When you have your next album ready, or when you simply want to run a promotion on a particular item that youâre promoting, you will want to achieve results as fast as possible and then move on to the next thing. If youâre already well established with your SEO, switching gears is easy. But most people arenât and certainly most artists are not either. This is when considering paid traffic begins to make sense.
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Many webmasters ignore the seemingly difficult SEO and simply pay for their traffic. This way they can pinpoint exactly what their traffic acquisition will cost and as long as that cost is lower than what they make on their promotions, all is well.
But the thing is that you need BOTH â organic and paid traffic â to succeed online. If you suddenly STOP buying traffic â your business stops receiving visits immediately at that precise moment. If you stop doing SEO, your traffic continues at a rate corresponding to the quality of your SEO.
I have already given you a general run-down of how to SEO your site and more concrete instructions will soon follow. But in the present section I would like to discuss all the essential considerations youâll need to entertain in order to BUY your traffic outright. While not a replacement for SEO, this can be a fantastic way to rapidly scale up your entire operation.
Naturally, remember that paying for traffic only makes sense if youâre selling something. If you just want people to visit your site and listen to your music, then itâs perfectly sufficient to limit yourself to âfreeâ promotions, i.e. SEO and social networking.
But when you do have something you want to sell, then paying for traffic makes a whole lot of sense, as long as you know how to find good quality sources. A typical calculation might look like this:
- Am selling something where I earn $25 commission per each sale
- I buy a targeted Facebook (or other) campaign for $500 and receive, say, 2,000 exposures.
- My ad is hot and well-targeted, so 10% of the people will click through, i.e. I get 200 well pre-qualified visits to my offer page.
- The offer is smoking hot, so I convert at least 20%, i.e. I make 40 sales.
- 40 sales give me a turnover of $1,000, i.e. $500 profit.
- I can then reinvest that profit and repeat the campaign. If I get the same or similar results, I can cautiously assume that this is a reliable pattern. And so I scale up.
- My next campaign may be double that, and the profit will likewise be double. And if that happens, I scale up again. And again.
- In some cases, itâs possible to literally double your money week on week. But in most other cases, there are other considerations to keep in mind (weâll touch on that in a moment).
This is a very ROUGH idea of how online incomes are made. The key variables are the cost of traffic and conversion rates. And, of course, the per-unit incomes.
Knowing the above, you now know what youâre looking for. All the techniques Iâll discuss over the next bunch of chapters have something to do with either one or all of these variables. Weâll look at different techniques, different traffic networks, different payment methods, different âcreativesâ (i.e. your ads, landing pages, âswipesâ or email messages, and so on) â and all the wild and crazy ways of experimenting with paid traffic until you hit the mother lode.
The weird thing is that the same source never quite works the same for two different people, so thereâs always an element of trial an error involved. But there are also many very clever techniques to minimize the risk.
So, the ideal is, of course, to find the cheapest quality traffic with the highest level of targeting. This is why SEO is so priceless. Itâs technically âfreeâ, and yet when people visit your site, theyâre automatically highly pre-qualified. If we can come as close as possible to this effect using paid traffic â weâre rocking.
Another thing about paid traffic is that there are some traffic sources which are dirt-cheap and much too un-targeted to be worthwhile for âspecificâ offers â but they may be very valuable for âgeneralâ offers, such as for example AdSense ads, some CPA offers and so on. So many webmasters invest in HUGE (but cheap) traffic in order to ensure that they clock up enough ad views (for which they get paid both when they are displayed and when people purchase).
While I personally donât follow this technique much, I will explain further on how it works along with many other techniques. Who knows you may like it and go for it.
So – using paid traffic you can rapidly secure MILLIONS of visits to your pages within minutes or hours. There will be situations where you you’ll need that kind of boost.
So where do you buy GOOD traffic?
By far the two of the biggest kids on the block today are Google and Facebook. You can buy CPC ads on Google using their AdWords program or you can do the same on Facebook using their text or hybrid ads. Both of these major sources provide very high targeting quality and if youâre well-prepared for working with them, you may never even need to look for paid traffic elsewhere. But AdWords tends to be much more expensive than Facebook.
While Google and Facebook (and also a few of the other major search engines) are the big kids on the block, their total ad volume is only somewhere around 30% of the global total. So who serves the remaining 70%? Thatâs the so-called âsecond-tierâ networks. They may be individually a lot smaller than Google, but theyâre very competitive and sometimes you can buy superb quality traffic from them for next to nothing. Theyâve become so threatening to the majors that Facebook has revised its ad policy and is now actively trying to compete with them on price. And thatâs good news to you.
So, the majors, apart from Google and Facebook include YouTube (which is part of Google), Yahoo, Bing/MSN and Yahoo. Then there are the âalmost-first-tierâ traffic sources (some people think of them as the âfirst tierâ), which are sites like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Ask, etc.
And then there are the âsecond-tierâ sources which include ad networks such as IndustryBrains, AdSonar, Business.com, Affinity.com, PlentyOfFish (which is a dating network), etc.
Finally, there are many popular niche sites or e-zines where you can purchase ad space either directly or through agents. This sort or âmedia buyingâ can be the best traffic source for some types of offers.
Youâll find that many popular music blogs or forums will only be too happy to accept your ads! And they can be very cheap, especially when youâre trying for the first time.
- The pros of using the second-tier networks include MUCH lower prices, but the cons often include lower-grade traffic (but not always, if you know what youâre doing). Another thing in favor of those networks is that you can advertise pretty much anything you like, while the first-tier networks tend to be more like âBig Brotherâ with all their rules and restrictions. Sometimes ridiculously so.
- The pros of using the first-tier networks include generally MUCH higher traffic quality, but the cons tend to include substantially higher prices â although Facebookâs ads are now actually quite affordable and there are ways to really cut down on costs making Facebook one of the hottest potential traffic sources in 2014. But â first tier networks like to act like your Keepers. Big Brother comes to mind. They will manually vet your ads and reject anything they donât like â and that can be anything they decide. This can sometimes be very unpleasant and off-putting. But⦠outside of SEO, they do have the best traffic.
For an extended list of traffic sources, check out my very comprehensive bonus resource pages here:
- RSS Networks
- Mobile Networks
- Social Networks
- Traffic Exchanges
- Video Networks
- eBook and Writing Networks
- Various Networks
- Classified Ad Networks
- CPA and Affiliate Networks
- CPV Networks
- CPC/CPM Networks
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Book 3 – Chapter 26Getting Ready to Promote |
Course Overview | Book 3 – Chapter 28Calculations |
Book 3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, , 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, Overview
Bonuses: templ, lib, tips, kwds, models Link Res: aff, class, cpa, cpv, cpc, write, mob, outs, rss, soc, traff, var, exch, srcs, vid Sub-courses: sens adw, aff, ar, bkm, cpy, cp, fb, fun, goo, lst, loc, mem, opt paid, ppal, sbox, prod, seo, opt, socn, vidm, host, wp, lnch