5. TRAFFIC

You have a plan, a selected target market, a product, and a conversion mechanism.

Now you need traffic. People, prospects. Folks with cash and a desire for what you have available.

There are 4 online sources of visitor traffic for modern online marketing shown in in the top left of this diagram:

Let's quickly consider each of those sources of traffic:

Online Traffic Generation

SEO - 'Free visitors from search engines' is what some SEO's call it. But having worked as SEO Manager for the largest independently owned loan brokerage in the UK, I can tell you that traffic from the search engines is not free. Despite not paying per visitor, you still pay in resource time and expertise to be able to rank highly for enough key terms to bring consistent and targetted traffic from SEO.

Social Media - A relatively new phenomenon that has evolved with technology beyond the old Internet's bulletin boards, and message boards, into full blown personality profile driven, video enhanced, user generated communities.

Tapping into Social Media is expensive, but vitally important to 1. keep up to date with trends in your market. 2. survey and understand your target prospects. 3. Develop inlinks to your site important for SEO. Tapping the viral distribution of your marketing messages by users sharing with their friends. Etc.

Paid Ads - Banner advertising and PPC is often the first resort of corporate marketing. As SEO Manager for the loan brokerage we managed a Pay Per Click budget of thousands of pounds every month (I won't disclose past clients figures of course). Paid Ads should be seen as a significant yet small part of the overall generation of new visitor traffic.

Affiliates - Having a horde of loyal affiliates that actively promote your product to their client / customer database is fantastic, important, and just as complicated as the other sources of traffic.

Offline Traffic Sources

Offline marketing can be divided well into 3 broad categories:

• Broadcast media - tv, radio
• Print media - print ads, newspapers, magazines, flyers, billboards, etc.
• In-person events - industry events, exhibitions, leaflet distribution, direct sales, etc.

Turning Traffic Into Lead Generation

All that new visitor traffic according to the Aggresive Marketing Traffic Model above, should be directed to open content which attracts them into an optin process so that you acquire their contact details (at minimum this should be their first name and email), and only then do you introduce them to your actual sales offers.

This gives you the opportunity of building a Database Program with a pool of prospects that can be educated and enticed over time, so that at the right moment for them, when their desire or pain is most pressing, you will be in contact with them so they see your offer and by.

I am available on a retainer basis to advise on combinging the onine sources of traffic, and integrating them into your marketing funnel.