that back down to where we can break down, let’s just say in Facebook you were advertising for Ryan Dikes. Let’s just say he’s our target. We are able to come back to that traffic and we are able to say, you know what? There are a lot on the Ryan Dikes keyword and newsfeed. Through the roof! Wonderful! Ryan Dikes newsfeed, checked it out, it is good! The Ryan Dikes right hand side ads did not do as well, Ryan Dike’s mobile devices for apple did great! Mobile devices for android, not so good. Using an approval we can actually break it down to that level and then you can go to – was it a tablet? Was it a mobile device? And one thing to look at you can go now, AT&T job placement, you use smart phone and that’s about it, you just need the polls. A tablet is still a luxury for a lot of people, we’re talking $300 – $400, we’re targeting people who have tablets is more akin to laptops. You’re talking a 10.5 inch screen as probably 11-12 on a laptop. The people that have a tablet are typically a higher end buyer. They want to spend $400 – $500 for a tablet and it acts very similar to a laptop and from a mobility standpoint, it is big, and because of that we have discovered those are very high end, very high quality buyers. And using something like improvely we can come down and say, laptop, phone, desktop, newsfeed, right hand side, you have a way to break it down to that level which is huge. Also from a standpoint of testament tracking, the biggest issue is when you are buying traffic make sure you need to have enough data to make sure that your stuff is actually accurate. A lot of people think we only need a hundred clicks, yeah in a perfect world, in a perfect theory you only need a hundred clicks to determine everything like is the opt in page working? Is the landing page working? Is the sales app working? Is the checkout page working? What we do with like improvely is something called website visual optimizer. I absolutely love it simply because it is easy to use and I like it. What we are going to do is start looking at the key points. What are the key points that can have a huge impact on your business? When you see your check out page, your checkout page can double your income. You don’t even have to double your traffic. All you need to do is double your conversions through your checkout page to go from 1% to 2% conversion is huge. A lot of people think conversion is totally dependent on the sales letter. It is dependent on your sales page and it is dependent on your checkout page. Have security seals, have testimonials. Make sure that paid traffic works, you would be amazed at the easy way sitting down and literally just sitting there waiting for people to optimize those pages. If you are using the default mannequin test page, there is nothing wrong with that? Nanacast is an extremely powerful program. You can actually have custom landing pages, custom check out pages. Make sure those custom check out pages work. Infusion, nanacast, you can actually create all those and create custom check out pages. Another thing to look at and using split testing, you can determine does the recap of the offer help people make a buying decision? Does the security seal above the fold help. Start looking at the value of that. If you say, Charles, I am using click bank, well you can use custom CSS in click bank, optimize it, make the page look good, you can’t really split test a click bank checkout page but guess what, you can. That’s what a lot of people don’t realize. You can actually if you really want to get down and dirty and really make some money, you can have a single product in click bank, we can have product A and product B and product C. Each one can have a product style on the checkout page. They are all selling the exact same thing. Maybe we are selling the James Reynolds Traffic Jam value pack for $97. You can have it listed as multiple products, you can use multiple checkout pages, maybe if you wanted to go even a step further, add them on different accounts but you can actually split test those check out pages. If you will split test your check out pages, you will be amazed by the amount of money sitting there waiting to be taken. Another thing to look at is when you’re saying, okay, the problem that a lot of people have with their split test is they are testing the word free product versus new product. Who really cares about free versus new? Those things are very minor. I see people say hey, we’ve tested the green button versus the red button and next week the red button will outperform the green button. The truth of the matter is, start testing the things that really make a difference. Offer the price points in the headlines. Those are the things that make a big difference from squeeze page, sales page, checkout pages, also with your upsells. A lot of people I find are doing no upsell test. Well, they bought now. You make your money on your upsells. You seldom make money on the front end product. Lord forbid, split testing, does this upsell do better? Did the $97 upsell do better than the $79 upsell? Which one of those converts better? Which one is all about conversions? I see people fall in love with a 2.3% conversion. I don’t care about that. What is the ROI? At the end of the day, all I want to know is ROI. Look at ROI. At the end of the day, your business doesn’t work on clicks, it doesn’t work on opt ins, your business works on what is your ROI generating. We have a 3.8% conversion rate because we’ve discovered our highest converting landing page we have gives us the least ROI. The landing page we have that gets some of the lowest opt in rates has an insane ROI. Because in this page, they know exactly what they are opting in for, they are in the right mindset to be shown a special onetime offer upgrade and it makes a big difference so I think a lot of people make the mistake of going it’s all about CTR. No! At the end of the day, it’s all about ROI. That’s the only thing you pay your bills with. And you look at it from the standpoint of the average user. The little money things I can’t seem to get any bigger gains. Split test different style of landing pages, different headlines and you’d be absolutely amazed. The same headline on two different style landing pages can make a big difference. When we’re spit testing out the gates we’re testing like five different landing pages, same headline on all of these pages. Which landing page style is going to work best for this particular traffic source and the problem people have is because ti works great in Google, it does not mean that it works on Facebook. If it works on Facebook, doesn’t mean it is going to work on mobile. If it works on mobile, doesn’t mean necessarily mean it is going to work for PPV. You have to understand all these traffic sources. You have to keep in mind users have a different mindset for every single traffic source you are using. When they are searching for something on YouTube, it is a how do I. when they are in Google, they are trying to solve their problem. When they’re in Yahoo, they’re reading content. Totally different scenarios. So, with that said, excel I can use it, visual website optimizer, use improvely. And the reality of this, get started. At the end of the day, I have people asking Charles a traffic display test. You’re right and if you are going to do a split test if you don’t start buying some traffic, split testing can make it better. That’s my little testing your tracking rant.

James: Awesome Charles! I think that is probably an appropriate point to wrap things up and because we have covered so much on this session I am sure our listeners are going to want to go and explore some of these topics a little further and I am sure you will find a place for people to do that. So let’s share where people can go and find a little bit more about Charles Kirkland. What’s that address on the web?

Charles: The easiest thing to do is go to mediabuyerassociation.com. Once you’re there you’ll see a free course, you can click on that and we provide a seven day traffic boot camp, and that landing page by the way is Google compliant, and Facebook compliant may I add, go ahead and optin to that and I promise you, we are not going to spam you or anything. You are not going to get emails from me offering you to buy anything. But we will send you information on how to make money using paid media and how to actually get better at what you do.

James: Good!   Well I am sure that is going to be a great place for people also to absorb what you are up to so the link to Charles’s website will be included in the show notes along with a whole bunch of other resources mentioned in today’s show and the address for that is TrafficJamCast.com/60. That’s it Charles. All that remains for me is to thank you for coming in today. Thoroughly enjoyed today’s session. I can also tell you’re super passionate about what you do as it certainly comes through in the interview so thanks for coming on the show!

Charles: Thank you for having me I appreciate it.

So there you go, that was Charles Kirkland from the mediabuyersassociation.com. Thank you for listening in to this episode of Traffic Jam. This was episode#60 of course. We’ll be back again next week for another episode and to make sure that you don’t miss out on that show, ensure your subscription so subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link to all of the bonuses that come with this episode including downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus a special paid traffic calculator that will help you make better decisions around your traffic sources and campaigns, go to TrafficJamCast.com/60 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode.

We end the show this week with a Traffic Jam of course chosen by Charles Kirkland. He’s gone for a track by Jimmy Buffet and it is called Margaritaville. So enjoy the track and I will see you back here again as always real soon!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

Charles Kirkland, our guest on Traffic Jam 60, has chosen the track Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett.

The track is the hit single from Buffett’s 1978 album You Had to Be There. Margaritaville also became the name of a fast-food restaurant chain owned by Buffett.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW:

Go ahead and download the Paid Traffic Calculator that accompanies this episode.

This pre-populated spreadsheet in .xls and .numbers format helps you quickly and easily asses the profitability of your online media campaigns.

Simply enter your data in the fields and the calculator will tell you whether you can expect to lose or win with your planned campaign.

The calculator removes 99% of the guess work so that you can pick a winning media campaign with certainty.

You can get instant access to The Paid Traffic Calculator by clicking download below.

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Google, by far, has the greatest market share of all search engines world-wide.  So, naturally it makes sense that if you want to reach people actively searching for what you offer, then you should display your wares on Google.

Google has virtually limitless information about the who, what, where and when for everyone on the web. This means that not only can they give you access to a huge market but they can offer many options for the way you target people with advertising on the web.

Get these targeting options set up correctly and Google is a literal money making vending machine . Get them wrong and the result could be you burn through a whole lot of cash.

Listen in to this episode as Mike Rhodes shares his checklist of must haves and what-nots for Google Adwords retargeting, search and display network campaigns.

OUR GUEST:

Mike Rhodes is a Goodle AdWords Management Specialist from Melbourne, Australia. He is the CEO and founder of Web Savvy, a Google Adwords marketing agency widely considered as the best in it’s market area. Web Savvy helps small businesses improve 3 vital things: overall online strategy, improve website traffic, and then conversion rates. WebSavvy also gives coaching on online marketing, pay per click advertising, and Google Analytics.

Mikes’s seven years of experience with Google AdWords campaigns makes him an authority on online marketing. His company is one of the first ever in Australia to be awarded Google Partner status.

Aside from being a consultant, Mike Rhodes co-authored the book The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords along with Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd.

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 59 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Mike Rhodes quote from the show:

You can also get Mike’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“It’s easy to set up an 80% done campaign but the last 5-10% makes the difference.” ~ @TheGoogleGuy
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey there listener! A special Christmas welcome to Traffic Jam! At the time the show is planned to air it should be Christmas Eve, perhaps even Christmas Day depending to where you are in the world so from me and all of the team behind the Traffic Jam podcast, a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year! I do hope to bring you gifts galore on Traffic Jam Episode#59 as we welcome Google Adwords expert, Mike Rhodes to the show. Mike is probably one of the best teachers of Google Adwords the world over. He’s also the co-author of the latest edition of the ultimate guide to Google adwords along with Perry Marshall so that should give you some indication of Mike’s credo.

But before we get stuck in to the interview with Mike I want to tell you about the special bonus that accompanies this podcast and for this bonus I’ve dug very deep in to the archives to pull out my notes from my $1000 event in Australia where Mike Rhodes presented his top innovations of the time. These notes cover some of the best, but perhaps most under-utilized features in Google adwords. To get your hands on these one of a kind notes, go right now to TrafficJamCast.com/59.

So let’s introduce Mike Rhodes, Mike is the founder of web savvy, widely considered as the #1 Google adwords agency in Australia, he’s the co-author of the ultimate guide to Google Adwords, which he wrote with the godfather of Google Adwords Perry Marshall himself who incidentally describes Mike as the best in the world adwords ninja. I personally know Mike for several years, we’ve been in a mastermind group together, we’re going to be speaking alongside each other in an event in Sydney in March 2015. He’s the best in the business and he gets my absolute highest endorsement when it comes to Google adwords. Do you want to know why? I think you are about to find out on Traffic Jam#59. So let’s welcome to the show Mike Rhodes from PPC Savvy.

James: Welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#59 of Traffic Jam and joining me here today is Mike Rhodes from Web Savvy. Mike, how are you doing?

Mike: I am very good James. How are you sir?

James: I am excellent! As you hear, just a little run down with a cough and cold but super excited on today’s show so that will soon get me back on track on track for sure. So Mike, there are literally dozens of ways to get traffic that are perhaps more targeted and cost effective than Google Adwords so as we kind of end 2014 and going in to 2015 with stronger competition and higher click cost than almost ever in the past. Why should we still be doing Google ads?

Mike: That’s a very good question! It is still where your market hang out. Facebook certainly will be the big competitor to adwords now. Certainly here in Australia adwords is still where everybody goes to search for something. In the States maybe 30% is Bing, here in Australia, it is 4%-5%. I don’t know what the stat is for Dubai –

James: Oh, it’s crazy! I think it’s 95% market share for Google.

Mike: Pretty huge, here it’s 92% – 94% and anyone here will agree, it’s basically on Google. And a vast number of people that’s still where they are going to go when they are looking to buy something. People at this point in time, at least in 2014, may well be distracted with an ad on Facebook but everybody who are doing well on Facebook, the vast majority are using website custom audiences or Facebook remarketing, that works the best for a lot a of people that I know. All the other types of marketing may be not as good but between Facebook and the display network of Google, I’ve dived in to the deep end here, you can cover a huge, huge range of things and then compare that to what are your other options. Do you go back to doing local papers or TV or radio, so compared to the other lines of options, I still believe it’s more expensive, it’s certainly more competitive, it’s certainly harder to use Google profitably but in the right hands it’s still the best tool that any small business, or any business can use to draw people to their websites and of course there’s always new features and new parts of the adwords machine coming out all the time and staying on top of that is something we pride ourselves in and knowing how to use those things properly is what makes the difference. Anybody can start an adwords campaign. It is very easy to set it up and have an 80% adwords done adwords campaign but that last 5-10% is what makes all the difference.

James: Yeah, and I think that is one of the things right? I mean adwords has perhaps more intricacies and a steeper learning curve to something like on Facebook where literally almost to get the best results you can just install one pixel and set and forget the campaign and over time you can get Facebook to perform it for you but with adwords there is more to it. With that being the case, what does it take to succeed especially for those just starting out with Google Adwords?

Mike: The tricky bit is for those very low spender counts because if you are spending $500 to $2000 a month, then it is going to be very difficult to find an agency to outsource that that is any good for a start, and it is probably not going to be cost-effective for you to try and learn that and to go up against as an advertiser, a competitor that might be run by an agency like ours so that’s the tricky bit. Getting educated is obviously vital, we’ve all heard the horror stories of melting credit cards and Google stole my money. They didn’t. It’s got the settings wrong on your account. It’s the tool; how you use the tool determines your success. Fire can be used to burn your hut down or heat your dinner, it just depends how you use the tool. If you’re just getting started then obviously getting as much training material and learning on a low budget, that’s fine. There are certainly a few things that I would like at this point in adwords in 2014 are lower risk areas to start, for instance, remarketing or YouTube campaigns, both would be excellent places to start. But if you want to dive in to a non-brand campaign and something like migratory finance than you’re probably going to get your identity.

James: Well, let’s talk about some of this kind of cash burning scenarios because we have all heard them. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see Google advertisers make and especially those starting out they literally do melt credit cards or burn through thousands and thousands of dollars overnight.

Mike: Well, if it’s a money thing it’s because they haven’t understood the fact that you are able to set your bid for every single keyword and most importantly, a campaign level budget. So all the keywords and everything that you have been bidding on if you’ve got a campaign level budget, Google will not spend a more than you offer. It will go a little bit over some days, it will go up to 20% over so if your budget is over $100 a day, there will be days where Google will go up to a $120, but over the course of a month, 30.4 day period, they will not spend more than $3040 during that period. So you’re melting credit cards because you’ve got your budget wrong first and foremost.

James: Got it. Let’s talk about some scenarios with ad copy. I really want to ask you because it is one of the areas that can make the difference to your campaign and probably one of the areas many people fall flat with, what tips have you got, or formulas you’ve got for creating ad copies that stand out and get click?

