The Secrets To Traffic Revealed!

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Updated 5 years ago

When a new friend on here discovered that I have been in the online business world for a few years, but had taken some time off he asked me about paid traffic.

So I thought this would make an ideal post topic and here I am exposing everything I know to help everyone who's got the same challenge.

There are many ways to get your website, post, landing page, etc. in front of an interested audience.

The question is what kind of audience are you looking for?

These are all things that we will be looking at in some detail today.

We're going to discuss the various tricks that you can use to grow your traffic and grow your daily audience to the thousands

I won't lie to you, there are hundreds of advertising gimmiks online, that don't work and are frankly way too expensive for the results they offer you.

I have personally fallen victim to such traffic programs and strategies, but no one learns for free, eih?

So let's get to it shall we?

What Do You Need The Traffic For?

Before we start getting traffic, we need to first understand what is it that we need traffic for?

For example, if you are building an email list the approach you will take is very different to the approach you would take if for example you have a facebook page that you need to get followers to.

In some cases there will be an overlap and in this article I will try my best to point out as many of these as possible.

So the first step is to determine what kind of traffic you need and what do you need it for.

Let's look at the different areas that you may need traffic for before we go any futher:

Email List: A list of emails that you build with people who opt-in to receive emails from you via a web page known as a "landing page". You collect these emails with the purpose of sending them emails on a regular basis using a mass mailer tool known as an "auto-responder".

Blog Audience: This is where you have a blog that you post on regularly and would like more people to read your articles and increase the number of daily views you get.

Facebook Page: You have created a Facebook page and would like to increase your followers on the page with the intent of posting regularly to get engagement, traffic and sales.

Instagram Page: Similar to facebook in purpose but would require slightly different strategies to grow.

YouTube Channel: Again similar to facebook but this time you want to grow subscribers and increase view times.

Ecommerce: You've created a website which either sells your products or other products that you are an affiliate of but visually looks like an ecommerce site. So would look like Amazon or Ebay and the like. For this you would need traffic that is either ready to buy or close to making a buying decision.

These are some reasons why you may want to get traffic and this list can go on for pages and pages so...

I'll cut the list off here and if you'd like to know about something specific that is not mentioned here, feel free to drop me a comment and I'll try and fill in some of the gaps for you.

The Different Types Of Traffic Sources

Well as you have probably established already, there are free traffic sources (also known as organic traffic) and paid traffic sources (paid traffic).

So I've put together below 2 lists one for the organic traffic sources and the other is for the paid ones.

Organic/Free Traffic Sources:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Social Traffic
Email Traffic
Guest Blogging
Forums/Online Conversations
eBooks
Video Traffic

Paid Traffic Sources:

Social Ads
Ezines
Banners
SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
SoloAds
Bulk Traffic Providers

But before we get into these we need to tackle a very important question.

Paid or Free Traffic - What Should I Use?

The straight forward answer is whichever you prefer.

The not so straight forward one depends on a lot of factors.

The two most important ones are whether you can afford paid traffic and whether you actually need it at this stage.

If the answer is no to the two previous questions then we need to establish exactly how much time can you spare?

The free methods are not exactly free, they may not cost money directly but they do cost you a time investment.

As a person who is embarking on doing business online you need to start thinking like a business person as opposed to an employee.

Your time now is worth money whether you realize it or not is irrelevant because it is a fact of life for every business person.

With that being said, all the free/organic traffic channels can take a relatively short time to use if you work smart rather than hard.

I personally don't think there is a need to use paid traffic unless you are in one of two situations.

The first scenario is where you have already used up all the free methods and have maximized the potential income from using them and would like to scale up your results and grow your income.

The second scenario is where you have a great start-up capital and would like to ramp up quickly from earlier on in the business' life online.

So let's discuss each of these methods and see which ones appeal to you most and are appropriate for your circumstances.

Organic/Free Traffic

Since I prefer that you maximize results from free traffic first, I thought it reasonable to lead with them first.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

I don't think I should waste your time too much on this section since the WA training is full of information and tools to help you with that.

So I think I will just reiterate that search engine traffic comes when you optimize your website and videos so that search engines like google, bing, yahoo, etc. can crawl and index them and in turn show them to people searching for the topics they contain.

Social Traffic

This is one of those free channels that will take time to begin giving you a sizeable chunk of traffic if you will grow them organically.

