Traffic Generation 102 - Making Your Public Domain Products Profitable

From:
The Desk of Damien Dupont

Because of the pivotal importance of an ongoing, steady flow of fresh website visitors to the profitability of your business, Russell Brunson devoted two of the six modules in his Public Domain How To course entirely to traffic creation.

The article on this page is the second of three preview articles on traffic creation. If you have just arrived at this page and wish to start with the first article on this topic, it can be found here:
Traffic Generation 101: Defining and Finding Your Target Market.

In Traffic Generation 102, Russell teaches the "how to" for the following five strategies for driving visitors to your website:

 
Building Your Affiliate Network

Russell Brunson relates how, out of every single way to drive traffic and to make money, his affiliate network has been and is the number one secret to his online success. He attributes his initial focus on this to something that happened when he first started building his online presence with his very first product, Zip Brander. He was spending a lot of time in different forums trying to market it through "community marketing" (discussed in the previous traffic generation article). And in one of the forums, someone asked a question: "If you lost everything in your business but one thing, what would that one thing be?".

You may well have heard that question before, and the answer that people usually give is "my mailing list", and of course, that's how everyone started replying in that thread. Except then there was one person who went against the grain, and said, "The only thing I would take with me are my affiliates".

The person who said that was Allen Says, a veteran marketer, a millionaire, and the owner of the Warrior's Forum. And if you know him or if you're on his mailing list, you'll be aware that he never sends any promotional offers to his subscribers. Instead, he has an amazing affiliate network, and they build his business and sell his products for him while he sits back and rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to his affiliate program.

And so, when Russell heard this he really took it to heart, and decided to focus on developing his own affiliate network. In essence, finding people who would promote his products for him.

Here's an example Russell gives as to why he believes building an affiliate network is more powerful than building your own mailing list. Let's say you have a mailing list and you've built it up to 30 or 40,000 people. That's a good-sized mailing list, and you should be able to make $10K to $20K p/mth with a list that size fairly easily.

Now let's contrast that and let's say you have 10 power affiliates that are promoting your product, each with a 30K list. Now suddenly your scope goes from your 30,000 people to 300,000 people due to the longer reach you now have thanks to your affiliates. Plus, some of this referred traffic will join your own mailing list.

So building an affiliate program is very important, but there are few people that do it properly. Most people simply have a link on their website that says something like "click here to become an affiliate" and you can sign up and promote their product, but it often ends at that.

So what Russell covers are the areas that you need to focus on beyond that, in order to get good exposure for your affiliate program, and above average results from your affiliates.

He relates how, before he started implementing these strategies, one December he had just finished sending out checks to 101 of his affiliates for the previous month. He then checked and saw he had over 10,000 affiliates signed up under his program, and realized that 99% of his affiliates didn't make any sales at all.

So he started implementing the following strategies in his affiliate program, and found that they resulted in a several hundred-fold percentage increase in his affiliate referred sales. The strategies he covers are to:

Pay-per-Click Advertising

As the name implies, pay-per-click ('PPC') refers to a form of Internet advertising where you only pay each time someone clicks on your ad. You can place your ads either directly on the search engines' results pages (usually seen in the right hand side column for most searches done at Google.com, Yahoo.com and Bing.com), or have your ads syndicated to independently owned third-party websites. You don't have to select these third-party websites yourself, as this is done automatically for you by the pay-per-click providers such as Google's AdWords and Yahoo!'s Search Marketing programs who will ensure your ads display on websites with the same or similar topic as yours, ensuring a targeted audience for your ads.

There are a number or advantages to using PPC to drive traffic, and a number of disadvantages. Some of the advantages include:

Some of the disadvantages include:

Russell is not a PPC expert. He admits this, and refers to several third party experts in his training that you can go to for more in-depth PPC training. One I can recommend is PPC Kahuna, which I have full access to as a Portal Feeder member. Whilst Russell is no expert, he does use PPC for a variety of reasons which he expands upon and which includes:

Power Linking

Power linking is a form of link building that improves the search engine ranking of your website, but when you're doing it, that's not your primary focus.

We all use search engines to find information and to research products/solutions we want to buy. But after entering an initial search term and looking at the first few websites, we will often either:
 

Power linking operates in that realm, where people click on links between sites that recommend each other. Often times you will read the web page you went to, and if you can't find exactly what you're after on that page, you might click on another link within the content you are reading, and/or click on a relevant ad on that page. You might go to two, three, four, five or more different pages trying to find exactly what it is you're looking for. And if you don't find it, you start back over again on the search engine.

And so Power Linking is about getting a hunk of all the traffic relating to your target market that is going back and forth from web site to web site, and in the process of doing this, all the links pointing back to your primary website will in turn boost its search engine prominence. In module 4, Russell delves into some strategies to achieve this, including finding link partners & getting them to say "Yes" to hosting your content, recommended software for the purpose, and how to increase the click rate on your links.

Author's note: Part of what Russell covers is the syndication of your content to privately owned websites. A more recent evolution is to also syndicate content to a plethora of public Web2.0 websites such as Squidoo.com & HubPages.com, amongst many others. There are now entire courses, as well as software and training toolkits such as Web2Mayhem¹, that are dedicated to traffic generation using Web 2.0 techniques.

¹As per PPC Kahuna mentioned in the PPC section above, as a Portal Feeder member I also have access to the full Web 2 Mayhem toolkit, and I cannot recommend it more highly. All three websites are owned by Jason Potash, Marc Quarles and Jason Katzenback, with Portal Feeder being their premium offering, membership of which gives access to all the others. Portal Feeder is closed most of the time, but re-opens once or twice a year for a week or so to let in new members on the waiting list.

Many of these Web 2.0 sites are authority sites that achieve high search engine rankings, and this can make it much easier for you to have your own content appear on page one of the search results for your target keywords. So whilst it may be more challenging to get your primary website on page one for a given keyword, your syndicated content on Web 2.0 websites can act as a conduit, and you can aim to capture several of the entries on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing's search results through this method. In addition to the referred click-through traffic, the links will boost the ranking of your own website.

As stated at the top of this page, this is the second of three articles previewing Russell Brunson's web traffic creation system taught in Module 3 (Traffic Generation 101) and Module 4 (Traffic Generation 102) of the Public Domain How To course. The third preview article can be found here: Article and Search Engine marketing.

There are a total of six modules in Russell Brunson's Public Domain How To system, more than 11 hours of audio content in all, accompanied by transcripts and a workbook. For a preview of the content contained within each of the six modules of Public Domain How To, subscribe to our e-course below.

Warmly,

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