Mike: I’ll combine this with the answer I should have given you now as well but you did ask me about biggest mistakes, budget is only one, so let me give you another big one and then combine it with this answer and that huge mistake is not really understanding the structure of your adwords. Within your account you can do reverse campaign and a campaign holds a number of ad groups. An ad group is like a bucket. It holds a number of keywords and has a slot on the front so when somebody types in something that matches to it, let’s just say for the sake of argument, somebody types in that keyword, they see the ad on the front of that bucket, the ad that’s in and obviously you should be testing and we’ll talk about it in a second, but they see that ad, and one of the biggest, biggest mistakes is people set it up, they have one campaign, one big ad group so one huge bucket, then that campaign with dozens and dozens and hundreds and hundreds of keywords on that bucket. What that means is somebody searching for any one of those keywords, they all see the same ad. I’ll give you an example. Our most recent account this morning, the guy is selling segways and everything was all in the one account so Segway battery, Segway for kids, Segway x2, Segway parts, they’re all in this one campaign which means all of those very, very different people looking for very, very different things because all those keywords are in the one ad group and they’re called adgroups not keyword groups because they are all seeing the same ad. That’s the mistake because that means that is not the most relevant ad for each of those people to see where adwords is going to work well for you is the person searching that kids thing sees an ad about the kid thing, and because you’ve got a different ad, you’re able to send those people to a different page or even send them to the kid’s page on your website. The person searching for spare parts sees an ad about parts and they’re taken to the spare parts page on the site. So that’s where the ad copy part comes in. they need to first and foremost when they’re starting out, the best thing that you can test is showing them what they’re looking for so don’t get fancy, certainly don’t use puns and wordplay and try to be more clever which some copywriters may sometimes try to do. Direct response copy is short, sweet, to the point, here’s what you’re looking for, I’ve got that and showing them that you’re very relevant, you’ve got what they’re looking for, and ideally some sort of point of difference, why am I going to click you compared to all those other things that I could click on on the page results. The brain loves a deal, loves a bargain, loves something different. If everybody is saying the same thing, it is very hard for our brains to figure out what they are all saying and what I need to click on, do I click this one on the top? They all look the same. But if you can stand out, if you can be different and if you can offer something that other people don’t that is going to help you enormously with adwords.

James: Yeah and it’s very different to writing ad copy for let’s say a Facebook where you kind of move people out of their current mental state. They’re looking at friends and photographs and now you’ve got to entice them with something that’s going to compel them away whereas adwords, at least in the search network is the opposite. You’ve got to get in tune with currently what they’re thinking and show them exactly what they’re looking for at that time, right?

Mike: Absolutely, yeah! It’s not interruption marketing; that is as true today as it was 60 years ago.

James: So what’s the difference between setting up a campaign for search which you just described in doing something in the Google display network because I know you’re a big fan of the Google display network but you also admitted that in the wrong hands it can also fall foul. What are your tips for getting a GDN campaign set up correctly?

Mike: Perry Marshal who your listeners will know, and I know that you had on the show before has a lovely analogy of what to use here and if search is like checkers or drafts for our signature people, then the display network is like chess. They are definitely more complex; infinitely more moves that you can make which is why so many people fall flat and do not make display work. I have taught literally hundreds of agencies at this point how to use display properly and it never fails to surprise me how little people understand display. You’ve got to understand it from Google’s side to really work out how to make it work. The short answer is that there are a vast variety of ways to target who sees your ad. I’ll give you three. The first one is the easy one and it’s called managed placements. What that means is that you are saying to Google I reckon my prospect is going to show up on this website, be that New York Times or Oprah or this tiny, little blog about making shoes that I found. And I reckon my prospects are going to appear on these sites. I would like you to put my ads on those sites and we’ll just sit back and wait for them to appear. And that’s traditionally how a lot of media buys has been done. We’re going to put you on this big website over here, we’re going to buy 20 million impressions for them, a month after, and because you’re such a good client we actually got you 22 million impressions. Ah, yes. Lovely. Did that actually put any money in my bank account? I hate those reports that talk about your impressions, or your click through rates double the industry average. Based on what? They’re very self-service reports that you get for those media buys and because they all pocket 10% straight off the bat, there is no benefit to them in terms of educating people about Google where you are infinitely more in control and all these other ways to target. So the next way to target then is this thing called contextual targeting. So there you are going to give Google essentially a list of themes, you don’t need to worry about the detail of how to do that but you can give a list to Google of themes and essentially say go find the pages that are about making shoes, I don’t know why that random example came up but –

James: It’s not what you bought your wife for Christmas is it?

Mike: I would not try and pretend, she’s the top shoe. I am smarter than that. Google knows which pages on which websites match that context, we haven’t got a clue but Google has got access to way, way more than they’ll ever share with us so we can say to Google, look, I don’t know what they are but you do, so these are the themes at the top of page I’d like you to find, go and find those and then stick my ads on those pages next to that content. And there’s all sorts of things that you can do to help shape that. Obviously all the controls that exist is still available to you so you can say only show this that are in Dubai. They might be reading the New York Times but only show them to people because they’re in Dubai or because it’s a Tuesday afternoon or because Google thinks that they’re male aged 45 to 55. All of that control still exists, it’s just a different way of targeting. But the third way is definitely my favorite. Something that I’d probably become one of the top two agencies in the world I would say at this point in time and that’s the behavioral targeting that Google offers and there’s many, many different ways within this and remarketing is one of them. But whether you are targeting your ads based on your previous behavior. In the case of remarketing, it is some sort of behavior that they have exhibited on your website. They know that you have been to the men’s section of your site, or the kid’s section or the sales section. Or that they spent more than five minutes on your site, or that they came to your site from a particular email campaign, or that they added a product to the shopping cart but haven’t bought yet or that they have read more than seven blog posts. Whatever behavior it is that you want to find almost limitless. You can define that behavior and know that they are someone who’s returned to your website for more than five times and in total across those five visits they have spent more than a half hour on your site. You can use that targeting too, or that they came to your site from Google organic in the States. That’s internet, it is limitless. It really is. It is fabulous.

James: Yeah, Mike is there anything else you want to say? Otherwise we are just going to move on to remarketing.

Mike: Yeah, just very, very quickly. There are a couple of other types there. One that we’re having huge success with at the moment is the thing called in market audience. This is the best non remarketing type of behavioral targeting. Google knows a lot about it, right? If it covers 95% of Dubai, let’s call it 93% in Australia, they know a lot about us, they know what we’ve been searching for, the websites they’ve been to, they know our buying behavior, they know which sites we buy and which ones we don’t. They know how we behave when the weather is when we’re doing different things. There’s so much data they have about how they behave. Google has figured out then that it’s got a list of about at this point about 550 different categories of what people might be in the market for. Everything from watches to juices and blenders and auto insurance and pretty much everything that you can think of, business services is coming in February or March last year, wait for that to come out. Google has figured out all of these people that use Google. You can target people based on the fact that Google believes they are in the market for the product or service that you sell right now. They get really specific with that, I can target people based on the fact that Google knows now in the market for flights to Austin, Texas or a five-star hotel in Austin, Texas. It’s incredibly granular, and once you see the list, which is available to anybody. You just log in to Google Help and find that list. Once you find that list, your brain will explode with possibilities. These are people in the market to buy a new Mercedes in Dubai. Right now, I can put an ad in front of them so I know about all these things and which website they are going to go to, Google knows who they are so use Google, find these people, put the ads and I will pay you only if and when they click on one of those ads and will take them to my landing page. Incredibly powerful.

James: It’s almost like they’re bringing search in to display, right? I mean you’re almost getting in to that sort of buyer’s psychology. People that are researching products and services and you are appearing in front of them even though they haven’t just searched for you so it’s almost like these two worlds colliding on Google in one place. Very, very powerful.

Mike: Absolutely! It’s almost like remarketing in a sense that it is like being able to put that remarketing code on your competitor site. Google is telling you, look in the market for what you’ve got but they haven’t been to your website yet, would you like to show an ad to them? Yes, please.

James: Yeah, there’s only one answer to that question, really there is. Well, let’s move on to remarketer, we certainly want to get to that topic, the place I want to start is really comparing these sort of plug and play remarketing options that are very readily available and things like adroll and other ones like that. We’re now starting to paint a picture I think of really potentially why Google adwords is more powerful based on previous actions that they may have taken on your website which really isn’t available through something like adroll. What other options exist though going through Google adwords platform over one of these generic retargeting options available to us?

Mike: Yeah Google is infinitely more powerful over something like adroll. I had a particular place in hell, no I won’t go that harsh but I really dislike adroll, the main reason is the way they measure success. How I prefer to measure success, and bear in mind there that no attribution model is perfect, Your listeners are smart, generally agency types that they can understand we’re driving straight in to here the adwords 301 level and no attribution model is perfect. But, last click attribution, or saying did this last click to this ad lead to a sale and lead to money? I think that’s a far, far better model than saying did somebody randomly half see this on Tuesday afternoon? They didn’t actually look at it for very long, they did not even click on it, but we’re going to take that view of that ad and we’re going to say yep, that, that, that and say that was us that caused that sale that maybe happened nine days later through a completely different and adroll by default and usually viewed through other versions and I think it’s cheating it just smells wrong to me and so I can see many people say oh, look our adroll set is working really, really well and with a couple of clicks of a button, I can show them that actually they did not get a hundred and fifty conversions, they got 4 and that is not uncommon so that’s partly why I don’t like that system. Yeah, Google, where’s our guy? The power of that, go on and ask me that question and I’d be very helpful and respond.

James: Perfect! Well it sounds like everyone about in their Christmas jollies so that’s all good. I guess it’s a Thursday afternoon in Melbourne, Australia, it’s probably time to hit the Christmas pub, right? Anyway, I was going to ask you a question and then that was really down to what available options within, and I think it is really coming down to this behavioral based targeting within remarketing right? And I have heard you talk on this topic a lot before so I know you’re a real master of it so maybe just peel the lid back on one or two of those things that you can do with adwords that you can’t do with an adroll or others.

Mike: Certainly! You’ve got two main options, you can use adwords to serve the ads to show your remarketing ads be there image ads or text ads, don’t ignore remarketing text ads. A lot of our clients get a lot of success from text ads so it’s not just about showing banners but you have two main ways of building the remarketing list, in other words a group of people that are going to see those ads. The first is within adwords itself and that is very powerful but compared to the second option, it is restricted. And the reason it is restricted is that the way you build a list within adwords is to give it certain rules and almost all of those rules is revolved around the URL that is displayed atop of the browser. So if you want to say build a group for people or your remarketing list or your remarketing audience, you may use those terms interchangeably – of anybody who’s visited the men’s section of my site and the URL contains /mens, done easy rule. Or anybody who’s read a blog post, URL contains /blog, done. Very easy thing to do, but it’s all URL based so people that have cart URL contains cart but not been to the thank you page, URL contains thanks, that’s a really easy audience to build, very easy to create an abandoned cart, a group of people who I can follow around and show ads in the next few weeks. The power though really comes when you start to link the most powerful tool when building a remarketing list, which every single one of your listener already has installed on the website because it is called Google analytics and 50% of the world uses it. Google analytics, when you think about it, all of these reports which none of us ever have the time to go and update in analytics all of those they call dimension tricks so things like the city where somebody was in, how they got to your website that traffic source as sort of alluding before, did they come from a particular email that they come in Google organic or from Facebook or did they come from your particular adwords ad because if they came from a search ad or they came from a display ad, there are probably two different types of quality of prospects. What are some others? New vs. returning – that is going to make a big, big difference in the propensity of somebody to buy. One we see huge success with is this thing called page depth. If somebody has been, and particularly for e-commerce site. Somebody that’s been 10, or 15 or 25 pages deep in to your site, pull the report available to you in analytics. With a little bit of work, pull that report and you’ll probably find people that converting 10, 20. I’ve got clients where those people convert at 40-50%. People that have been 20 -25 pages deep, I can segment that by device, so okay, put just the people from desktops. And just the people that were returning more than twice, how many people of those have I got 10,000 on the last week and 50% of them bought or hang on, I have this group of people here, half of them – half have bought, the other half got interrupted. It’s not like they did not like my website, they were there for 20 minutes, they’ve looked through 25 pages, they’ve been back a couple of times, they are going to buy given the opportunity. Who knows why they got interrupted, but that’s the first group that I want to get in front of. So the real power comes from when you think about all the different data points that are in Google analytics. You can use pretty much any of those to tell Google, here is a group of people that are highly likely to convert, that’s a group of people I want to get back in front of, please show them my ads.

James: They literally are infinite possibilities in terms of how you could segment those audiences, where should we start? It sounds like one of them is basically on how deep it had gone in the site and how many pages they viewed but is there any other way to sort of cut this cake up that would really be worth our listeners looking in to as well?

Mike: Cool! I’ll give you my checklist. I have not actually published this anywhere yet so, good question James.

James: Traffic Jam exclusive! There you go.

Mike: Alright, first thing I’ll look at is who. What do I know about the person? Now this is in third by Google but it’s always worth a look. I generally don’t use this but generally age and gender, there’s now parental status in there. What do I know about the person? That gives me a clue. I was on a site I was looking at a couple of days ago, there were people over 45 who were six times more likely to buy than people that weren’t. So that probably plays in to my remarketing strategy. Probably also gives me some intelligence to use with my Facebook strategy or maybe how I am going to talk about it and the various benefits that I offer and how I talk about it in my search ads. It probably changes the imagery that I use on my website and the subject line of my email like it feeds so many other things when you really start to think about. Then I think, what do I know about how they use the internet? What device are they in on? That’s a big one – desktop, tablet or mobile. We all know, those of us who have been using adwords for a while that the ability to target people using tablets or using mobiles disappeared a year and a half ago, thanks to Google. There are some sneaky ways around that between you and me but for the most part, that is difficult to target but with remarketing, using analytics, you can. You can say, what happens if I just target those tablet users? I only show them ads back on their tablets. That can work really, really well. The browser or the operating system that they use, that can give you some good clues about the type of person that they are and sometimes you’ll find that there are big differences in conversion rates there. Geography, I’ll often have particularly Australian clients that come to me and say we want to start selling in the States, this is a once a month occurrence with a new client usually and I will pull the data and say yes, it’s true, you did get 30,000 visit from the States last month and they converted at 0.09%. You’re not ready to sell in the States yet! You don’t want to spend that adwords money. This data is telling us and therefore would you want to remarket to those 30,000 people? What most people do, let’s back up a sec, most people would remarket to everybody that came to the site. They have one remarketing list and it’s called all visitors that entered my site in the last 30 days. The key here is to treat different people differently, and that might mean that we exclude the people that have come from the states because they converted at 0.09% compared to an average of 5% for the rest of the site or it might mean that we just find the best of the best of the best people and just remarket to them because if we do that, we can afford to spend more for each click and we also get to think about what the message I need to show this person, what does that ad look like? What does that landing page need to look like? Did this person discover me through the YouTube ads that I was running? They probably liked video and I should probably have video on the landing page. I’ll run this very quickly for you so geography, traffic source, massive one there, organic direct email referral or paid and they’re going to be on my site. How do I know how they use it on the site so are they returning, we mentioned time on site, how long did they spend on the site? Page depth, I mentioned that’s a little harder to pull the data for but that is a strong, strong indicator obviously how much revenue do these people buy. I don’t have to only show remarketing ads to people that have not converted yet. If I’ve got a group of people that spend maybe $250 per transaction and my average is a hundred, then that’s a really good group of people to build a list for too! Or people that buy frequently, the whales as we like to call them, and site search. If you have some sort of a search widget or we did a lot with McGrath, a real estate agent here in Australia and they being a real estate agent have that widget where you search for your house with three bedrooms with a yard and a view in this area of town. Somebody who interacts with that widget has shown significant additional interest compared to the average person. So we tag all of those people, or cookie all those people and say these people, that’s a good group of people to follow around. I’ll give you one last thing, I don’t know if we’re short on time but –

James: Go ahead Mike, this is all good stuff so I’m going to give the floor to you, go for it!