With that being said, it's also worthy to note that there is nothing preventing you from creating viral posts that grow your followers exponentially in short time frame.

I am from Egypt, there was a girl in the college of mass communications, her dad owns a medium sized cafe and was struggling.

The girl made a free advertising video for her father's cafe, what happened next blew everyone's mind.

The video was so low budget to the extent that people shared it to make fun of the girl's effort.

Within a few months the video had crossed over 1 million views.

The video went so viral that one of the famous shows on TV (Similar to Opera & The Ellen Show) here in Egypt invited her and her family for an interview.

This girl today is a celebrity on most of the biggest social media channels with millions of followers, all this from just from one video.

Now imagine someone like her telling people to go visit her website because she has a new post on there...

Millions would flock there in a matter of minutes, leaving comments, sharing, etc.

Assuming a more realistic scenario, how would you go on to grow your social channel so as to get more people to see your posts and click your links?

The section on Forums/Online Conversations will tell you just that so keep reading to find out more.

Email Traffic

You've probably heard the saying "The money is in the list".

Let me start off by saying I HATE EMAIL MARKETING... lol

But just because I don't like it doesn't mean it won't work for you.

We've brushed up earlier in this article about email lists so I won't waste your time repeating it here, just to fill this article with more words that add up to nothing more than a bunch of fluff.

To build your list is the trickiest part of this type of free traffic.

You can build it with paid traffic like solo ads and other marketing options but this is the free section, so look at the Guest Blogging, Forums/Online Conversations, and eBooks sections for more details on how to do just that.

Once you have a list of at least 100 opted-in subscribers you can send them emails regularly with links that you would like them to visit.

Obviously just like blogging for the emails to be read their contents need to offer your subscribers some value otherwise they won't even open your emails.

Also if you just send the link the email will either end up in the spam box, the subscriber will report you, or at the very least they will not click the link and will most likely unsubscribe not too long afterwards.

Guest Blogging

This is where this article begins to get really useful.

This particular free traffic channel will allow you to piggie back on someone else's traffic and popularity ethically and with their permission.

There are plenty of popular blogs and eZines (electronic magazines) out there that allow you to post articles on their platforms for free.

As long as your content is related to the platform's audience interests, unique (i.e. not copy and paste from other sites, even your own site), and is of acceptable quality they'll accept it.

You would write your blog post and embed your link(s) in it as you would a regular blog post on your own website.

People who read your article, if you have a proper and effective call to action, will then click on your link and go to wherever you want to direct them.

I would put links on here to a few examples that I know of, but I don't think it's appropriate to link to sites outside of WA other than my own, on their platform.

Actually come to think of it, what I am doing right here now is a form of guest blogging.

Which brings us to an important point...

Make sure that the platform allows you to put links in your post to avoid getting banned.

I understand that if you are not familiar with email marketing you maybe wondering how a guest blog will help you get emails.

To get an email you create a page known in the online business world as a landing page, which is basically a page with nothing more than a headline, a box for the people to put their email address in, and in many cases a bonus ebook, course, gift, etc. for signing up to your newsletter.

This will also apply to ebooks when we get to that section.

Forums/Online Conversations

For the purpose of this section I am going to assume you are familiar with Yahoo Answers and Quora, as well as similar sites.

These are literally a gold mine for free traffic.

You need to get on all forums that talk about the topic/niche you are focused on.

Once you are on there, search for questions and discussions related to your niche or something specific within it (sub-niche).

Answer the questions, get engaged in the conversation, be an active member of their community.

You basically try to genuinely help people find answers to their questions and overcome challenges and obsticles to success.

Within your answers/comments, on many of these platforms, you can drop your link whether in your "signature" or within the body of your comment.

Just please, please, please, whatever you do, don't be spammy and drop your link without helping people, it will get you reported and banned!

You need to put in the effort to answer the question and then at the end of your answer you could say something along the lines of "I know of a place where you can get a more detailed answer to this, as well as other similar questions, if you'd like to check it out here's the link...".

The same concept applies to how you would get such traffic from social media pages.

The best thing about this approach is that once you've done it, it becomes somewhat hands off for some time.

Your answer/comment will remain there for a while and anyone who has the same question and finds that post will see your comment, and potentially click your link, as long as it is still one of the top few.

