Good Afternoon,
Today we will continue our audience building/online business creation series by talking about traffic sources and choosing the right one for you and your business. As I mentioned in the first part of this series one of the key components of starting your online business is having multiple reliable traffic sources.
There are a few things to consider when deciding on your traffic sources:
- If you already have any kind of audience… where are they?
- If not, where do your potential customers hangout online? Forums? Facebook? Instagram? YouTube?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses? Writing? Speaking? Being funny/engaging? Being a teacher?
Also remember that one of them MUST be email.
If you already have an audience then leverage that. They presumably already like you so start giving them more content and other forms of value and ease them into your new venture. I think this one is pretty self explanatory so there’s not a lot of detail for me to go into.
If you do NOT already have an audience then you will need to do some research. Say your audience is Pit Bull owners and you want to sell dog training and dog products. Start by doing a Google search for pit bull (the breed of dog, not the rapper) forums, groups, meetups, and websites. Search Facebook to see if there are not only groups, but if they are active. Join the group and see if the community is a good fit for driving traffic. If there is a lot of activity start your own page and group. Repeat this process for Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. Do something similar for YouTube… are there lots of people making videos on your topic? If so then YouTube might be a good place to start building your audience and generating traffic.
The final thing to consider… what are your strengths?
I am much better at writing than I am at speaking so Facebook has been a great fit for me. I have adapted and been able to do ok with YouTube as well. I am NOT good at being succinct or creating visual content so Instagram and Pinterest have just never worked out for me. Analyze your skill set … both in what you are best at, and where your personality plays the best. Take all of these findings and weigh them together to find your ideal traffic sources… and remember you have to do email or this won’t work.
One other quick note… considering my background is in SEO you may be wondering why I don’t list this as a traffic source. While its true you should optimize whatever you do for search traffic and build towards that long term… the truth is that for this type of business model it is too slow. It is also “reactive”. Meaning people need to be looking for what it is you have to offer, as opposed to you making the effort to get in front of them. So while SEO is great is some circumstances, it isn’t a fit for this model. As an exercise let me know what you think your #1 traffic source would/should be. Then we can start talking about what sort of content works best for each platform.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Best,
CMW