I just received my copy of John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0 on Tuesday. It took some time to reach but, you know, after going through nearly half of the program so far, I must say it was well worth the wait.

12 video CDs covering the major traffic methods on the Internet today (including the seven I mentioned in my earlier posts) – really great value. Especially at $397. It’s a steal considering that Traffic Secrets 1.0 was $997.

John really breaks it down for you and he makes it really simple to understand. You don’t have all that fancy-schancy stuff that leaves you confused after going through it. Simple, effective, neat.

Anyway, besides the fact that Traffic Secrets 2.0 is a really solid product, I mentioned it because to get really good at something, you must continually upgrade (upgrade sounds like something the government tells retrenched people to do) educate yourself in order to improve in your field. It’s amazing how people expect to be experts at something without even investing the time to learn the simple basics.

I’ve had people come up to me and ask me ‘How can make money online?’ and I always do this – I throw them a copy of Insiders Secrets and I tell them to read the whole friggin’ thing from front to back in two weeks. And get this… NO ONE has done it so far. I bet they look at the thickness of the binder and they start freaking out. I’m sure they’re going “Ah shit, it’s a trick! There’s actually work involved…”

But that’s exactly what I did. I read Insider Secrets from front to back more than once when I was just starting out online. Like I said, how can you expect to get good at something if you can’t even accomplish something as simple as reading a binder in two weeks? Now, I don’t want to sound preachy or anything here, but I have to point that out to you. Especially if you’ve NOT been investing too much in your education at all.

I’ll admit. I’m as lazy as you can get as well. When I got my copy of Traffic Secrets, I got all excited, tore open the box and ooh and ahhhed at the pretty CDs and stuff. That lasted like 10 seconds and then my mind actually acted up and said “Oh man… now I actually NEED to go through this stuff?”

So I get that too. But it really comes to knuckling down and getting things done. The day I got the product, I popped in the first CD and started watching the videos. Now you see, here’s the trick – we human beings just can’t stand leaving things unfinished (for the most part, anyway). If someone tells he’s going to show you three magic tricks and he only shows you two, you’re definitely going to ask “Dude, where’s the last one?”

Or similarly, have you read a book before and halfway through it, you finally realized that it really sucked and it was totally boring. But then you decided to read the whole thing anyway, just so you could finish it.

It’s the same here. I popped in the first CD of Traffic Secrets and when that was done, I automatically wanted to carry on with CD2 just because I wanted to see what was next and eventually finish what I started.

I’m sure you know, often times it’s just getting the ball rolling bit that’s the hardest, but once you push off, it just starts rolling easier and easier and pretty soon you reach the bottom of the hill and ‘hey!’ you finished the course.

So if you’ve been wanting to get something done but you’re still procrastinating, it’s simple – just start with the first step and the rest of it will simply flow. It works.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is also relatively new on the Internet. Remember it wasn’t too long ago that most people will still hooked up to the Internet using dial-up modems.

At those snail-crawling speeds, streaming video over the web wasn’t feasible. But with more and more people signing up to broadband and the runaway success of YouTube, video marketing is fast becoming another great way to drive traffic to your websites.

What you need to do is to create videos based on your market niche and then submit them to as many video sites as possible.

We’ve all heard of www.YouTube.com. Other major video sites include www.spike.com, www.metacafe.com, videos.google.com, etc.

These video sites, especially the big ones, receive HUGE amounts of traffic every single day (it seems like people have nothing better to do with their lives than watch video), and submitting your videos to these sites will net you some eyeballs to your website. You even can use a service like TrafficGeyser.com to help submit your videos for you.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a strategy where you encourage people to pass on your marketing message. They pass it on to their friends, who in turn pass it on to theirs, creating exponential growth for the exposure of your website.

A great real-life example I can share with you is this website which generated over a million dollars in just over two years – purely by viral marketing.

Have a look – www.TheInterviewWithGod.com

When you land on the website, you are treated to a short inspirational video. The message in that video touched so many people that they automatically wanted to share that video with all their friends and family.

And they in turn also passed the video on, and on, and on. The website just grew and they monetized all that traffic by selling products based on that one simple video that started it all.