Some platforms also allow for people to upvote your answer so that it stays at the top, that's yet another reason for you to really put an effort in your answer.

Another way to do this, is to take the more personal approach and get them to private message you, and this works a lot better for social media as it lowers your chances of being reported as spam.

You get them to intiate a conversation with you and this has the added bonus that if you build a relationship with that person you could reach out to them with other links in the future if you get a vibe from them that they are willing.

eBooks

This is possibly one of the most under utilized and least spoken about methods of traffic in the online business world.

Frankly I don't know why, especially that it gives you lazer targetted traffic.

If you are here on WA then you are either already a blogger or a blogger in the making and the art of the written word is becoming one of your masterful skills.

Instead of just blogging, create an ebook that speaks about the specific topic of interest that you are targetting.

You can easily find plenty of articles online about how to structure an ebook and start writing one.

The cover you can make with one of the many free options online like canva or whichever one you prefer.

You write an ebook and embed it with links to your landing page, blog post, website, etc.

The best thing about this technique is it gets you traffic that is futher along in the buying process and possibly already ready to buy what you are selling.

It also positions you as someone knowledgeble about the topic and thus earns you a higher level of trust and credibility instantly in comparison to others online.

Once the book is ready you publish it on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Bookrix, smashwords, and Apple’s eBook Store.

You could sell the book itself, but if you publish it as a free ebook you multiply the downloads and in turn the potential traffic you would get from its readers.

Video Traffic

This one is a fun one because first of all it overlaps with SEO.

In order for search engines to find your video, you will need to manage its keywords and SEO so that your video is shown to the people you target.

The neat trick here is you don't need to reinvent the wheel.

A few years back I was introduced to the concept of content repurposing.

It's a common sense concept that most of us don't think about.

Yet! it saves us hours upon hours of work.

The best thing about this concept is that you can apply it to every other free traffic source I mentioned above and even others that span beyond the scope of this article.

So what is content repurposing? It is exactly as the name states, you have an old blog post, or a chapter from one of your ebooks...

You take it and make it into a video, a social media post, a forum answer, etc.

Why not? You've put in the effort, time, and squeezed your mind to create the content, why not modify it and reuse the information in it over multiple channels to increase your exposure?

So let's take the blog article example. It's jam packed with information.

The easiest way to repurpose it is to create a powerpoint presentation, export it as a video and then stick a voice over on it (speak about the contents of every slide).

There you go, you have a video ready to publish, you then just do some SEO magic and stick it on YouTube and other video streaming sites.

Under the video is where you get the traffic, in the description you give a summary of what's in the video and strategically place a link with a call to action inviting people to click it and buy, subscribe, read, etc.

With social media repurposing you just create a summary of the post's content and then again a link with a call to action.

Summary Of The Free Traffic Channels

So that was a juicy section wasn't it?

We've so far covered the free/organic traffic channes where you can grow your audience without paying a single cent.

We've mentioned SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Social Traffic, Email Traffic, Guest Blogging, Forums/Online Conversations, eBooks, Video Traffic as means to get more eyes on whatever link you want to get them on.

So how many of these have you tried yet?

Is it becoming clearer now why I suggested that you consider taking the free approach first until you've reached saturation and made enough money to begin paying for traffic?

I have an apology to make though...

Unfortunately this blog post has exceeded 3000 words already and we've barely scrached the surface here.

So I just got an idea, I think I will create another blog post specifically about the paid traffic channels.

This way I give you the opportunity to digest the information that I've shared with you so far and give your eyes a little break before going into another lengthy article about paid traffic.

I am sorry if you've come here to find out details about paid traffic, click baiting was not my intention when I set out to write this post, but it's gotten way too long and I've discovered one post cannot cover everything.

Tomorrow, I'll finish off the article on paid traffic and publish it for you guys.

Who knows? Maybe this will be the start of a traffic series, I mean it is a very deep topic, with plenty of diversity to cover in one or two posts alone and do it justice.

Don't worry, I'll also link it here once it's published so that you can find it easily if you ever want to come back and read through them together.

In the mean while, I suggest you start applying at least one of the things I covered here and let me know how it went for you.

And as aways, I'll be waiting to hear your thoughts, questions, and suggestions in the comment section.

Good Luck!

Evolve Your Wealth,
Tareq Helmi

UPDATE: The post on paid traffic is now up as promised and you can check it out by clicking here