Mike: Where you really get the best things per bark? Again it’s treating different people differently and this depends on the buying cycle of your business and that is going to be very, very different for every industry but you can set it up so you are beating differently over time. So let’s say it’s a typical e-commerce site, someone’s been to my site. I want to spend more to get that person back in the first two, three, four days I know they’re very much hard to track at this point and I need to get them before they buy from anybody else. Two weeks from now, I may still want to show them an ad, it might be a different ad but I’d probably still want to show them an ad. And a month from now, I definitely don’t want to spend that much, and six months from now, I’m probably not remarketing to them. I might, it depends on the business, how often people buy from you and if you have a new product. That’s about the only time that you, you might use that all visitor list when you come up with a new product and you want to tell everybody who has been to your website in the past year and a half. Hey we’ve got this cool thing, or you see there’s really something stupid and you need to tell your side of the story or you are a charity and you just finished your event and you very subtlety say thank you to all the people that are involved. You could use a big remarketing list just to run ads to say thank you to everybody involved. You don’t, by the way, say hey, thanks for being part of the blah, blah, blah. You never refer to that known behavior because that’s just too creepy. Ugh! We know that you’re a part of – that’s hideous! I wouldn’t have wanted to see an ad that says hey thanks for being the thousand and one CEOs that flocked on the streets in Melbourne and blah, blah, blah. But if I showed an ad that said thanks to everybody involved, we just raised $4.3 million that’s going to make me feel good and if they are smart, they can start following me around eleven months from now just before the next event and start to show ads to me because they know my known previous behavior and that would probably be a really, really smart thing to do to get people back to that charity website and get people involved the following year, just saying.

James: Perfect! Well, Mike I think people’s brains are probably exploding right now especially if they have been doing remarketing in that typical fashion of all website visitors or perhaps even worse, just targeting those people that haven’t already converted as you’ve so rightly put. You’re far better to target those people who’ve already got the propensity to buy and be spending money with you. I think we should wrap things up there, one because it’s Christmas and you’re probably due to grab cold wine somewhere in Melbourne, but also just be mindful of your time and also so we can send off our listeners somewhere else to dig a little bit deeper in to all of these stuff and I know you have got some training and resources that would help people really get to the next level with Google adwords. Mike will you share where those places are on the web so we can head people off to those locations?

Mike: Alright, the cheap place to start is the book that has just been published that Perry Marshall and myself co-authored, and Bryan Todd, the wonderful Bryan Todd, let’s not forget Bryan. You can get that for about $19, free shipping around the world and all that, that’s a great place to start if you are new to adwords. If you’ve got a little more experience and you just want to go the next level, the thing I found annoying back in time was nobody training was up to date and it used to frustrate the hell out of me. And I am guilty of this, i had a course which I did with James Schramko about three and a half years ago, and it’s still knocking around somewhere, it’s in my membership area but I am able now because everyone’s been nagging me for so long to create this membership area and creating new material every single month so whenever something new comes out, we will test it within the agency and then I’ll share that new thing, I’ll often share results where I am able to about how that worked for us and how that worked for various clients, obviously keeping privacy for our clients, checklist, mindmaps, cheat sheets, a massive Q and A form, we’ve got some really, really smart people in there, it’s brand new, we’ll only be going two, three months so it’s my baby at the moment and I do spend a ridiculous amount of time answering questions then creating training materials, and they vote on we want more materials on Google’s a hot topic right now and Google shopping I have been asked to create some more stuff around so they’re on the list for early next year and that’s all that PPCsavvy.com. That, I think, and certainly my goal with that is to make the best training place for Google adwords specifically. We’ve got some very, very smart Facebook people in there but it’s really around adwords, a little bit of analytics and Google tag manager. Everything connected to adwords so that’s the main place and I just mentioned the business and what we do for a living is to run adwords accounts for people. We’re fairly picky of who we bring in but if your budget’s 10 grand a month or more and you have some data and decent website and you’re not a startup you’ve been doing this for a little while and you suspect that your adwords could be doing better then we should talk and we’ll audit your account for you, we’ll have a look through and we’ll tell you the issues that we’re seeing and that’s at websavvy.com.au and [email protected] is the best place to reach me and the team!

James: Awesome! Well there you go listeners, so those resources, Mike’s agency, his training portal, the book and all of that other good stuff. If you haven’t made enough notes of those web addresses, it will be on the episode page for Traffic Jam#59 so you can get to that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/59 where you’ll find a link to all of those resources so Mike it just leaves me to thank you, have an awesome Christmas, hope you celebrate, I hope the wife enjoys the shoes you’ve been planning to buy and all the best for the forthcoming year.

Mike: Thank you mate! Merry Christmas to you and all your listeners have a wonderful end of year, relax, go away, do nothing for a bit and let’s all go crush it in 2015!

James: Awesome! Cheers mate!

So that was Mike Rhodes from PPC Savvy for a deep dive in to Google adwords pay per click. Now as I mentioned at the top of the show, I dug deep in to my training archives and pulled out my notes from a high level marketing event where Mike presented his top adwords innovations of the time and in that presentation, he revealed several extremely powerful yet rarely utilized adwords tools. The notes are a couple of years old now but the information is as useful now as it was back then.

Now incidentally, I did travel several thousand kilometers and did pay several thousand dollars to attend that event so I am sure you’ll find some value in the notes I took. So to get your hands on those notes, go to TrafficJamCast.com/59 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode.

Remember also to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. And of course when you do that, you’ll be the first to receive the future shows as soon as they’re released.

We end this week with a Traffic Jam of course chosen by Mike Rhodes and the track he has opted for is called Hello, Bonjour and it’s by Michael Frante and Spearhead so enjoy the track and I’ll catch you back here real soon!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

This week’s Traffic Jam track, chosen by Mike Rhodes is a song called “Hello Bonjour” by Michael Franti & Spearhead.

Michael Franti is an American poet, composer and the creator and lead vocalist for Michael Franti & Spearhead, a band that blends hip hop with a variety of other styles including funk, reggae, jazz, folk, and rock.

Hello Bonjour is from the 2006 album Yell Fire!

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

So that you can take your new-found Google Adwords Retargeting expertise to even greater heights, I have this very special bonus for you.

Google Adwords Innovations

Google Adwords is a powerful tool kit. It has a mind-boggling number of options and coming to terms with all of those options would be overwhelming.

That’s why I’ve put together this special PDF report containing my top picks from a talk Mike Rhodes presented called; Google Adwords Innovations. When you download this report you will learn quickly which tools (from the many available) you should be using.

Mike’s talk was part of a $1000 event in Australia and covers Google Adwords retargeting, Google Adwords search ads and the display network.

I took a week out and travelled 12,000 KM to attend that event, so you can be sure it will be worth 5 minutes of your time to read my personal notes.

You can access them instantly by clicking download below. 

In this day and age, everybody is on social media, particularly on Facebook. A lunch doesn’t get eaten, a gym weight lifted or an aeroplane flight taken, without news of it being posted to Facebook.

Real-life conversations are happening around the content that gets posted to the internet, your success online hinges on your ability to shape those conversations.

Alex Houg and Dennis Yu have uncovered a social media engagement strategy that shapes word-of-mouth online. It ensures the right people are the saying the right things.

They use frameworks to zero in on the right message, then use ad targeting to get that message in front of the right people. Its an innovative approach to old fashioned word of mouth and you can learn all about it in this episode.

OUR GUESTS:

Alex Houg is the founder and CEO of BlitzMetrics. BlitzMetrics is an internet marketing firm that is based in Minneapolis and employs 21 people worldwide. At 20 years old, Alex has become an international speaker and writer. He has spoken at different events including Social Media Marketing World and ICON14.

Alex started as an entrepreneur at the very young age of 14 where he developed, then sold a gaming accessory website.

BlitzMetrics, his current company, works with clients such as Adidas, The Golden State Warriors, Fuddruckers, and Jack Daniels. They help connect businesses with interns, or unterns as they call them.

Dennis Yu, the Chief Architect and CTO of BlitzMetrics used to hold leadership positions with Yahoo! and American Airlines. He is now best known for Facebook marketing and advertising, expertise that has seen him featured on Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News, and CBS Evening News.

He is a contributor to InsideFacebook and AllFacebook.

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Here are some of the highlights from episode 58 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Welcome listener! You’re tuned in to another episode of Traffic Jam and of course that means you’re about to learn more strategies that will help you build and grow a consistently profitable audience online.

I am kind of excited of today’s interview because we’ve been working on setting this one up for some time and because it’s the first where we’re joined by two guests under one show. Before I introduce those two guests, I want to point you over to the episode page for Traffic Jam#58 and the URL for that is trafficjamcast.com/58 and you want to head there because there is a wealth of bonus training awaiting you and today’s guests have been very, very generous and donated a whole catalog of bonus stuff that will help you get much better results online so before you forget, head on over there now, it’s trafficjamcast.com/58 and download those bonuses.

So allow me to introduce my two guests from www.blitzmetrics.com. Alex Houg, he’s the 20 year old CEO of BlitzMetrics, an internet marketing firm with the difference from Minneapolis. Alex is a writer and speaker and has presented at Social Media Marketing World, iCon14, PubCon, and many others and he’s a regular contributor to Inside Facebook and Social Fresh.

Dennis Yu, he’s the CTO of BlitzMetrics and he’s a recognized lecturer in Facebook marketing, having been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TechCrunch and many others. He’s also an author at Inside Facebook and All Facebook as well.

I am going to allow them to explain exactly what they are up to in BlitzMetrics in the interview so without any further ado, let’s hand over to Alex Houg and Dennis Yu from BlitzMetrics.

James: So hey there listeners! Welcome back to the interview section of Traffic Jam episode#58 and we’ve got a first today – an interview double header so joining me we’ve got Alex Houg and Dennis Yu. Guys, how are you doing?

Alex: We’re doing very well, thank you so much for having us James.

James: Well, it’s going to be a blast. Let’s open up by talking a little bit about www.blitzmetrics.com, that’s the company that you’re both involved with which is some pretty interesting stuff for agencies and interns so I guess as a way of introduction for both of you, tell us a little bit about www.blitzmetrics.com and what each of you get up to there.

Alex: BlitzMetrics is created and founded to solve two fundamental problems. One, businesses and brands moving from traditional marketing in to digital and then on the second part, for young students and young adults to be able to get jobs and opportunities and work in their passion area. It is called Portege because it is like going from one body of water to another; it’s a transition phase and that’s both true for businesses and for students and we do this by connecting them and create something that’s economically viable for the businesses and then allow students to get a hands on experience as long as they’re qualified through their education program.

Dennis: So it’s about connecting the students and the universities we’re partners or the agencies with different businesses and when you connect these guys together, you need a process and that’s something that doesn’t happen in the school system so folks listening to the Traffic Jam podcast, imagine there are a lot of folks who are super pro at PC and email and generating traffic looking at conversion rates. But how do you scale that further right? You’ve got to develop in-house staff and buy only so much software so my role as the CTO is building the software that helps connect these pieces, but we are not an agency, we are not to take away clients, we’re actually here to produce clients and produce staff for agencies and these other folks, we are trying to help them so working with guys like you James is great because we get to put our education out there.

James: Nice! What type of agencies and businesses are you working with, with this platform?

Alex: We work with some big brands all the way to small businesses with small packages. Some of our bigger clients are like Brown Foreman, they’re a company of Jack Daniels, Golden State Warriors, and big brands like that.

Dennis: So it’s not necessarily that verticals because what we do is a horizontal play of traffic optimization. Some people might call it Yield Management and if you’re in an agency that is very concerned about having clear goals for cost per conversion, cost per lead and content management, not just social media nonsense or PR, there is nothing wrong with that but that’s just something different because you focus on numeric based optimization and you see where we get in to so we’ll talk later about the kinds of techniques that are working on Facebook with Google remarketing and combining other sort of things together in what we call plumbing but the overall theme is you’ve got to combine these ingredients in such a way that it drives more yield out of leads, phone calls, sales, ROIs, shopping cart behavior – this kind of thing and it is amazing how easy it is not to do it with native tools that are coming out of Facebook and Google so I think to a lot of the folks, listen in and see that the things that were very difficult a year ago when you handle natively, you’re going to get out of DSPs and 3rd party remarketing platforms and you’re going to integrate everything down across various tools, there’s a lot of the technology but you’re going to find that the manual ad creation and a lot of the things were a real headache targeting is now being handled by the platforms.

James: Neat! Well I think this is an appropriate point to get stuck in to the meaty stuff of the interview and I know you guys have been working on something very interesting stuff recently, one of those things you mentioned to me Dennis was something you code named Triangles, so I am all ears when it comes to new and innovative stuff so perhaps you’d like to sort of lift the lid on what you’ve got going on there and sort of explain what this new concept is all about so here’s the floor, what’s triangle all about?