You can do the same for your website by giving away free reports, books, videos, and CDs all pointing back to your website. You can even make this a near zero-cost exercise if you do it entirely digitally.

What you must ensure is that what you are giving away must be of sheer quality or it could hurt you! No one is going to pass on anything which doesn’t add value to their lives. So make sure you do this part right.

Viral is a great way for driving traffic, especially when it hits that ‘tipping point’ and the whole thing just snowballs your way.

It could be a bit tricky getting there but if you do it, it’s well worth it.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing a system where you pay people a commission in return for recommeding a customer for you.

A fine example of a system like this Amazon.com’s associate program. This program allows you to display Amazon’s books on your website. And if someone clicks through from your website and purchases from Amazon, you get a commission.

Th advantage for Amazon is that they gain an army of affiliates to promote their products for them and they only pay when a sale is made.

The benefit for the affiliates is that they don’t need to create their own products to sell, but they can still enjoy hefty paydays if they promote successfully.

You too can implement an affiliate program for your own website and it is a tremendous way to drive traffic to your website for free. Clickbank.com is a great and very easy way to start your own affiliate program if you’re dealing with digital products.

Just make sure that your offer CONVERTS. Because if your website is not performing, affiliates will drop your program and move on to a better converting product.

Social Marketing

Social marketing is a relatively new form of driving traffic. It is basically driving traffic to your websites from online forums, blogs and from also social networking websites like Facebook.com, MySpace.com, and also from social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, etc.

These are places where thousands of people of a particular interest meet virtually online.

The idea is to join these social networks and participate in the discussion online. As you contribute more and more to the community, you build yourself up into an expert in that social network.

And when that happens you automatically become an authority in that field and naturally people want to see what you have to offer.

It is a relationship that is based on trust.

Remember if you are not contributing and your focus is only on selling to these people but not giving, the community can see through it and you will not get any results this way.

A great way you can start is to join an online forum related to your market niche and start participating in it. As you find network with friends and peers, your social influence will start to grow and in turn help to direct people to your website.

So there you have it!

Seven methods which you can use to drive online traffic to your website. If you feel overwhelmed with the information, remember that you don’t need to employ all the methods for to drive traffic to your business website. Doing one or two methods EFFECTIVELY is much better than doing all seven in a half-baked manner.

For example, when I first launched Secrets Of Self-Made Millionaires, I only employed TWO methods of driving traffic to the website. I simply did article marketing and affiliate marketing.

The reason why I chose these two methods was pretty simple. Firstly I had a ton of articles at my disposal and naturally the smart thing to do was to submit them to all the article directories out there directing traffic back to my salespage.

And since I was using Clickbank to market the product, it only made sense to have an affiliate program set up. The thing about having your own affiliate program is that you want to make it as EASY as possible for your affiliates to promote for you.

So I did just that. I provided as many tools as I could for my affiliates so that promoting my product was as simple as cut-and-paste. I provided articles, solo ads, graphics, banners, a rebrandable report, etc. If you provide all these sort of tools for your affiliates, it greatly lessens the work they need to do to promote your stuff, which makes it more attractive to them (because let’s face it, everyone doesn’t want to do work!).

If you want to have a look at the tools I created, you can have a look at the affiliate page I set up. You can model it for your own affiliate program if you want to.

I didn’t do any SEO because I knew jack about it (even though I read ebooks and articles about it). Right now, if I want to get SEO done, I’ll look for an expert to do it. Because he’s going to execute a better job then I’ll ever do in a million years. Ditto for PPC.

I didn’t have videos, so I couldn’t submit any back then. I didn’t have the time (or enjoyed it anyway) to partake in social marketing. But I know of a friend who did VERY well simply by hanging around forums and making for a name for himself there. And viral marketing was something that I didn’t want to bet my traffic on.

So I just started off with article marketing and affiliate marketing. And till now Secrets Of Self-Made Millionaires has made more than seventy-grand in revenue (guesstimate). Not too shabby, eh?

Like I said, you don’t need to do EVERYTHING just so your website starts rolling. In fact, if you can only do, for example, article marketing, right now, the just do that one method right and consistently. And then you can move on to other traffic methods as you get more familiar and proficient with other methods of driving traffic.

