Recycled Traffic

I have a close friend who makes over six figures a month online – well, he used to until about a year ago, then it started to drop dramatically.  I used to warn him every time I saw him that he needed to change his ways or else some day it would come back to haunt him.  He told me not to worry because he knows how to drive a lot of traffic through Google PPC and because of that he’ll always have traffic, visitors and money.  

The warning I kept giving him was simply this, “Don’t stop driving new traffic to your site, but you need to focus more time selling to your customers and visitors who have already come to your site and already know who you are.”

His fatal flaw was that he was so good at generating traffic he would never email his subscriber and buyer lists again to sell them more products.  His profits came from the quick sale, not the long term.  

Now, as Google and the economy keep changing, he’s watching his profits quickly disappear and all he has to show is a list of people who, at one time, came to his site but have forgotten who he is and they aren’t buying from him anymore.

The Most Expensive Customers

It’s really a shame that more people don’t talk about this subject, because this is where the bulk of your profits and money come from.  We spend so much time focused on driving traffic, but that’s normally not an action that makes you money.  It creates the customer, but the money and profits normally come later.  Actually, traffic and lead generation are often the things that cost a company the most.  In fact, we normally lose money on every sale we make from a new lead because we make our profits based on how we recycle this traffic.

Now, one thing to always remember is that it is a lot easier, and cheaper, to market to customers you’ve already acquired, than to go out and get new ones.  This simple concept can grow your business exponentially.  It’s been said that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one – so now lets focus on marketing and selling to them because it’s a lot cheaper and easier.

Today I wanted to give you a few simple ideas to help get your creative juices flowing so you’ll be able to use all of the traffic you have been getting and turn it into huge multiples with very little extra effort.  I’ve broken this down into four simple steps.

Step 1: Defining Your Attractive Character

You may have heard me talk about something we call “The Attractive Character.”  Now, this is not a concept I created, but I stole it from John Alanis who sells products in the dating niche.  He spoke at one of my events and told us that the same skills he teaches his guys to get women to approach them are the same skills that we as business owners need to get customers to be attracted to them.

This is the key to making all of this work.  Personality based marketing will make all the difference between you making $50 or $10,000 a month.  When you understand this powerful concept you will understand that making money is not just about the product you sell, but the relationship you create with your buyers.  The power of personality cannot be underestimated!

You can get someone onto your lists, but they aren’t going to open your email, read it, and buy from you unless they have a good relationship with you.   So, how do you build that relationship? List out the qualities you have that would be attractive to other people.

For example, I almost always share stories about my wrestling, my kids, and shooting potato guns.  The reason why is because I’m trying to relate to athletes, people with kids (especially people who either are a twin, know a twin, or have a twin), and to anyone who thinks it’s “too complicated” for them to do it.

For example, this month we are launching our new “Micro Continuity” program, I sent out a bunch of videos, but one of them in particular was meant to help build a closer bond between my subscribers and me.  It was my “Fight for Your Dreams” video.  You can still watch it at www.MicroContinuity.com/fight.  It shows videos of me wrestling, talks about my dreams, and how I failed at one of my most important dreams.  Then I show my family, business, and why I’ve decided to start training for the Olympics.   There’s no content because with this video, I just wanted to build a relationship, strengthen the bond I have with my subscribers and get people to want to hear from me and care what I’m doing.

Step 2: Giving Them Solid Content

Again, your goal is to build relationships with people who want to hear from you.  That means giving them value upfront so they will like you, trust you and eventually buy from you.

You can see another illustration of us doing that if you go to this page:  www.MicroContinuity.com/squeeze. Again, notice that I am GIVING away over 50 minutes of free content.  I’ve had a lot people say that I was crazy for giving away that much, because it almost made the buying of the product not necessary for success, but again, this is what binds people to you and gets them coming back for more.

Step 3: Building a Community

The next step is building some type of social proof through a community.  Now, it could be a forum, a blog, a web TV show, but something that gets people interacting about what you are showing them. Here is another example of how we are doing this in our current launch: www.MicroContinuity.com/blog.

During the launch process we have had well over 500 comments from people who saw our videos and loved what we were teaching.  When you do this right and you get people positively commenting in your communities others will see the comments and it builds a very strong sense of social proof that what you’re talking about is real.  When that happens, for whatever reason, their likelihood of responding to your offers will dramatically increase.  People love being part of something, and they will keep coming back to keep that sense of belonging.

Step 4: Make Offers

The biggest reason why most people will fail at this is they are scared to sell things to people.  Every time we do a seminar, I’ll have a lot of people ask me, “How long should I wait before I try to sell my subscribers something?”  My answer is always the same.  “You should sell them something immediately and often!”

From your first communication with your customer you are training them on how the relationship between you and them will work.  The fastest way to guarantee your subscribers never become buyers is to wait for a month, a week, or even a day before you try to sell them something.

People are online trying to buy things.  If they are interested enough in a topic to go to your site, give you their email address, and then are not given an opportunity to buy something, then they will keep looking until they can find something to buy.

People love to buy things, and when there is a need, they don’t want to wait seven days before they can get to the meat.  They want it now and if you can’t provide that then they will go somewhere else to find it.  That means your competitors are getting all of your best customers because you were unwilling or too scared to sell them something.

So, make sure you give them offers often, but be sure to do it the right way.  Just sending out emails selling something is very anti-climatic to a subscriber.  This weekend I was talking to someone and they said that every time you sell something, you need to make it some type of event – and that you should be doing some type of event every time you communicate with your audience.

So, when you are doing offers – do things that are different. Here are a few ideas to get the wheels turning:

• Do a live ustream.tv show interviewing the creator of the offer
• Create a contest around the offer giving a prize to a person who best implements what you are teaching
• Post a video about a special topic on your blog that pushes people to your offer
• Give huge discounts, cash back offers, or bonuses that get people excited to buy
• Have people submit videos to you acting out what you’re teaching
• Make videos showing your life story
• Act out the sales letter with your spouse (this will get them to read every word)

The key again is to make every communication with your audience some type of event, and if you do that – people will listen, because they all love events!!! To reemphasis the key point, make sure you continue to build the relationship with the subscribers you have and they will continue to buy from you forever.  Focus effort on this part of your business and you’ll see dramatic increases with very little extra effort.

Russell Brunson is a featured speaker at this years MARKETING and MONEYMAKING SUPERCONFERENCE.  For more information about this event, and to find out how you can save $500 off the registration fee, click this link http://dankennedy.com/go/blogfriends.

Author Info:  Russell Brunson started his online business 5 years ago with $20 and a simple idea. At the time he was wrestling at Boise State University and within a year of graduation had sold over a million dollars of his own products and services from his basement. He has been featured in ABC, NBC and Fox news teaching beginners how to start their own online businesses. He's helped tens of thousands of students from all around the world to FINALLY make their first dollar online. Russell's business has grown from a very small one man shop to a multi-million dollar business with over 40 employees in house. He consistently makes well over $100k a week and is on target to do over 10 million dollars in sales this year alone. But even with all of this growth, his focus is still on one thing - the success of his students. His greatest pride is in seeing others implement his simple systems to finally make real money online.

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