Dennis: So a triangle is the strongest geometric structure. It’s the foundation of bridges, you see this in nature, and executives like to use this kind of thing too and you can even go further and say, depending on how religious you are, but think of this, things change so much in a minute in marketing and we feel like we’re breathless running from fad to fad, this technique, that technique, especially those in affiliate marketing, there are some underlying, everlasting concepts that will always be true no matter what is going on, example, iAds just launched and we know that Tumblr just launched app install and there are some new things with Twitter in the way you can tie together your applications and platforms and logins and different mobile marketing frameworks, all of these things appear to be very confusing as potential users of traffic to optimize against which you are already doing with Facebook, Google, Email, SEO and all that kinds of stuff, so when you have, I am going to go through five or six of the first triangle formats and I’ll go through quickly, but you’ll see that these principles help you scale everything else that you already have taking what’s working and making it better, taking what sucks and cutting it. The basic principle of optimization. The first one is audience engagement conversion. That’s a three-part funnel. Top, middle, bottom funnel, separate your goals in to these different areas. Second one is goals content targeting. You choose what the goals are, cost per conversion, ROIs, content, you have the content to support that for each of those areas targeting. You have the audiences, remarketing audiences website and customizing email, targets based on workplace targeting, targets you drive traffic from, keywords that rank in Google. When you combine goals, content and targeting, you have a triangle. When you combine metrics, analysis, action, which is the process of iteration, looking what’s going on, why did it change, therefore what action I am going to take, right? Metrics, analysis, action. You have another three parts. To the students, we have learn, do and teach. First you have to learn how to do it, you then have to practice it, then you have to be so good you can teach other people how – this is where the school system breaks down because you learn in A levels if you’re in Europe or in the United States you get an A like you’ve mastered it because you’ve been able to answer a multiple choice test, but can you really do it? Right? Going from learning to doing and then doing to teaching means you have to manage a staff, so if you are a small business owner, or if you are managing an agency, probably your biggest headache is consistency from other people who are not doing the level of work that you have because your expertise, because you care and they’re just an employee they’re not doing the level of work that you have, because of all these different reasons, how do you tie all these things together? And there’s a series of these frameworks that we’re putting out there and all the content actually flows back in to those frameworks, all the way down to how do you optimize Google display network for remarketing. That falls in to these frameworks. So it is not just an idea. Each of the ideas breaks down in to subsets and goes all the way down so you can troubleshoot what is going on with your campaigns. If your margins are down, your profits are down, then is it because your revenue is down or your cost is up? Can you figure out where it is coming from? Is it because your cost per click is up or your conversion rate is down? Is it because it is coming from Google? Is it because of seasonality? Is it because if you trace it down to cost per click, is it because your quality score changed? Is that because of your landing page? Maybe you changed your bids too often? Maybe a competitor came in. so if you are looking at your traffic at an overall framework you can go all the way down this logic tree to figure out where something has changed and this knowledge is independent of how well you know power editor on Facebook, or using adwords editor in Google or all sorts of little techniques that – we’ve heard all kinds of techniques, these frameworks we believe are timeless and this is what people need to be thinking more about and less about the next thing they need to jump on because if they miss this one thing they are going to miss the opportunity that is that we have spent millions of dollars even in the last few weeks, we have one client that is spending almost $400,000 a day on Facebook ads and we are applying the same techniques. Even though we are seeing stuff from Facebook we have daily calls with Facebook and Google. A lot of people can’t even get a note or whatever and we are telling you, even though there is a bunch of stuff we have not seen before in the ways that both of those guys are moving in to mobile and things that we can talk about here, it still is more important to focus on these frameworks. I don’t care if you are a small business owner, I don’t care if you are spending a million bucks a day on Google, and you still need to get this basics.

James: Yeah, it’s all about the fundamentals, right? As business owners, as marketers, we’re quite ready to jump on the new and latest thing but it really comes back down to the basics. I can see Dennis right away that you’re very much a systems and frameworks guy, seems to be a very analytical brain that you’ve got going on there, would that be right?

Dennis: I ran analytics for Yahoo back in the day. I’m Asian and usually Chinese people are better in Math, but I would not put it past Alex either because he’s the founder and he’s the one driving the vision here, I’m just the techie.

James: Yeah, so have you been influential in the development of these frameworks Alex?

Alex: In many ways because my vision going back to what we had explained earlier is I believe education should be free and we want this to be available to young people, young adults, young students so that they can then apply this and learn this and overall this then translate to business results for the brands that work with us so yes, of course my hand is definitely in all of these little frameworks that we’ve created.

Dennis: You might see James on inside Facebook or it could even be larger outlets like USA Today or Times or places like that. We are putting out these examples, not just consulting things, this is first hand data with our step by step, here’s how we did it for the Golden State Warriors, here’s how Jack Daniels did this to increase sales, here’s how we’re selling more tickets or here’s how we’re getting more conversions with the screenshots. You know how those affiliates who breaths this stuff and they say oh, I have five or six secrets and now you have to register and give us all this money. We’re putting that stuff out there because we practice what we preach in this respect and this is why we’re sharing it. We want to talk about specific techniques, there’s no BS to sell people in to a product, right? We’re all tired of that!

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well I’m going to make sure that we’ve got some links to resource in the show notes because these are certainly interesting concepts that I know our listeners would want to go and find out a little bit about so we’ll share that offline after we finish speaking, we’ll make sure we plug those in to the show notes section for this podcast. I want to continue straight along the jugular for a question around another little secret that you both sort of hinted out before we started recording and that’s the strategy you’re using to connect with influencers using only a $1 a day in Facebook ads, what’s that all about?

Alex: Our technique for reaching media influencers as you’ve seen where we’ve been featured in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, we target media influencers by our favorite technique which is workplace and job title targets. And for a $1 a day you can hit this core influencer of the inside of the media or inside of your industry, you can then target these people for a dollar a day and hit a few hundred people

Dennis: So for example, you may have seen the article on USA Today where they reached out to Alex and say, hey, it looks like the Ice bucket challenge and all these crazy videos and stuff where people are tagging each other is way more popular in Facebook than Ferguson with all the riding going on, now why is that and what is the data behind it? Anecdotally, different people are seeing different things. African Americans may be seeing more Ferguson and different sets of people may be seeing more about Ice Bucket. So we gave them research about that. Now the way they got that was that they saw something that we were quoted in the LA Times. How did they see that? Well, we did workplace targeting. So anytime you have something good and you’re going to have to wrap your head around this one because everyone else falls down on this, you are promoting everyone else’s content. But why pay $1 a day to promote someone else’s content? I want to drive them in to my blog, right? No! You want to drive them to the highest authority thing which is usually not yours. So we will drive people who work for the Wall Street Journal, who’ll work for the LA Times, who will work for The Chronicle, or MPR or whatever, we will drive them to an article where the LA Times is using our research. And when this USA Today thing goes out, guess what? We recycle that back in to the network and then we keep loading it on, and this cycle builds power. You see? Because when you see that, we’re all internet marketers here, let’s pretend that you’re a journalist for a moment because you might over assume the knowledge level of the people that you are working with, right? And they see this article from USA Today, they click through it, they see all that stuff and guess who they think puts it out there? So for me it’s PR really. And a lot of internet marketers as well, they can’t write the content necessary to generate this. They are so focused on the immediate conversion that they forget that this is actually the most powerful concept in internet marketing is word of mouth marketing where a lot of people talk about you. It is the ultimate medium that has nothing to do with changing the bullets of your landing page copy or making the button green and bigger – that has nothing to do with that. Before there was the internet it was word of mouth and this is how you stimulated that way and that has been our favorite technique for years. You never fail!

James: Yeah this is nice and it is self-perpetuating. I’m sure as soon as these journalists pick up this piece of content then you get those media mentions which then in turn drives organic links back to your site which then drives search results which then increases traffic and this thing can just roll on and roll on, hey?

Dennis: Email sign ups and leads and word of mouth when people are talking about you and ways they’re not even track-able. Remember we talked about frameworks? The first one, goals, content, marketing? The first one, goals – I want to be known for being the best in Facebook optimization for example. I want to be known as the guy who knows how to generate leads for car dealerships. Whatever the goal is, is you define it with metrics. Content, am I producing the content that supports that? You can call it SEO, you can call it content marketing, you can call it social marketing, PR, it’s all the same thing. You have the content that supports that goal. Targeting – do you have that audience? Is it your own list? Is it someone else’s list? Is it using workplace targeting like Alex taught us? You see that as an application of one of the frameworks goal-content-targeting.

James: Yeah, absolutely! And I think I read Alex somewhere, perhaps on an inside Facebook post that you’ve written that actually who you engage with on Facebook influences who you can target with your ads and I think the example was a workplace placement ad that you’d set up in this regard, is that still the case?

Alex: Yeah, definitely!

Dennis: And you’ll definitely be able to do that going back to the core of hitting the media influencers but if you fail on any of those parts, you’re not clear on the goal – oh, I want to be known as an internet marketer – sorry, not good enough, not niche enough. Content, your content sucks because you’re self-promoting and because you don’t have any media examples of samples of expertise, sorry you fail. Targeting – I want to target everyone digital because I’ve got my get rich quick thing, sorry you fail. You must have all three.

James: Well, I think last time we had scheduled to have this interview I think Alex you had just been presenting at Pub Con in Las Vegas where I believe you were sharing a case study of a photography business that went pretty much from ground zero to six figures likely at least within this year, sounds like a pretty inspiring story, certainly one that resonates with me because I took had some pretty good success growing a small photography business. What’s that story and what can we learn from it?

Alex: So that was on one of the panels that I was on but there are many examples that I could share with you for growing small businesses. Here is the thing, when you are a small business and I know a lot of us are self-made entrepreneurs who kind of make stuff happen. We don’t have the money that the NBA or Rosetta stone or those guys have. We look at small businesses who are doing it and then how it scales out. So for example, Infusion Soft serves fifty thousand small businesses. Now we have helped them with their lead gen so we’re a little biased but we’ve taken a number of their customers. For example, one of them is Paul Sohal and he sells a little video service where you can send video emails. Well guess what? If he knows that his audience are people who are already using Infusion Soft and Mail Chimp, and Hub Spot and guys like that, and this is something that already works well with that service, then it’s a matter of simply marketing and spending a couple of bucks a day and so we present that at Pub Con as well as the Infusion Soft. Kelly Householder he has a shop where he sells digital I think D-I-Y welding is the name of his little side business and you pay $10 and you download one of these welding plans, and guess what, he is targeting all of these people who are commercial welders, all the people who like to weld in their garage during weekends and you can build a little dune buggy, you can build a table, you can build whatever or a tricycle for your kid and it’s simply having that content, making sure that it ties with the thing that you stand for and narrowing it down, just like we talked about choosing a niche. You do that with any kind of marketing and then targeting. And targeting has been probably the thing that people had been most amused and excited about in terms of what you get out of social data but it is actually the easiest part. The most difficult part is always going back to choosing the right thing and that piece of content against it. And so a lot of folks come to us all the time thinking that they’ve seen things that we’ve done for very small businesses and we cannot work magic, we cannot make chicken salad out of chicken shitake because you must start with legitimate credible expertise in a particular area you are passionate about because you want to make money but you really want to make things happen.

Dennis: Gary Leeland, he loves softballs and he goes and records videos of softballs and he targets the parents of softball players. He targets adult softball players and amplify to these people so they can start engaging to this content which goes back to his goals; I want to be able to get more people to watch his podcast or I want more people coming in to get his training programs. Okay. Now is he creating content? Absolutely! He goes and he records videos, he interviews people in the softball arena of sports and then he just amplifies to the people that would really enjoy that and that’s going back to what I was saying just a few moments ago each amplifies to the people that would really enjoy that and that’s going back to what I was saying a few moments ago like the parents of softball players, the adult softball players, people that are in college playing softball and just sharing that across the coaches, the college scouts, he amplifies to those people and it goes back to the core of what we’re saying. It doesn’t even cost that much to do it for a few dollars a day and it. And he has a lot of reach and he would look at other guys like Jacob Spatchnik, he is a San Diego immigration attorney, he’s the number 1 attorney in Facebook. #1 in terms of Fanbase and #1 in terms of interactions, and guess what it drives business. It drives people to him when they’ve got a problem with their visa or whatever because whenever something dumb happens, when Obama says something that pisses people on the immigration law, he’s the first to come out and say something like that. He’ll put a video together, interview other people, and if you have a relative in India and you are trying to come over on an H1B Visa, this is the guy, you’ve seen his content, everyone’s talking about it, they’re forwarding articles from this guy and not even selling his services. But he uses ads in such a way that he gets good media pick up so he’s quoted in the major newspapers as an authority on immigration rules, I think he probably is one but this is the whole behind the scenes thing. The same thing with like Marie Smith, right? We did a class with her last year, the Facebook marketing success thing to tell you the same principle and it goes back amplified because you know of Marie Smith and her audience we’re thinking on the small business side and just sharing her content goes back to these frameworks which you are actually included in that program as well in the Facebook marketing success system.

James: Yeah, and we’ve gotten in a really exciting time for a small business for content marketers because it’s so easy if we put to mind to produce content now that the platforms are available like Facebook we can really precisely hit our exact target audience and as you said it doesn’t have to cost very much at all, right?

Dennis: Yeah, what makes it even more exciting is having your users and your true core fans actually create the content for you because they are already using your product, they are already using your services, why not leverage what they’re already saying and then just amplify it to the people that are like-minded to the people who are sharing definitely.

James: Absolutely! Good. Let’s stick with Facebook for just a moment, what are your suggestions or strategies for setting up a campaign, what types of campaign should a business potentially have in play?

Alex: Again, our framework’s social media engagement strategy ties directly to our goals, content and targeting so one, you have to start at the very top understanding the business, what are you trying to drive to? Are you trying to directly sell or are you trying to get people to your email list or are you trying to get people to your videos? What’s the goal? Then, are you creating content that supports it and are you targeting the right people which will then amplify that to it and showing to your campaigns in a way where you’re building a funnel, you’re building up your audience, you’re building your mass up the top which then starts to trickle down from audience in to engagement. Okay, you’ve got this people in on your website, you’ve got these people in on Google and you’ve cookied them, they’ve joined your email list, what are you then doing to move them down the funnel in to engagement? Start amplifying your content to them and then as you’re engaging in the middle of the funnel and continue to trickle down in to the bottom of the funnel which is conversion and that is driving, going back in tandem of what your business goal is and then driving those people to it so that’s how we organize our campaigns, it’s audience engagement, conversion and you divide them out based on what your objective is, if you are trying to build an audience then you would load it to the top of the funnel or if you are trying to drive conversions and you have adequate amount of engagement and mass at the top then you can put more in to the bottom of the funnel so it’s based on the business goals and based on where you are coordinating with your other marketing efforts to.

Dennis: Let me tell you something that has significantly shifted our thinking that I think is going to really throw a curveball to people that are marketing on Facebook, if you asked us a year ago, how do you build campaigns? We would have given you a step by step process on how you do it and how you optimize and how you tweak these things and how you bid the right way and what placements are working and if you should build a mobile app and all of those kinds of technical maneuvers but if you ask us today, we’ll tell you that stuff almost doesn’t matter because the network themselves, Facebook in particular, they are doing the optimization for you so when you come in and you create a Facebook ad, guess what, there are 13 possible business objectives which 10 you can see and there’s a few that we can see but other people can’t see that relate to website clicks, video views, conversions, registrations, RSVP, all of these kinds of things and you choose that goal. You don’t even have to target anymore and I never thought I would ever say this, we’ve done this and tested this across dozens of clients. We used to pride ourselves in being able to upload lots and lots of custom combinations of all sorts of targeting. Think about all the crazy kinds of targeting that you do, we used to pride ourselves on that. We found that just by – like some of these guys literally targeting the United States, 18+, median of the market is 25+, people who are high income whatever, we find that over time, the algorithm beats us. So you don’t have to spend time tweaking your ads and moving stuff around and all that and so the time that you used to spend diddling around on that kind of stuff and learning all the power editor stuff, okay fine, there’s a few things that you can do in the power editor that you can’t do in the accounts manager, some weenies and we can argue over that but let’s not forget the most important thing. Because Facebook is doing the optimization that squeezes out all the tools out of the way by the way, then that gives you time to focus on what really matters which is the content. So if an ad is not performing it’s not because of the bid, it’s not the time of the day, there’s day parting, the delivery which we notice a lot of things like that, what matters is your content probably sucks. And the networks can’t do that part for you unfortunately so 2015 is about doing less ad tweaking and more analytics and framework based stuff on your content. Is it aligned with your audiences? Are you segmenting to create a journey for each of the different customer types and along the way delivering them content so that they get an automation through email? It’s the same as marketing animation through social and search, it’s all the same thing. Now the networks have made themselves generic delivery channels so you can focus on the framework items. And that is really to screw over people that consider themselves adwords experts or Facebook ads experts or whatever kind of tool specific dinosaurs, single player, you’re about to die kind of expert.