Hi Adam,

You see, I’ve created my own product but now I’m stuck as to where and how to promote it.

Where can I find JV partners? I means, yes..you know you have a great product when you digitalised Adam Khoo’s books…but the BIGGER question is: who did you JV with? where to find JV partners? How to market your products? How to get your products out to the market?

I’m stuck…appreciate if you can throw some light on this for all fellow Internet Marketers.

Millers

And I said I’d give him an answer, so here it is.

There are 4 steps to building a successful online business and you probably already know this.

1. Profitable Niche Market
2. Product
3. Website
4. Traffic

You need to do these 4 steps IN ORDER properly if you want your Internet business to make money for you. Just to be brief, Step1 means you need to have a niche market to sell something to. A lot people make the mistake of creating a fancy product first only to find that no one actually wants to buy it (Wuuu… The ‘How To Marry An Ugly Bankrupt’ book – NO market!). Complete waste of time and money and I made that mistake too, not too long ago.

You need to identify a niche market online first, discover what their needs or problems are FIRST before you create a product to suit them. So that’s Step1.

Step2 is pretty straightforward. Once you’ve done enough market research and you know what your market is looking for, you then create a product that will fill their need or solve whatever darn problem they have (bad breath, acne, man boobs, etc).

Step3 means you need to create website that is designed to SELL your product. So you need a good salesletter, offer, sales process, credit card processing, etc.

And Step4 is the final bit. You need to drive traffic to your website. It’s not use building the best sales site in the world if no one is ever going to see it. You must get eyeballs to your site to make sales.

Each of these steps are crucial and ALL of them need to be done right (but not necessarily perfect!) for your website to make money online. So to answer the question here – How do you drive traffic to your website?

There are many ways to do that, but I’ll narrow it down to these 7 major methods.

1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Pay-Per-Click
3. Article Marketing
4. Video Marketing
5. Viral Marketing
6. Affiliate Marketing
7. Social Marketing

To give you an overview of these traffic methods…

Search Engine Optimization

Basically SEO is a process of optimizing your website around your targeted keywords so that it is ranked highly in the search engine results. Go to www.Google.com and type in lets say… ‘dog training’. And again you ‘ll see a bunch of search results pop up on the left.

This is where you want your website to be. On the first page and especially in positions #1, #2 and #3. If you’re ranked on the 59th page of the search results, not too many people are going to find your website, are they?

There are a lot of factors to consider when optimizing your website for the search engines and it takes TIME. You will not jump to page1 overnight. But if done right, it is a highly, highly effective way to gain targeted traffic to your website.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

PPC is the quickest way you can start driving targeted traffic to your website instantly. You can literally set this up and start driving traffic to your website in less than 5 minutes. The downside, of course, is that you have to pay for it (come on! it’s still advertising after all).

Go to www.Google.com and type in a search term like ‘golf swing’ into the search box and hit search.

You notice when the results pop up that there are links on the right side of the page. Those links are from companies advertising on Google for the keyword ‘golf swing’. And they only pay a fee whenever someone clicks on their ad, hence Pay-Per-Click marketing.

As with any paid form of advertising, it is imperative that you measure your return on investment. It’s no use spending $100 on PPC only to find out that it’s making you sales of only $50!

There are many things to employ to ensure your PPC campaign runs successfully but Pay-Per-Click is definitely a major way you can drive traffic to your website.

Article Marketing

What are looking for most times when you surf the web?

I’d guess that a majority of the time you spend online is all about looking for information. That’s basically what the Internet is – a whole web of content and information.

Knowing that people visit the web to look for information, in article marketing, your goal is to provide that information in the form of articles and in turn direct people to your website through them.

What you can do is to write a bunch of informational articles relating to your market niche and then submit them to article directories (here’s one example – www.goarticles.com).

You’d want to submit your articles to as many quality article directories as you can. Because the more places your article shows up, the more people are going to read your article and visit your website.

But it doesn’t stop there.

When you submit to an article directory, you also allow other website owners to pick up your article and use it on THEIR website. Again if many website owners love your information and decide to add it to their websites, your article is being displayed in many more places. All in all, article marketing is a great and steady way to drive consistent traffic to your websites.

