Paid Traffic First, Ask Questions Later

October 27, 2014 by Veit 21 Comments

if I could travel back in time and tell my younger self to focus on ONE thing, it would be this …

… (drum-roll) …

(there’s a close second (and a third as you’ll see below), but here’s the winner;-)

Paid Traffic.

as in PPC and its brothers and sisters.

NOT: “hey, I’ll pay someone on fiverr to build me a link-pyramid so I can get some free SEO traffic”

There are so many reasons why, I don’t even know where to begin, so here are 2 in random order:

1) you can switch paid traffic on/off at will, so you can support short-lived campaigns and profit from them (think launches):

fat chance trying to do that with SEO…

2) you learn soooooo much faster than with ‘free’ traffic (SEO, social-viral-something, forum posting, article marketing, ….)

last week I set up a campaign in the weightloss niche, and ….

… it bombed spectacularly.

Not a single signup to my webinar.

ZERO!

Man, that sucked.

But it didn’t suck nearly as much as it would have had I spent ages setting up a site, finding content, doing or outsourcing SEO ….

…. just to find out that nobody is interested in this particular offer.

And of course, there’s the flip-side:

did a quick $10 experiment in a niche where I NEVER thought I’d get any response, and this thing has gone viral.

Every day I’m getting FB notifications that new people like my page (which incidentally has precisely ZERO content….)

…. but the title of the page itself apparently has an enormous appeal….

Can you test an entirely new marketing for $10 using any of the free methods?

(without spending more than $10 worth of your time? … because setting up the test-ad took 3mins tops!)

ok, step back for a second now!

This post is actually inspired by a conversation I had only a couple of days – with a guy who has been at this “Internet Marketing” thing for years, and still is at square 1.

I’m absolutely serious:

If you are stuck at Square 1…

(and want to move from Square 1 to Square 2, then Square 3….)

aka: “If (only) I could travel back in time and tell myself what I should focus all my efforts on” it would be

PAID traffic
(close second): high converting sales-funnels.

which both have a fundamental (and very re-assuring) ‘truth’ to them:

the ONLY way to master either of these is through TESTING.

(it’s reassuring because TESTING requires ZERO special powers whatsoever, and even works for those of us who constantly think “that’s just too bloomin’ simple, that would never work“;-)

Yes, you can shorten the learning curve by learning the ropes from someone who’s actually done it…

… but when you get around to applying it to your own market, the real gold at the end of the rainbow can only EVER be reached through TESTING.

So, here’s the thing:

2014 is rapidly nearing its end.

Look back over what you’ve achieved in 2014.

And tell me:

could you have achieved a whole lotta more had you focused on paid traffic and then converting that traffic with a nice lil’ sales-funnel?

I’m willing to bet, in 99.9% of all cases, the answer is YES.

I’m also willing to bet that when you look at the money you dumped down the virtual Internet drain on random products you never used, well, there’s a nice lil’ PAID traffic budget for you.

And when you look at the lost opportunity cost, it’s starting to feel a little ridiculous you’re doing ANYTHING but