James: Yeah, well, I am just a little bit worried now what I am going to line up for guests in forthcoming shows, there might not be anyone left, right?

Dennis: Bring the folks in the networks themselves because really, you’re asking us about Facebook ads, don’t you think that some of the folks at Facebook would be better qualified or perceived to be better qualified than anyone else?

James: Yeah, absolutely! But it certainly loops back to what you were saying about really understanding your market, getting your messaging right and standing for something that is actually going to make a difference and stand you out from the pack. It really isn’t about the difference between cost per click prices and slight click through rate difference from one ad to another. That stuff doesn’t really matter it’s the bigger picture stuff we’ve got to get focused on.

Alex: And this is from the technical optimizers telling you that the technical optimization’s being handled by the networks. Unfortunately there’s going to be fewer e-books to be sold around this and the vendors in this place and many of them will die. That’s unfortunate but that’s exactly in the vision of what BlitzMetrics is about, it’s putting that education out there because if you look James at the end front of this game, eventually the vendors will have to put the education out there. That is network specific. Do you think anybody is going to make better education google adwords than google themselves? Facebook tried to do this in the last two or three years by partnering with these agencies who have done a terrible job of educating clients and then they turn around blaming Facebook when things don’t work. Well, Facebook had to take that back and that’s pissed off a lot of people but it’s in their financial interest to produce the education. The only one who can keep up with Facebook’s changes are Facebook people themselves and the same with Google. (28:45) and that is a fact. People like to argue with it about that because their livelihood is dependent on selling e-books on that sort of thing and continuing to sell weight loss, the new weight loss diet, that’s what these internet marketer crowd of people like to do. But they are going to go away in the same way that they are going to go away. We’re all legitimate content marketers who have to actually know something about that for the client, all that stuff is going to go in house so if you are listening to the Traffic Jam podcast and you are a struggling small business owner, you have expertise in a certain area and if you hire a vendor or buy a piece of software and those people aren’t die-hard fans or customers of what you do, you’re going to fail.

James: Yeah interesting stuff. Well, let’s get close to rounding out gentlemen, we’ve talked a lot about Facebook and I don’t want to just leave it at Facebook itself, what are the channels that you guys are playing around and finding really great results with for those people that you’re working with?

Alex: Going beyond just Facebook because of course James you know us for working on Facebook ads but we work across all channels, whether that’s Google, whether that’s Twitter, whether that’s Facebook and it’s tying all of the content and all of the sequences together because at the core it’s about marketing automation so if you have a user in a particular step along the way in the funnel, they should be having consistent messaging in email, on Facebook, in Google and you can do that based on a cookie, based on a user ID, based on an email address and hitting them so they’re moving along the funnel, they joined your email list, are you then hitting them inside of Facebook? Are they seeing your stuff in Google? So now they’ve made a purchase, what are you doing to cross sell or upsell? What are you doing based on where they are in the funnel and at the core comes back to marketing automation across all channels.

Dennis: In other words you have to think about sequences for the customer as opposed to channel specific level silos. Bigger companies struggle with this so if you’re fighting against a bigger company, you have the advantage because they are organized by channel unfortunately so what that means is you got a customer and they abandoned your shopping cart or they didn’t fill out the form or whatever it is then guess what, of course you would use Facebook for remarketing. You do it natively instead of FB ads but why wouldn’t you drop the Google pixel the same time like Alex says? Why wouldn’t you drop in the Twitter remarketing? Why wouldn’t you have all of your remarketing pixels working together at the same time? Why wouldn’t you use Google tag manager to drive all of those pixels at the same time? That’s an example of a web audience. But what about email audiences because email is another way to deliver a message. So is phone and direct mail. So if you tie together these sequences it really doesn’t matter what channel they come through because if they have a preference of clicking on email, send it in email. If they have a preference for in-app notification, send it to the app notification and cut off the email bit. If you are independent of channel, then you can design the customer experience as distribution independent of any channel specific thing. Channel specific marketing will die in the next couple of years.

James: Yeah. Well I would certainly vouch for that and I think that’s an awesome point to end on guys, I know you have some interesting material around these topics, you’ve got a checklist which I have seen on your site which I think would be an interesting read for our listeners so I will make sure that a direct link to that is included in the show notes and of course the main website itself but where else do our listeners connect with you each individually over the web?

Alex: You can email me at alex@blitzmetrics.com you can reach me on Facebook, Facebook.com/alexhoug or Twitter just @AlexHoug.

Dennis: Same with me, [email protected], we’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and all the typical places. Probably better to do just a google search for Alex Houg, that’s the best way.

James: Yeah, you both got pretty unique names so I am sure you’ll be popping right up the top of the search results. Anyway, awesome, we’ll include it in the show notes, the links to both of you and the website so that will be included for you the listener in the episode show notes which is TrafficJamCast.com/58 so thank you to both guys been an absolute pleasure having you on the show I am glad that we could put this together and also it is a first double header here on Traffic Jam so thank you to you both.

Alex: Yeah thank you so much for having us James, it’s been a blast.

Dennis: Two for one, thanks!

So there you have it that was Alex Houg and Dennis You from BlitzMetrics and that is almost another episode of Traffic Jam. Now remember that the kind guys at BlitzMetrics have provided a little bonus training as an add on to the information shared on this interview and you can download all of that for free by going to TrafficJamCast.com/58 and there is a whole lot of goodies here and I would recommend you go grab a lot.

Also as a reminder, you can quickly and easily subscribe to the show by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher and whilst you’re there please leave a review for the show it really is the best way that you can support the Traffic Jam podcast.

We end the show this week with a track chosen by Dennis and Alex at BlitzMetrics They’ve gone for Lords, The Royals but it’s the puddles, the clown version – yeah, Sad Clown with the Golden Voice version. I hope you enjoy the track and as always I look forward to seeing you back here real soon!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

This week’s Traffic Jam track is a song called Royals. Dennis Yu and Alex Houg have chosen a version by the Sad Clown with a Golden Voice. 

The track was originally recorded by singer Lorde for her debut album, The Love Club EP, which was released in August 2012. Puddles, a 7 foot clown with a sad face and a golden voice, along with the band Postmodern Jukebox recorded their cover version in 2013.

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

To help you market yourself even better online, the kind team at BlitzMetrics have put together some special bonus training, just for you.

This unique bonus bundle includes…

Click to download and get instant access to this special bonus content.  

The dream of not having to get tied to a desk to manage your business, not having to spend long hours in a day and not having to worry about your bottomline – the lifestyle entrepreneur has it all. But what does it take to be able to do exactly like that yet earn enough money to grow your business?

Perhaps a huge following you will purchase whatever product you put out, perhaps that one ultra in demand solution to everyone’s problem. You just need to figure out how to get your message across so people say Wow! when they hear about you.

Increase your traffic. Build your audience. Be a lifestyle entrepreneur.

OUR GUEST:

Yaro Starak is the writer and founder of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, a blog devoted to helping aspiring entrepreneurs make money through online business.

Before he started teaching others how to sell digital products and services through blogging, Yaro tried several internet businesses. Some of those are a Magic: The Gathering card game trading forum and e-commerce site, BetterEdit (a proofreading company), sites on miniature motorcycles, and much more.

After trying his hand at several online business models Yaro plumped on information publishing. He now generates a healthy income selling eBooks and courses to help others do the same. He works only a few hours a day because he has automated systems in place to attract and convert traffic.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 57 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Yaro Starak quote from the show:

You can also get Yaro’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Deliver your message so people say wow! Otherwise you won’t get what you want.” ~ @yarostarak
Click To Tweet

To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey there listener! Welcome to episode#57 of Traffic Jam. I’m your host James Reynolds and you’re tuned in to the podcast that helps you increase your website traffic and build a profitable business online.

Now before we get stuck in to today’s content, I want to acknowledge Tabmandoo from the USA for leaving a five star review for the show. It reads amazing, this is one of the best digital marketing resource. Each episode is concise and actionable tips, not bewildering or intimidating. You can get something from every single show. James occasionally answers uhm, yes, great but he has significantly helped my career so I am indebted to him. Keep it up! Thanks Tabmandoo, I am certainly going to keep an ear out for my uhms and errs from now on. Anyway, I am chaffed this show is helping you.

If Traffic Jam is helping you jump ahead in your career or business, please leave a review for the show on iTunes or Stitcher radio. That really is the best way you can show your appreciation to everyone who puts these shows together. It’s not just me, but it’s my show editor, it’s my illustrator and of course the awesome guest we bring together for each episode.

Before we get to today’s guest, I want to let you know that there is a bonus training accompanying this episode titled Six Easy Ways to Build Traffic to Your Blog and you can get your hands on that training by going to TrafficJamCast.com/57 where you’ll also find the show notes for this episode too!

If that wasn’t a big enough clue, today’s topic is of course blog traffic – how to get more of it, how to convert more of it and all whilst working less. Yaro Starak has been blogging for 10 years now and during that time he’s tried a number of blogging business models including affiliate marketing, adspace sales and information publishing. The one where he had most success was the publishing medium where he spent the last several years helping others turn their expertise in to a profitable online business. Today Yaro helps people set up their own blog sales funnel, a system that combines blogging with email marketing to build a platform to sell your own digital training products online. Yaro is going to be sharing on this episode how he drives more traffic from conversion through his blog using the blog sales funnel so listen in and enjoy.

So here we go, it’s Traffic Jam episode#57 and this is Yaro Starak.

James: So hey there listener! Welcome back. You’re listening in to episode#57 of Traffic Jam and of course this is the interview section and today we are joined by Yaro Starak. Yaro, how are you doing?

Yaro: I am great James! Thanks for having me.

James: Stoked to have you on the podcast and as always. I don’t normally give my guest the opportunity to intro themselves, I normally do that for them, but since you’ve got a website called entrepreneurs-journey.com, I thought it might be quite nice of you to give us a bit of an overview of your business and tell us about the journey of how it came to be and what it is today.

Yaro: You know, the longer I live, the longer the story is, James so I will try and give you the short version. I went online in ’98 as part of my university studies, a good old fashioned dial up internet account and consequently fell in love with the internet. My other passion at that time was a collectible card game called Magic the Gathering, which some of your more geeky audience, probably males, will be familiar with – it’s a competitive card game I used to play in high school. It is a bit like poker in a sense that there is a tournament series where you can make big money, not big money on the poker scale but certainly you can make a living from it. My first website was about that game, I had a little e-commerce shop selling cards, and I had a forum and I made a bit of money so it was my first experience online. The dotcom boom was happening at that time and then double burst so I was exposed to all that experiences, I loved that stuff and wanted to do something bigger so I started a proofreading company which is my next business. That’s the one I took over or should I say the one I focused on a 100% after graduation and it became a full time income source, it was a great lifestyle business. I basically forwarded emails from editors and international students who were writing essays at English speaking universities and I acted as a middle man connecting those two groups and it was an hour or two a day of work, made a full time income, had a lot of spare time and consequently had time to think and sort of try other things as an entrepreneur. I was thinking of new ideas and eventually in 2004, someone said, you should start a blog, it is great for traffic, Google was ascending at that time a the big search engine so I thought you know what, I don’t know what blogs are but I will give it a go and see if I can learn it. Bearing in mind, 2004, ten years ago, and I installed a proofreading blog essentially on this proofreading business, really boring subject, crashed and learned within three months because I just didn’t care about that topic but I noticed I liked this blogging thing in particular telling stories about being an entrepreneur and about my business. So that’s when I registered www.entrepreneurs-journey.com January 2005, meant to be a hobby, I was going to tell the story of my previous 7-8 years of having the card business, having the proofreading company and all the other things I had done as an entrepreneur and also to continue to chronicle. It was truly an entrepreneur’s journey and what blogging is all about, I was journaling my story, my experiences, my thoughts, and surprisingly, an audience showed up! Maybe the benefit of good timing there, I did happen to jump on the blogging bandwagon at the start and my blog eventually became as big an earner as my proofreading company but I was loving blogging so I actually sold off everything else to focus a hundred percent on blogging which then eventually led me to, I guess you might call it traditional internet marketing, direct response marketing, email marketing, which I combined with blogging and start becoming essentially an information marketer so I started creating information products, courses, e-guides, group coaching, teaching other people how to make money with blogs, in particular, following that sort of lifestyle model, trying not to create a business that’s so big that you have no free time, getting high leverage but finding the sweet spot where you are enjoying what you are doing and also making good money and that is pretty much what I do today although I am sort of veering more towards pure sales funnel information publishing where I used to do more advertising and affiliate marketing and today it is really all about a blog combined with an email marketing sales funnel selling digital products and services and that pretty much brings you up to where I am today.

James: Love it! Well I’m glad you painted that picture because it does give an overview of your experience which is pretty broad as we were saying before we hit the record button and I am also glad that you touched on email on the end because it seems to me that you kind of built this lifestyle business sort on a pretty cool group, a cool audience and a very dedicated email list following, would that be the case? And if so what tips have you got for developing and nurturing an email list?

Yaro: Yeah it’s definitely a symbiosis of the blog and the email list. The email list is by far the most powerful direct response tool so it is certainly where the money comes from but it wouldn’t exist without the blog. I would really see it as like a linear flow, the blog is attracting the attention, I get my traffic from the blog. It is coming from search engine, it is coming from social, hitting the blog, joining the email list, the email list is more focused, and it’s giving dedicated information to solve a specific problem and I segment my lists, I have various email courses and various reports that lead in to relevant products. It is linear, I do like that, I love the fact that you can write about a specific project in a blog post or probably in a video or a in a podcast which then connects with the specific email sequence which you give away more targeted information which then leads to a logical next step if they want to continue working with you to buy your product and that’s what funnels is all about, that’s the front end of it and that can be quite automated. My dream has always been and I have been working towards this for a long time actually trying to find a model that works, a situation where you can write once a week because you want to. You enjoy blogging, you enjoy podcasting, you enjoy video, whatever it is you enjoy exploring content ideas and then you have these email content machines behind the blog where people can opt in at any point in time, they get this evergreen content that teaches them something and then they buy your products and also they go on to buy higher priced products so you can have multiple six to seven figure business that is quite elegant, quite simple, not necessarily requiring any employees and you still get to do the fun part which is jump on podcasts like this to teach people, speak onstage if you want to, just sit in cafes and write blog posts which is what I spent doing in my life in the last 10 years, and it takes a bit of setting it up. That’s the challenge here. All the content, all the emails you have to write, the free information you give away and not to mention the products you create as well so there’s things that you can do to speed up that process but that’s probably where I spend most of my time right now – product creation and email writing.

James: Yeah, got it. I mean it’s all that big, heavy lifting at the start that has that payoff over and over again, I guess it’s that clichéd example that all these internet marketers like to speak about of making money in your sleep but it is kind of the road that you’ve gone down right? You are now an information publisher, you have the systems in place that send out emails and follow people up on auto response rules and all that stuff while you can just be kicking your feet up in the beach having a cup of coffee in a local coffee shop or digging your teeth in to some content writing that you really enjoy doing eh?