To sum it up…

Remember, this is by no means an exhaustive guide on how to drive traffic to your websites. I’m giving you just an overview because each one of these methods could fill a book by itself.

If you seriously want to drive traffic to your websites, you need to LEARN how to do it. And it doesn’t stop there, you need to DO it as well (now that’s the hard part. All that work… damn!).

So if you want to do SEO, get a good product or coach who will teach you how to do SEO the right way (Stompernet for example). Ditto for the other traffic methods.

I’ll share the other four traffic methods in my next blog post.

Does Rich read my blog?

I don’t think so. The point here is that I’m as brilliant as him. (Ha! I’m kidding!)

The point is that the reason why the same advice is floating on more than one place on the internet is because that the principles of success are all universal. There is no magic bullet.

Successful people have been around for a looooooong time, and the principles that worked for them will work for you as well. And the principle we’re discussing here is about focus.

Anyway, back to my title – Traffic Vs Conversions.

Which do you think is more important to you? Would you rather have sky-high traffic or sky-high conversions?

Ok, I know some of you now would say that neither is more important. That you need both to make money online (or anywhere else for that matter). And I wo’t deny that. You need BOTH to make things work. But which one is more important?

I’ll tell you.

It’s conversions.

If I had a choice between high conversions and high traffic. I would always go for the former. Why?

Because if you had high conversions and you couple that with an affiliate program. You need never have to worry about traffic and you’d still be laughing all the way to the bank.

Take a look at all the top products in the Clickbank marketplace. Chances are (or it’s certain) that they’re the best converting products out there.

Ask yourself. As an affiliate marketer, what is the most important thing you look out for in a product?

It’s how well does the product converts. If you a killer conversion rate, you can’t fail to have affiliates clamouring to sell your product for you.

So instead of worrying about the traffic you have (or don’t), I’d rather you focus on how you can increase your conversion rates all the time. And you’ll be on your way to doing mighty fine online.

What do YOU think? DO you argree or disagree with me? Let me know your comments.

So pick your favourite and stick with it. Because traffic is something we all need to do for the long-haul and you’ll do a lot better if it’s a method you enjoy using.

So now… what’s my no.1 source of traffic?

Ok, first off I manage a number of sites. This blog, Adam Khoo’s blog, Secrets Of Self-Made Millionaires, Success With NLP, and a couple of article/content sites.

And right now, the website that garners the most traffic every single month is Secrets Of Self-Made Millionaires (SSMM).

Why? How is it that a site with no content, no articles, and with just a salesletter slapped on it the most trafficked site I have?

Because my no.1 source of traffic is my affiliates.

Ever since I bumped up commissions to 75%, more and more people have started promoting SSMM and the results have been fantastic! It is quite simply attractive to promote a product that pays you over $66 per sale.

So even though this site has less than 10 pages, has no articles, and is just a site selling one product, it’s doing really well because it makes people a nice sum of money. And because of that, they will continue to promote, and the cycle goes on…

Not only is it my highest trafficked site, I also collect the most opt-ins from this page every single day because affiliates are sending traffic to it all the time. Not suprisingly my biggest segmented list comes from here as well.

What’s even more amazing is that I NEVER did any SEO, PPC (a little nowadays though, I’m learning how to be great at PPC…), article marketing, directory submissions, link exchanges, press releases, co-reg, ezine/banner ads, etc, etc, etc for this site at all. I did NONE of that. And it’s still the no.1 trafficked site.

Plus on a side note, the page rank for this site is a respectable 4 which is really good for a mini-site.

So you see, you don’t need to use all the traffic methods out there to see results! You just need to be good at one or two. SSMM is doing great because of two sources of traffic – from affiliates and from my follow-up emails when they opt-in.

I still feel that the site has alot more potential to do even better and I’m now tweaking things here and there to optimize it some more. So maybe I’ll share about that in coming posts.

Anyway, tomorrow’s Good Friday so no post. See you on Monday.

Unless you have a team to do this for you, I believe you’d be hard-pressed to find the time to actually use ALL the traffic methods out there effectively. We only have 24 hours a day.

Rather than spread yourself too thin and submit some articles here, do a bit of PPC there, tweak a little SEO here, and spend some time blogging there. Why not just focus your efforts on the one type of traffic you enjoy doing the most?

Because if you’re playing with SEO and PPC and blogging and articles, etc… How good are you ever going to be at any one of them if you can only focus 1/4 of your study and effort to each? You’ll just be mediocre in each area.

Compare that to someone who spent ALL his time mastering PPC and becoming a true expert at that game. Could you imagine how powerful his traffic generation skills could be?

So if you like playing with the search engines (SEs) and their algorithms, by all means choose SEO. If you are great at writing quality articles quickly, then use article marketing. And so on and so forth.

There’re people out there who make millions just using Google Adwords to drive traffic to their sites. And they do zero or very little SEO. On the flip side, there’re SEO experts who’d never spend a dime on PPC and all their traffic comes from the organic SE results.

So who’s right?

No one and everyone. You just have to find something that works best for you and just focus on being very, very good at that! Obviously it is still good to know and understand the other traffic generation methods out there.

For example, even though you’re great at PPC, a little bit of proper on-page SEO for your websites is still important and wouldn’t hurt (proper title/meta tags, site structure, etc).

And also… although it’s smart to be a master at one source of traffic, it’d also be wise to be proficient at another. Because if anything happens to one stream, you still have another source to rely on.

For example, some in the PPC game got caught when Google “slapped” and their income dried up. Another example is of people who relied solely on SE traffic and when the SE algorithms changed, and they got bumped down, and their traffic dried up as well.

So be a master at one or two methods of driving traffic and focus your way to success.

Tomorrow, I’ll reveal my No.1 source of traffic…

Now if you’re not very sure what article marketing is, here’s a quick rundown – Article marketing is one of the fastest ways of exposing your site to more people and gaining the traffic that really matters.

It involves the peddling of your articles to as many free articles sites as possible. Search engines love free articles sites, and having a page dedicated to your work would serve you well. Best of all, you’re allowed a resource box where you could prominently display your name as well as a link to your website. This would surely generate some traffic!

The trick is in writing an article that people would love to read and in subtly promoting your product through the same. So here are my 10 tips to consider in formulating your article marketing campaign.

1. Write well. By this, we mean that you should write well in accordance with proven methods in web publishing. Web readers are generally more impatient. Keep your paragraphs short, your tone conversational, and your style accessible. Avoid using jargons that common people wouldn’t understand. But still make sure that your article is grammatically sound, flows well, and factually correct.

2. Write with focus. Pinpoint a subject you want to discuss. It should be relevant to your product, as the point here is to generate traffic for your site. Stick with that topic.

3. If you do not have the time to write, you could hire a ghostwriter to do the job for you. Fees for a 300-600 word article range from $5 to $15, but money should not be a consideration for as long as you find a ghostwriter who is perfect for your needs. Additionally, the very essence of a ghostwriting service is confidentiality, so choose one whom you could trust.

4. Your article should be informative. It should not be a sales pitch, or at the very least, an obvious one. Readers frown on ads disguised as articles. The purpose is to provide them with something informative, something that they would want to read.

5. Strategically populate your article with a keyword that is relevant to your business as well as the topic of your work. Search engines love article sites, and more often than not, each page is indexed. Making your article keyword-rich would invite those search engine spiders like crazy!

6. Format your resource box. What is needed is but a short introduction of you. One or two lines will be perfect. Consider this line as an illustrative model: “John Doe has been in the web design business for 7 years. He has come up with many innovative products that have helped webmasters the world over.”

7. Encourage your readers to distribute your article by expressly allowing them to republish it in their websites, or to e-mail it to their friends, provided that your resource box is kept intact.

8. Compile a list of all the free articles directories that you can find. Know the editorial guidelines for each, and if your article would fit them, submit to as many sites as possible.

9. Do not stop writing! Write or commission more articles and repeat the entire process. It’s still a numbers game. The more articles you have distributed, the more chances you’ll have of being read by a lot of people.

10. Practice patience. Waiting could be difficult, but once your article is posted in numerous sites, more visitors are due to come. Give it time. The viral nature of article marketing would soon make its presence felt, that’s a guarantee!

Alright.. I hope this has helped you if you’re looking for some great methods of generating traffic to your site. Have a good weekend ahead!