Yaro: Yeah, and we’ve all been exposed to that idea right? I remember seeing that even before I was blogging because I was running these other companies that while these are lifestyle companies, they weren’t information publishing services and I did not like the idea of selling my own creativity, that’s what I think drew me to blogging and content publishing in general because there is something lovely as a creative person, almost like an artist where you can almost get creative and get paid for your work and for your writing or for your teaching whatever it is. The challenge though is it takes a while to figure out to make this work in evergreen also in a way like you’re talking about it. I spent a lot of time doing launches in my early days of blogging and I have made most of my big success financially from launches but they were not evergreens, they come from things that I had to do a sequence of things that was manual and I had organize affiliates. It was something that I didn’t set up to be evergreen and it felt like I could do it but I was so hooked to the launch thing that I spent a couple of years just doing that and I think that was what sort of showed me why evergreen is better because doing launches you burn out, you can’t keep doing that, you can’t keep promoting to your list in the same way you can’t keep expecting affiliates to keep supporting you so I have really been studying a lot of that sales funnel business models to combine what’s good about launches but make it though so that it’s not time dependent so it’s basically launch techniques tapped in to something that hopefully fingers crossed will work next year, the year after, and it keeps helping people and to do that you have to change the way you think about content production because especially as a blogger we often spend a lot of time being news reporters or in the moment content which is not evergreen and that’s a different blogging model. I did dabble in that and I tried to cover what was current and that turned you in to a reporter which is nothing like evergreen sales for business which is essentially being a journalist and you are getting paid for having up to date content and delivering advertising which makes money from advertising so I had to change and see myself more as making content that isn’t that transient, it’s that solid value in two years’ time, that’s the shift in which you produce content and it is difficult to do in some industries; I’d hate to try and do that in for example, search engine optimization because that industry changes every week –

James: Tell me about that! We try.

Yaro: Exactly! Right?

James: It’s a challenge, yeah.

Yaro: But if you are doing something like losing weight or getting rid of acne or some of clients’ subject areas like book publishing or like a few guys who focus on sports meaning these types of subjects, they talk about the fundamentals that don’t really change and that’s nice if you are in an industry where you can do that. I have managed to do that in my space although I can see already a good example, you can feel this as well, I wrote about Google authorship as a good SEO technique a few months ago before they went ahead and killed that process and it has been one of my products and I was like, have got to go and change my product now and that is frustrating so there is definitely a mind shift here you have to make thinking evergreen.

James: Yeah absolutely! Well I’ve been wanting to ask you about that. I am glad that we have touched on it. Really you came about on this evergreen model because you’ve dabbled in advertising, you’ve done the big one, I think you have probably done a few other things in between so what are some of the pitfalls with the other way of doing it versus where you are at now and perhaps we’ll sort of fast forward from there and really talk about the mechanics of how you got your systems set up and what’s involved in producing an evergreen funnel as you’ve got right this moment?

Yaro: Well I think a lot of it ties back in to the personality types and your strengths and what you personally want to do and how you want to spend your time married with the right business model to leverage that. That’s really important so there’s the strategy and your own personal strength so there was a time where I was following all the other bloggers which was about writing lots of content to increase page views and make more money from advertising, I was selling banners basically, I also started my email list and I was trying to get as many people on to that list as I could thinking that time was going to make more sales or affiliate products whenever there are other launches to promote or even just selling things to promote an email responder or some other software tool. And that’s a model that can work. If you don’t want to create your own product that’s fine. Some people just like to review other people’s products, some people just want to report the news and not really worry about customer support, product delivery, setting up a membership area and all that sort of thing, I guess my evolution of desire, as I was always there but I sort of danced around it and try to find different ways has been a true lifestyle business. I call it three main things, it’s really just actually the father, the son and the holy spirit here but it is similar. It’s been that important to me as an entrepreneur and it has taken me my entire entrepreneurial career, you get all three of them in alignment. So those things are, number one is finding something that is obviously going to make money. That, from the early days, that was actually the first goal, you have to make money, right? And then also, beyond that, to kind of reach a point where money is not an issue so at that time when I first started I saw a thousand dollars a day, it was actually my initial goal but if I make a thousand dollars a day, I can’t spend much money but certainly that was a lot of money as a 21 year old kid. So that was my initial goal, secondarily, I noticed a lot of my entrepreneurial friends were doing long hours and people were doing startups and they had all these clients and I was thinking it was great to get all these money but if I had to spend my entire time in servitude to clients sitting in an office and dealing with all these little fires popping all the time, that’s not the life I want to live so that sort of four hour work week or a couple hours a day kind of lifestyle was what I was after and then the third thing was actually the hardest thing to get right and it was finding something that I was personally could see myself doing long term so it’s really a strength to develop and get satisfaction which often falls on the wayside because one can get too busy trying to get money first and then you try to work less because you’re doing too many hours and then finally you’re making enough money and you’re not working too many hours but do I actually want to do this for the rest of my life? Am I tapping in to something that’s a passion? So for me, I initially had this card game website, not enough money, I was passionate about it until I got in to the game, my proofreading company, good money, leveraged on time, it took an hour a day for me to manage it but I did not really care, I was not doing anything that had tapped in to my inherent strength. Blogging initially looked good, I had something I cared about, I discovered I enjoyed writing and wanted to be a content creator, they looked like there was flaws in the sense that it might be hard to get leverage because if you have to sit there and write blog posts every day and do promotions and things like that to keep the money coming in. it felt like eventually a job, it could turn in to one of the 12-hour day situations and so I had to find a better model, there was a higher investment, higher margin and that’s when things like the 80/20 rule for me became really important. That’s when I started studying email marketing and I started looking at how much leverage was there compared to traditional blogging and that allowed me to get the three rights. So once I had these sort of business funnel sales with the blog, the blogging taps in to the thing I enjoy, the money is good, and because you are using a sales funnel, you are getting more time and once it’s set up and running, it’s really 80/20. You focus on 20% of things to give you 100% of the value. It’s not really 80/20 to be honest, it’s probably 20/100 and that’s work but I spent 15 years as an entrepreneur to find that combination that I run with today.

James: Yeah it does take some fine tuning doesn’t it but that’s the journey right? That’s the second part of your domain name coming through in your story. So it seems now it’s really an information business that you’ve got. You’re selling paid infoproducts I think and you’ve got a community on the backend and you’ve got this evergreen funnel that’s driving it all. Tell us a little bit about what you are promoting and how this blog sales funnel as you describe it is set up.

Yaro: Well it is a traditional sales funnel so there is nothing different from even before the internet where you have low priced front end products and then midrange products and higher priced products and you don’t have as many people buying high priced products and your business is really run off that small group who buy everything you produce. The difference with what I have done is that I have tapped on blog at the top of it so it’s where the funnel begins, it’s where I track my audience, and it’s where I build trust and credibility. So in principle, it is quite simple. You write the blog, you share information, you market the blog, you have to get out there and build your audience, and then you make offers through opt in lists and that sort of thing. You can download a free report to get information on how to solve your problems, you can learn how to do something, then as an email sequence, most of my sequence at the moment are between two weeks and a month although I have plans to do a couple of longer ones but essentially those sequences deliver information and the beautiful thing is to deliver my blog post so I send people back to my blog post but they’re all about the one subject. So for example I’ve had a sort of a side project investing websites, I’m buying and selling websites with the money I was making from blogging as an investment strategy. I don’t do that now but there was a period of time I did that and so that was something that I felt was worth teaching as well. I knew buy and sell websites, I had some success stories to tell and I have written quite a few blog posts about it so I decided to let’s create a front end product and let’s put in an email sequence which is basically an email course that points people back to the relevant blog posts on how to buy and sell websites that have a passive income strategy that leads to selling a roundabout $150 front end product and that’s set up now automatically so you can go to my blog, you can join that email force that teach you the fundamentals of buying and selling websites as an investment strategy, if you want more information you can buy the guide and that ties in to the product on the line though if you are really serious about it and you buy a blog and you want to grow it in to something substantial, that’s when you might invest in my flagship course which is called blog mastermind. Obviously it’s a higher priced and it’s also more intensive and you spent some time with me as well and it’s that linear flow of what the funnel is about and what I love about it is, it allows you to service the people that benefit the most from you and make money doing it. The people who do buy it think that they are getting the result. They won’t buy from you if they want everything down to the intensive wires and the ones that we spend more time with them if they were really serious and really motivated in getting something in return so I think it is a great model because part of its automated, you can just keep selling these e-books and courses and people can just stay at the front but those who are serious at the right situation who are your best clients, it will find them automatically. That’s what the funnel does, it isolates the best customers and allows you to do that automatically so you do spend your time with the people who benefit most from your work and there is nothing worse than being a teacher or an information product creator teaching people who just don’t get value from your content. Anything that you can do to get the higher people to the best products you have, the better. And if it can be automated then it’s brilliant so I haven’t actually formulated my funnel and I am halfway through building the big machine. The front is finished, I am working on the middle and the back at the moment but so far it is working quite well and as I said it is the most enjoyable model that I’ve used so far and there’s not many bloggers who do it very well so I am looking forward to helping more bloggers helping more experts, coaches and trainers really use this model because I think it is the perfect model for anyone who use the opportunity – subject matter expert, or a trainer or a coach or speaker or an author because the blog is the platform, it is how they can build their email list, their content producers so they can understand blogging and then they can build up the machine behind it if they can just understand how to do effective email marketing and create great products so it is a beautiful model for those types of people.

James: Perfect! Well let’s talk about some specifics. The first question I want to ask you is around actually acquiring a subscriber. So what do you do? Do you have sort of generic offers or do you go with the model where you’ve got post specific opt ins that drive people on to the list. What are you working with?

Yaro: When I decide to begin this process, I actually looked in to my archives. I was thinking, I already was blogging for a good eight years before I decide to fully commit to this model so I look at my strengths in terms of subject matter so as I said, buying and selling websites, I already had already had following in terms of people who were searching my content in Google and reading these articles I already had. Same with things like mindset and productivity and I also had one on traffic and you know, people want to know about traffic, everyone loves the subject of traffic, I had a 90% finished e-guide on how to increase traffic to your blog that I just hadn’t released so it made sense as well to focus on that. I knew it would sell and frankly as a teacher you have to have some traffic because everyone needs it so those are the three things I have decided to test as my funnels one at a time of course and there is a lot to go in to and some upsells and backend products that I want to be available straightaway but to answer your question that’s how I did it. I identified existing needs in my audience based where they are going within my blog and then I built funnels behind that so I added specific audience, specific email sequences, free email courses, the information is of course targeted to each of those different funnels and the way I did it is essentially through content. I don’t do any paid advertising at the moment. I have done a bit before but I realized that I was underutilizing traffic that I was already getting from my blog so I want to make sure I maximize that first then they’ll go back in to paid so it’s the benefit of blogging. You do build an audience if you do good blogging, which is what I have been doing for ten years now. You build this audience, you get search results and it is targeted because each article is about a subject, it is classic long tail so every blog post can have a targeted email sequence behind it, the trick is making sure you’re picking the right ones because I could have 50 different sequences, I just can’t make them all. That’s too many email sequence written. Maybe one day if I decide to go big and hire content creators, hire email writers, hire copywriters then turn into something like Agora, the information publishing business then I can have all those funnels and that’s probably the path to becoming an 8-figure business. Not sure I’d want to do that because it would complicate things. I like simple elegance, a few core funnels, a simple blog that’s me, a few contractors running it all, but to answer your question, blog content, that’s how I get people to opt in.

James: Yeah, I got it and I think from what I have sort of read of how you set things up, one of the sort of core concepts of what you are doing is what you describe as pillar article where you create a piece of content that is evergreen, it stands the test of time and it draws organic traffic in, so I’d love to ask you a question around that and really uncover what your process is for creating this core content pieces, researching them and then promoting them from your site.

Yaro: Pillar content is something that really caught on and I was quite surprised. I wrote about that many years ago too, 2006-2007. The way I describe pillar content, it is more about outcome as much as formats. You’re going for the outcome which is a pillar outcome and the reason why we use that label is when I was first creating my blog I felt like I was creating pillars which were the substantial blog posts that answered the more pressing questions that my audience had and then the outcome is things like rush of traffic to the post so nowadays is that would actually mean a lot of social media shares, a lot of people talking about your article and getting instant attention to it and then the runoff effect down the line is that all that link building brings in search traffic every time and that is really important because it is nice to have a rush of traffic at the end of the day if you want sustained audience growth without needing to constantly produce content, you need that search traffic coming in or some way to bring in traffic from old content so the first thing to do though is actually pick formats that work to create pillars. Sadly, there is no guarantee on this, it has been a hit and miss thing, you pour your heart in to an amazing article, it doesn’t take off, and then you write something that wasn’t as big a deal and then boom! Everyone is just tearing it but you can certainly can do things to encourage the effects of a pillar and it is simple stuff, it is like using formats like breaking your content down with dot points and lists, writing pieces about definitions of the core topics in your subjects and defining them for the beginners. If you are writing about SEO, what exactly is long tail? Write a definition piece on that in your own words. Things like how to articles obviously a staple format is so teaching the steps visually. It is about creating extreme value that taps in to the actual raw needs of your audience. To make this work though, you have to know what the need of your audience is, I actually teach my students now, especially for those just getting started, spend a lot of time understanding your audience first like you have to establish true empathy and I think one of the best ways to do that is to actually be your audience. So ideally you’ve gone through the process, you’ve solved the problem that you’re now proposing to help people with, you will have true empathy because you’ve experienced it. So if you have lost 10 lbs. after having a baby and that’s what you want to help other women do, that’s true empathy. If you’ve gotten out of a $100000 within 18 months, that’s true empathy. You can help people do that and the empathy comes from knowing what it feels like. The feeling is one of the most important things. You know the situation you experienced, you know the language you used to describe your problem. It allows you to just be that much better a content creator so you can think inside all of that empathy and put it in to blog content and really solve people’s problems. I think pillar content is one of the most – the reason why it works is you’re actually giving a result before you even ask for anything in return. That’s the best form of content, Jay Abraham talks about that. His concept is pre-selling. There’s other guys like Kevin Pagan talk about the concept called moving the freeline which is essentially again increasing the value you offer up front for free and for me I love Jay’s concept of giving a result before they buy. If you do that, that’s more likely to become a piece of pillar content which in turn will get all the effects we want, the viral distribution, the incoming links, the long term search traffic which then can tap in to those email funnels so you do have to build this in a logical order and that is the area where I had to develop my knowledge and skills because no one taught this stuff to bloggers when I growing up with blogging so it is something I’ve only really got full grasp in the last two years now that I have properly been implementing it and that gives you the power to see the right order to build this in because back when I started I threw a blog post in the wall and hoped that traffic would come and then once they showed up you just sort of hope by putting advertising they’ll give you money. There is a lot of hope in there. Nowadays, you can completely flip it around and you can do research, you can set up funnels first but you can do it quickly, you can make sure that the content you produce is very targeted and hits on the paying points that your audience has from day 1, be focused be linear, solve problems and much quicker build that traction and start making that money which is something that I couldn’t do at the seat but I think you can do it now when you know how to do it.

James: Yeah, definitely and I think you touched on a very good point. You can now assure the likelihood of your success to a much greater degree because there’s tools out there that help give you that analysis right? I mean there’s various SEO tools, things like Buzz Sumo will tell you exactly what type of content in your market is actually driving results for people and if you can just see what is working within those pieces of content and adapt them to your own scenario then you’ve got a pretty strong likelihood of success yourself,, right?

Yaro: Exactly and even making the conscious choice to go find the answers to those questions, whether it is using tools like that or even having a conversation with your target audience of observing the behaviuor online, that’s one of my favorite ways to do it, just to see where the people are flowing in and what they are responding to because the answers are on the internet already. People’s behaviors are being tracked. They openly show you what they like because they share it on social media, they leave tons of comments, they buy stuff, they are pretty motivated so the answers are out there.

James: Yeah, I know you’re a big believer as we all should be in content distribution. What strategies have you got to get your content published in front of other people’s audiences?

Yaro: Well, there’s so many ways to do it, but my favorite way is to get famous. Once you’ve become a big fish in the small pond, people will automatically invite you to share your content.

James: Do we get ourselves in American Idol or what’s the story?

Yaro: Well, if that’s your market then why not but seriously the thing with any sort of marketing today, I call it getting published, to me that is what online marketing is today. Ironically enough, that’s nothing new because that’s what PR is all about since old school PR business, it’s been about getting your name and getting your content out to other platform whether it’s getting yourself interviewed in to someone’s podcast, appearing in some popular YouTube channel, getting your article written in another popular blog, someone with a large social media following circulating your content. All of this is about your content circulating other people’s platforms. My opinion and my strategy, especially if you’re new, to get that outcome, is to actually spend a lot of time on the packaging of your message. So this is where people struggle often because if you are going to get out there trying to get that effect trying to get other people to share your content and you sound just like everyone else, no one is going to pay attention to you. You’re just another person who is doing weight loss, you’re just another person who’s doing dieting or another person who’s even making money online or SEO or whatever your subject is. Unless there is something about the way you deliver your message that makes people go wow, you will not get that result and you won’t be able to start building that thing that you need which is really about traction and you know the momentum because one interview tends to lead to another one and leads to another one. Once you get successful it is easy to get more successful. What’s hard is at the start so for me the best marketing technique I have heard in a long time is one that Rich Schefren taught to me which is called counter intuitive marketing, which is simply looking at whatever the accepted practices are in your industry today and finding a way to have a counterintuitive message to present to people. His example is quite simple. If you’re teaching weight loss, imagine you’re going to the weight loss industry and you say I have a way to lose weight where you actually eat more food and do less exercise. Now that’s counterintuitive to what people accept as the practice to lose weight here. It is more accepted to do more exercise as opposed to eating less. This guy is doing the opposite so that immediately cuts through the noise, you sound different to everyone, if you want to know, the curiosity angle there, how does this work? Now obviously you have to be able to back it up. There has to be validation and credibility to the claims you’re making but usually you can find some sort of story that that you’ve got in your own experience or maybe with your clients that can be turned in to a counterintuitive angle and that’s where you need to spend time because the better a message you wrap what you are doing in and then if you go out and try to get the coverage on all the people’s websites to bring traffic back to you, the more likely you are going to get a yes when that message is compelling, it is different, when it is counterintuitive and that’s the challenge and this is where people don’t spend enough time. They just sort of think, well, I know how to increase traffic to your blog. I am just going to tell people I am good at getting traffic and they’ll want to interview me. Everyone says that if they’re traffic builders. Well you have to say well, I know a way of getting traffic where you don’t need any links. And they’re just like, what? How do you do that? So you need that special message and that’s where you spend time to begin with, then it’s just good old fashioned hard work, knocking on doors, building relationships, and pushing that message out there and start building some traction.

James: Awesome! Well Yaro I think we should leave it on that point to be respectful for your time and for our listeners and not to keep you from the free time which I am sure you are enjoying today being a lifestyle entrepreneur so let’s wrap things up and send people off to somewhere online where they can find out a little bit more about you, I am sure www.entrepreneurs-journey.com is one place, anywhere else we should connect with you online?

Yaro: Yeah well I tell people to Google my name. I am going for the Oprah or the Madonna claim to fame and that’s if you google that I’ll be the first result, I recommend if you like what I am saying here, you can download my free report Blogs Profit Blueprint where I sort of cover a lot of what we’ve been talking about in this interview and in more depth and it’s free.

James: Awesome! So to you the listener, make sure the link to the resource there, the Yaro sites and you’ve also got google to rely on as well, will also be mentioned in the show notes for this episode so head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/57 where you’ll find all of those listed. So thank you to you Yaro, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I didn’t get to near where anything I’d like everything done on today’s interview because there is so much to cover but I thoroughly enjoyed today’s session and maybe we can do it again sometime soon.

Yaro: Lovely! Thank you James!

So there you have it that was Yaro Starak and that almost rounds out another episode of Traffic Jam. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve learned in this episode and want to discover more blog traffic strategies, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/57 where you can download six easy ways to build traffic to your blog. It’s half a dozen actionable traffic building strategies from Yaro Starak with notes from me so go visit TrafficJamCast.com/57. Grab your bonus traffic training and also join in on the discussion for this episode.

If you’ve not done so already, make sure you are subscribed to the Traffic Jam podcast by clicking through to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher and hit the subscribe button.

Join me back here for episode#58 where we’ll be joined by the founder and CTO of Portage; it’s going to be a cracking episode and you’ll not want to miss it!

Now we end episode#58 with a Yaro Starak chosen traffic jam; it’s called Pulsar by the trance DJ and producer Armin van Buuren, so enjoy the track and I’ll see you back here real soon!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Yaro Starak has picked Pulsar by the trance DJ and producer Armin van Buuren.

The track is from the Dutch trance producer’s fifth studio album titled Intense. The album was released on May 3, 2013

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

In order to show you how to increase traffic to your blog, I have put together this bonus download for you.

6 Easy Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

This training upgrade guides you through half a dozen easy to implement strategies that will help you start building traffic today!

These strategies have been taken from one of Yaro Starak’s special live trainings. Each is super simple to action, even if you have never blogged before.

Go ahead and download the bonus training now:

Make your marketing so effective that “selling” is no longer necessary – this is what well-crafted marketing funnels can do for your business.

When you have an effective step-by-step process that moves your prospects smoothly from new enquirer to satisfied customer, you will make more money, with less stress.

But, the thought of building an automated marketing process is overwhelming and stressful for most. It involves the detailed study of competitors and potential customers, it utilises complicated tools and technology, it requires an understanding of marketplace sophistication and even more “big ideas” – there’s no wonder why marketers get so deterred by it all.

It doesn’t have to be that way though. Todd Brown believes that setting up marketing funnels can be simple when you follow his tried and tested steps. Do his steps work? You bet! When you follow Todd’s process, your funnel will create crazy desire and convert.

OUR GUEST:

Todd Brown has been marketing online since 2003.

In that time he’s co-orchestrated multiple six-figure launches within the internet marketing and health niches. One of his companies was launched then grown to be “the #1 largest provider of marketing and business-growth training for bodywork professionals”.

Todd has been a partner at Strategic Profits with Rich Schefren and a faculty member for Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Manager Training. He has presented on the same stage with best-selling business authors, Brian Tracy and Michael Gerber.

Today, Todd is recognised as one of the foremost authorities at engineering marketing funnels that produce leads and customers. He lives in Southern Florida with his wife and two daughters.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 56 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Todd Brown quote from the show:

You can also get Todd’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Regardless how long the funnel, find out what your prospects expect at the end.” ~ @ToddBrown
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey there listener! What’s up? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This of course is the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. I am your host as always, James Reynolds, and I am super excited for the awesome show that we have for you today.

Now, I will tell you all about our guest but before that I want to say a quick thank you and give a shout out to Brad from SkilledUp.com and that’s because he left some awesome feedback for the show and also a five-star iTunes rating so thank you to you Brad.

I’d truly appreciate it if you too left a review or a rating for the show, you can let me know what you like least, you can let me know what you like most about Traffic Jam and perhaps who you’d like me to introduce on a future show. Leave your feedback on iTunes or Stitcher and I’d read it out on next week’s episode.

On to this week’s show, we’re joined by Todd Brown from MarketingFunnelAutomation.com who is surprisingly going to be talking to us about marketing funnels. You can download bonus marketing funnels training along with this episode by going to TrafficJamCast.com/56. So head on over now, grab your downloads, and then listen along to the show.

So back to our guest, well Todd Brown was introduced to me by Ryan Levesque and when a funnels guy like Ryan gives endorsement of a fellow funnel marketing specialist as well, I take note. Todd is recognized as one of the foremost authorities at engineering marketing funnels that produce leads and customers often a triple or quadruple value experienced by the competitors. He’s worked alongside internet marketing guys like Rich Scheffren and Jeff Walker who orchestrated multiple six-figure launches within the internet marketing community.

So there you go, that’s a real brief intro, and now over to Todd Brown himself from MarketingFunnelAutomation.com.

James: Hey there listener! Welcome back to the interview section of TrafficJam#56 and joining me right here today is Todd Brown. Todd, how are you doing?

Todd: I am doing great man! Thanks so much for having me.

James: Thanks for coming onboard. So you’ve got this website called sixfigurefunnelformula.com where you show people how to set up their first sales funnel. Let’s start with some of the basics, what exactly is a sales funnel and how do we go about setting one of these things up?

Todd: Despite what is often talked about as a sales funnel, I really just look at a sales funnel as a sequence of communication that a business delivers to a product to a prospect or a customer designed to move the prospect or customer to take a particular action. So typically when we talked about marketing funnel typically we’re talking about the marketing sequence or the marketing activity that go out to prospects designed to turn those prospects in to a first time customer to get them to participate in their first transaction and that’s really all there is to it, what message are you delivering to those prospects? What does that message consist of in terms of the number of steps, in terms of different channels that you’re utilizing with the ultimate aim of moving them to become a customer.

James: Got it! And I guess in that definition, it could be a simple a step as getting someone to make contact, getting someone to subscribe to an email list; it’s just nudging them along a little sequence to move them closer towards being a customer. Would that be right?

Todd: The answer is yes, that is right. I like to look at it from a little bit of higher perspective and ultimately what we’re looking at is we are looking at what is the ultimate goal in any one instance when you’re communicating with a prospect for example and even though there are multiple steps along the way like one of those steps might be filling out a contact form, another step might be picking up the phone and calling your sales department. Those are all kind of steps and stages of a bigger, more overall marketing funnel that’s ultimately designed for an end action. So those are steps in the process of reaching that ultimate goal.

James: Yeah, do you think that’s where some people perhaps get a little bit caught up with this stuff because when you do look at the bigger picture, there are so many moving parts, so many different steps that if I was to look up my own funnel and you were to look up yours and our listener would also delve in to what happens in their own business, there aren’t so many steps that could occur from someone first finding out about the business to actually becoming a customer. Do you think that people get a little bit over awed by this because of just the complexity and the potential size of this thing?

Todd: Absolutely! And I think a lot of that comes from approaching the development of a marketing funnel backwards. A lot of entrepreneurs, a lot chief marketing officers, a lot of just marketers in general looking at what are the different stages that I should have and what are the different things that I can communicate at those different stages and different steps of the funnel and they can really very quickly get overwhelmed by all of that. Whereas the right way to start to build your funnel is really to take a step back and look at your prospects and ask yourself what is it that they need to know to be able to buy? What is it that they need to ultimately believe? And I think it is weird thing because this is one of the most critical elements of building out a funnel and yet this is one of those areas that just gets so overlooked so often. Figure out what your prospects need to believe that the end of your marketing funnel no matter how long or short that funnel is. What do they need to believe so that when you eventually present them with the opportunity to buy, they see it as the absolute best decision for their current situation? And only until you’ve got that and you’ve got clarity on that- what they need to believe so they start to buy. Should you even believe then well, what is the best way to then present my message to accomplish those beliefs and what are the different stages if you will, that are ultimately need to bring this prospect through as I am leading them through those different beliefs?

James: Yeah, so I guess there are some key things to consider here before starting out for one, and I guess sort of listening to what you are saying Todd, the big one perhaps is really understanding what outcome you want at the end of that process but what are some of the other things that we kind of need to consider before we start putting together any of the architecture- mapping out what messages people are getting at what time and what mechanisms are in play. What are some of those big picture things that we need to consider first?

Todd: Yeah, so we have to start from the very beginning and even before you begin thinking about what should you be communicating in your marketing message, before you even think about any of that, you’ve got to go back to what’s typically referred to as marketplace sophistication and you’ve got to understand what is the sophistication level of your market and all that really means is what are the marketing messages, the promises, the claims, the benefit statements that your prospects have been exposed to and are being exposed to by competitors. What are competitors saying? What are competitors claiming? What are competitors promising? What are competitors saying in terms of how they are going to deliver on those promises to your prospects like how does this service work? What are the mechanisms behind their products and services that ultimately deliver those results? You need to know those things, you need to get an idea of what it is that your competitors are saying and what is it that your prospects are seeing for a couple of very important reasons. For time purposes, I’ll just say that you need to know those things so that you can craft a message that #1 is the appropriate sophistication level for your prospects. Meaning that based on what it is that they’ve seen before and heard before and based on what it is that they have been inundated with, that ultimately determines what it is that they will respond to going forward and like one of the examples that I give with marketplace sophistication is like at one point in time there were no fat burners in the market, there were no pills that people can take to burn fat. And then all of a sudden, some entrepreneur, some company came out with the very first fat burner. Well, the very first fat burner in terms of marketing, all they had to say was take this pill and you’ll lose weight and people flock to it. Today, because of marketplace sophistication, because of competition, because of what other companies have said, and promised and claimed, if we roll that out with a supplement fat burner today making that same claim take this pill and you’ll lose weight, we’d get crushed and we wouldn’t sell anything because the market is at a totally different marketplace sophistication level. So that’s one thing. You’ve got to understand where your prospects are at based on what they have been exposed to. The other reason why we need to know that is because we need to be able to design and craft and engineer a marketing message that is unique, that is different, that is fresh, that is seen as unique in the marketplace and if you don’t know what your competitors have said, promised and claimed, then you’re shooting in the dark, you’re taking a guess at that and so you need to have a marketing message that is unique, different and fresh so in the process it prevents what we call mental opt out meaning that when a company and when a marketer designs a message that is not unique and different and fresh and timely and news worthy, and intellectually and emotionally compelling and all those things wrapped in to one, when prospects are first exposed to that message or exposed to that funnel, whether it is a landing page, whether it is direct mail, whether it is TV or whatever that is, they immediately experience that, Oh, I have heard that before, oh, I have seen that before, oh, I know about that, oh, it’s more of the same. That’s what we call mental opt out. And then their engagement level goes in the toilet and they either bail or ring a bell. So you need to start with that and that’s like in the core of understanding the marketplace as a whole before you start to design your marketing message. Does that make sense?

James: Yeah, that absolutely makes total sense. You’ve got to position yourself away from what everyone else is doing to keep people engaged. You’ve just got to understand sophistication of what people are looking for, right? Using the diet fat burning pill example. If we just claim, hey we’ll help you lose, well everyone’s heard that message a thousand times before. Why are we suddenly going to believe it’s actually going to be different for this pill when it hasn’t been for others? So it makes total sense. And you’ve got a formula for crafting a message around this I think, Todd, where you sort of position the solution to be new and different and you identify the right customer. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Todd: Well, I think there is a couple of things that you can do but for time purposes, let me share one and I think it is the most valuable that any marketer can learn and it’s this idea of one more step before you begin crafting the actual message, you have to recognize that marketing and selling are two totally different activities. Selling is when you talk about the product, when you talk about the product’s features, when you talk about the price point, the product’s guarantee, etc. Marketing is when you talk about the prospect and when you talk about the prospect’s situation, their needs, their wants and the best solution for their needs. Obviously, kind of marketing 101 says that the job of marketing is to make selling superfluous. I think that’s a quote from Peter Drakker, the job of marketing is to make it so that selling is unnecessary where after you do your marketing, presenting the product and you’re saying here it is, here’s your opportunity to get it. if you’ve done your marketing job, your prospects, they have a much higher level of desire for your product even before you talk about it. In order to do that, there is an idea, some concept that you are presenting to the prospect that your whole marketing message gets wrapped under. It’s really what I would call, there is an idea right behind your marketing message and that idea needs to be intellectually compelling, meaning it needs to be on a pure logical level, it needs to be intriguing. But also it needs to be compelling on an emotional level, and it needs to be new, unique, and different. That’s what we call the big idea. I first learned that from my good friend and mentor, Michael Masterson, or that’s really his pen name, Mark Fort is his name. and it’s like the days of simply being able to make bigger and bigger promises in your marketing, to scream the loudest promise, make the biggest claim, the biggest benefit in your marketplace, those days are long gone because less and less people believe those claims today, they’re not as credible. You can’t simply go into a marketplace and scream, louder benefits or more benefits than your competitors and so in order to get the market’s attention, you’ve got to start by building your market’s message on a unique, big, compelling idea, an idea that is arresting, an idea that makes everybody feel like huh, I have never heard that before! That’s logically and intellectually interesting! On an emotional level, I can see the benefit, I can see the payoff of me even engaging with this message, and remember, what we are talking about here is that the idea behind your marketing, not the idea behind your product, not the idea behind why you should buy the product, or why you should become the customer, but the idea behind the marketing message. Behind the marketing message is a message, remember about your message about their situation, about their obstacle, about their problem, about what they need, about their solution and so on, and so you’ve really got to look for again, what is big ideas based on an idea including its new, its unique, its fresh, its timely, its newsworthy, its immediately understandable. In other words, immediately grasped by the prospect. It’s intellectually compelling, it’s emotionally compelling, and it’s based on one single idea and of course inherent in that is a big, compelling, audacious promise inherent in that idea. Does that make sense?

James: Yup, absolutely! I’m loving this, I am just letting you free roll because it’s such good stuff Todd so yeah, absolutely following along. What do we do next? We’ve got a big idea, we’ve got a concept on which to base our marketing around, there are some mechanics to this, there are some steps that we may need to move people through. Where do we go next?

Todd: Yeah, so next is when you really design your marketing message and when you actually craft the message. Like at this point you’ve got an understanding of the marketplace sophistication, you understand what they have been exposed to, you understand kind of what’s going to move them and what’s not going to move them. You’ve kind of engineered or developed a marketing idea for that funnel that’s arresting, that’s startling and shocking and now it’s time to design your message. So what do you say to move prospects from being prospects to customers? That’s when we go back to what is it that prospects need to believe by. And for time purposes, the best example or metaphor that I can share with this particular part or step in the process of developing your marketing funnel is here’s where you’ve got to think like a prosecutor, you’ve got to think like a prosecuting attorney where there is a defendant, they are presenting their case, the prosecutor is presenting their case to the jury in an attempt to let’s say find this defendant guilty of a particular crime. Well, just like a prosecutor knows that there are certain critical things that the jury needs to believe and there is kind of a sequence to the things that they need to believe if ultimately at the end, by the time that prosecutor rests his case, he knows that there are certain things that that jury needs to believe and so that prosecutor then begins to present each of the facts, the prosecutor makes a series of statements and claims in sequence building a case and getting the jury to believe what it is that they want them to believe, ultimately leading them to the belief that yes this person is guilty, right? And so just like a prosecutor does it is basically a series of claims and benefit statements followed by a preponderance of truth, that’s what you as a marketer, that’s what you as a CMO or a business owner need to have happen in your marketing funnel. Remember that the essence of most marketing, even inadequate marketing, are a bunch of claims like you need this if you want to get thin or you take this pill and it prevents the absorption of fat or you do this and you’ll grow bigger tomatoes. All of those statements which are typical statements that you find in a marketing or sales piece or advertisement, those are all claims and one of the biggest mistakes that marketers and entrepreneurs is thinking that the market is just going to believe what it is that you say because you said it and you said it with conviction. The reality is that they are doubting everything you say because they are on guard because they know that you are ultimately trying to sell them on something and it is a defense mechanism for prospects. They are looking for reasons to doubt you, they are looking for cracks in your armor, they are looking for excuses not to feel guilty if they don’t buy so the reality is that a healthier and more productive way to look at this is they don’t believe a darn thing that you say until you prove it to them so when you make any kind of claim in your marketing, or should I say, any kind of claim you make in your marketing, you need to prove it, you need to offer proof. Literally a dozen different proof points that you can use and you should use throughout your marketing. But that’s really your whole marketing message becomes. It’s like plain proof benefit statement all the way through until you have kind of established in your head what the prospect needs so that when you do then present your offer, right ultimately when you present in to the Segway sales portion of your “marketing funnel” they’re then ecstatic because you just convinced them that they need a particular solution and now you are offering them a way to get that solution, right? So they are “sold” on everything that you got them to buy in to during the marketing portion and so now when you offer your product, you’re thrilled.

James: It seems to me a lot of what is underlying this is this whole element of trust right? And I guess that’s probably a stage which we’re at at the evolution of marketing where we have gone through this phase of people hyping up claims and making this huge offers and the market becoming blind to it all. The companies that seem to be doing well in the sales funnels so well are the ones that are inherently trustful where people go through them and not only do they believe their claims to be true but they trust the company or the person behind them. Would you say that’s the case?

Todd: Yeah, I definitely think there is a level of trust that is always needed and that’s why without getting too deep in to a different topic, but that’s why the backend, meaning all the marketing that a company does with existing clients – that is why the backend is infinitely easier and it is really why the backend is where all of the profit comes from in business and that is because there is a trust level there, right? The most difficult transaction to generate is that first transaction because there is no trust, there is no relationship and so it is why on the front end which is all the marketing that you do with prospects, in an attempt to convert them in to happy new paying customers, it’s why you’ve got to present certain elements in your marketing funnel to gain their trust, right? Because look, you know, on the backend you know you’ve gained their trust by delivering what you promised to them in their original purchase which is why it is so essential then bring on what it is that you promised to them in their original purchase. So it is why it is so essential that on every transaction but especially on the front end transaction, the very first transaction that you have with a brand new customer that you over deliver value, that you exceed their expectations because the ongoing trust that you have or lose with them is going to be dependent on the experience that they have with whatever it is that they just purchased. But when you are talking about a prospect they don’t have the luxury of and so all of the trust or experience that they can feel with you is derived from marketing and there’s certain aspects of that that are potentially beyond your control. You know what the marketplace said, what’s said about you in social media but there is also a tremendous amount that is directly within your control that can be engineered and strategically used in your marketing like establishing credibility. There is lots of different things that you can do to establish credibility. There’s demonstrating track record, and then of course there is a preponderance of truth. And look, when you demonstrate credibility, let’s say we came out with, again let’s go back to that supplement example, we can establish credibility by talking about the formulation, our supplement was designed by a team of MDs and we could list out who they are, their credentials, their experience, X number of them are published authors, they are professors at prestigious universities then of course we can show track record. We can show that out of the X thousand of the people that have used the supplement X pounds have been lost in the first month, week, year, etc. and then when we make a variety of different claims throughout our marketing, like meaning we are talking about the efficiency of the ingredients in the supplement and we are saying that the most powerful ingredient for fat burning is whatever, then we can offer studies that back that up, we can show excerpts from trade journals. And so all of those things taken together are what help us to establish trust in the minds of the prospect and again get them to believe what it is that we are saying. And I will finish with this, you know, that in marketing, it is one thing to tell the truth, it is another thing to be believable. And so, just because something is true doesn’t mean that it is believable. And so the most important thing is that when you say something, your prospects believe what it is that you are saying and so that is why proof is such an incredibly vital part of any marketing campaign. It’s why Gary, one of the most successful living copywriters to this day talks about at the foundation of every million dollar plus campaign there is an extraordinary amount of proof. My buddy Jeff Walker with product launch formula talks about no proof, no launch. It’s about why the biggest direct response publishing companies like agora, their campaigns are just laden with proof point after proof point after proof point. Because it turns a claim in to a fact, it turns a prospect to believe, their trust level goes up, and prospects who believe and trust are a lot more likely to buy.

James: Totally! Well let’s get close to finishing up on a couple of things. The first thing I want to ask you about is conversions and of course when it comes to any aspect of conversion, testing is critical but I’m guessing with the sales funnel which has many, many moving parts to it, there are going to be some aspects that are more critical to test than others. What would they be Todd if we sort of zero in on those?

Todd: Yeah, that’s a great question. the right answer to that is that you identify what is the constraint in the funnel and then you test that constraint and so the easiest way to understand what I mean by constraint is picture your funnel like a chain with different links and in every chain there is a constraint in the funnel and then you test that constraint. And so the easiest way to understand by constraint is picture your funnel like a chain with different links and on every chain there is one weakest link and the strength of the chain is dependent on the strength of the weakest link. It doesn’t matter if you strengthen all the other links, the chain will only be as strong as that weakest link and if you want to improve the strength of the chain, you have to improve the chain of the weakest link. That’s the same way that we optimize our funnel and determine what needs to be tested. We look at the different metrics related to how the funnel is performing and the different metrics are dependent on the steps in the funnel and what type of funnel you are using but you look at the different metrics in the funnel and you identify based on those metrics, not opinion, not guess, but based on numbers, objective numbers, you identify the constraint, we are going to find the weakest link then you go to work testing that weak link until you can find what is going to strengthen it and so in your funnel, the stage or step in your funnel that needs to be tested could be vastly different from the stage inside a funnel that needs to be tested and optimized because it all goes back in to. So for like a typical example where you’ve got an opt in page you’d be requesting the contact information and then you might look at what is the opt in rate meaning what’s the percentage of people that hit on it compared to the percentage of people that give you their contact information and if you allow people to buy right in to your website, what is the conversion rate of the people that then buy. What’s the percentage of people that abandon their cart because that is the number that most marketers don’t even think about that its usually through the roof and it’s looking as though the performance of the different stages of the marketing funnel identifying the weakest one, the one that if you strengthened it would have the biggest impact on the performance of the funnel and that’s the one you go to work and test everything.

James: Got it! Well you mentioned opinions and assumptions and I guess as marketers we try not too many but invariably we do from time to time. What have been some of the most surprising test results that you’ve ever seen?

Todd: What I think is that I think the reality is when it comes to testing, when it comes to your marketing, when it comes to your decisions on what changes you should make, you never ever want to go on opinion or assumptions because I have made. I said if I was a betting man I was going to bet that this page is going to win and I have lost more of those internal bets or bets with my team over here than I care to admit because sometimes the reality is that people are not rational. We like to think of ourselves as rational involved creatures but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of decisions that people make are not based on rational thinking and logic and they are based on deeper, more emotional drivers and emotional triggers and so certain things that we think logically would work oftentimes don’t and so when it comes to your marketing, one of the worst things that you can do is implement a change without at least tracking it, if not testing it against a prior version because many more times I have been in situations where we made the change and the change that I made, whether it be adding audio to a page, or adding a video, or taking the video away, it’s suppressed response. Whether it’s suppressed opt in rate or sales, its suppressed so it’s like a price point. For most marketers, they are simply guessing at what is the best price point. They have no idea and they’ll make a change and they won’t track it. they don’t know if they are making less money and that is the beauty of direct response marketing. In direct response marketing where you’re asking for a specific question and you can see whether they are taking that action or not, you can hold every single thing accountable. And so there is no reason whatsoever to do anything based on opinion because really to answer your question there is no rhyme or reason to the test results that I have seen stuff work in one funnel for one product with one appeal and that thing that worked really well got crushed in a different funnel. The same audience, you’ve got to track and test different things before you make a decision about the different things that you are going to make, what additions you are going to put in, what things you are going to take out etc. and let the numbers drive what it is that you do.

James: Yeah exactly! Well let’s I think appropriately wrap things up on that point, there were plenty of directions that interview could go and I think we hardly touched the surface. I think to be fair to you Todd and also to be fair with our listeners, we should direct them off somewhere to dive deeper in to the topic a little bit more so where should we send our listeners off to as a result of listening to this?

Todd: I think there are two places they can go, the first is as you mentioned earlier, sixfigurefunnelformula.com. There is a four-part video series there that is better than some paid training programs. Well worth your time to go through. You can go through it at your own pace. The other site is our main website and that’s just at marketingfunnelautomation.com. if you want to read, we’ve put up a bunch of posts and videos and audios which you can find at marketingfunnelautomation.com/blog and go there, read a bunch of articles and posts and we dive deep in to a lot of these areas and have fun.

James: Cool stuff! Well to you the listener, if you haven’t managed to take note of those two places they will of course be show notes for episode#56 which you get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/56 so head on over there you’ll find all of those resources and more. So all that remains is for me to thank you for coming on, it’s been an absolute blast and enjoy the rest of your day.

Todd: Thank you so much it’s been my pleasure.

So there you go that was Todd Brown from MarketingFunnelAutomation.com. Thank you for listening in to episode#56. We will be back with another episode next week where we’ll be turning our attention to blog traffic so keep an ear out for that show. Remember to get the bonus train that comes along with this episode. Head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/56 where you can also get your hands on a full transcript of the show, special episode artwork, and a host of other goodies as well. So as not to miss next week’s show, remember to subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio and the links to do that are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. And whilst you’re there, you can leave a review for the show as well, that would be really appreciated.

We end this week’s show with a traffic jam with Todd Brown’s chosen track and it’s called Keep Your Head Up by Andy Gramma, so enjoy the track, I’ll see you here next week.

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Todd Brown has picked Keep your Head Up by Andy Grammer.

Andrew Charles “Andy” Grammer is an American singer-songwriter and record producer signed to S-Curve Records.

His self titled debut album, “Andy Grammer”, was released in 2011 and featured the hit track Keep Your Head Up.

READY TO BUILD YOUR OWN MARKETING FUNNEL? THIS WILL HELP:

I probably don’t need to say this, but I will anyway…

Traffic is important, but conversions are essential.

Without a high converting marketing funnel, traffic is close to useless.

To help you build your own “converts like crazy” marketing funnel, I’ve created a special bonus area just for this podcast.

The free bonus area includes:

1. 60 Minute Funnels Training Video: How To Create Million-Dollar Marketing Funnels with Todd Brown & Justin Brooke.

2. A full word-for-word transcript of my interview with Todd which you can download and save to your computer for future reference.

3. MP3 recording of this episode.

Click below to access the special bonus area: