The Amazing Unlimited Free Traffic Technique
From: Jonathan Mizel
Cyberwave Media, Inc.
Dear Friend,
Over the past 11 years, we have reviewed many techniques to get visitors to your Web site. The good news is there are literally dozens of ways to generate quality traffic.
Unfortunately, almost all of them have a cost, whether we are talking about opt-in e-mail, banners, pop-ups, pay-per-click bidding, or whatever. Even free techniques, like search engine optimization, newsgroup postings, or linking strategies require an investment of time, and the results are hit and miss at best.
However, there's one method that encompasses nearly all the above techniques with zero advertising risk, and that's the use of affiliates and revenue share partners. Yet, not one in a thousand marketers has a clue as to how to get others to willingly risk their time and money to advertise your site.
It's not about commission rates or tracking codes (though those things do come into play). And it's not about starting an affiliate program and sending out a mailing inviting everyone to join. Rather it's about creating a sales process that outsells every other sales process available to the affiliate, one that generates the highest visitor value possible.
Recently, Guerilla Marketer Mitch Meyerson interviewed me regarding how to turn on the unstoppable faucet of highly targeted risk-free traffic. This technique has been used by many of our large clients, some who generate as much as $500,000 a month.
It's called the Unlimited Free Traffic Technique, and it's as much about psychology as it is about marketing. And now that you know the formula, you too can create your own tidal wave of visitors that you literally couldn't stop even if you wanted to!
Mitch: Today we are going to discuss creating traffic to your website with Jonathan Mizel. Let me start by asking you this. You've developed a system called the unlimited free traffic technique. Can you tell us about this?
Jonathan: Well, you have to look at all the different ways one can generate traffic to websites. There are banner ads, pop-up ads, opt-in email, search engines, pay per clicks; all sorts of things. The problem with each of these methods is not whether they work, because they all work in their own way, some very well in fact.
The problem is you need to pay to implement them. That's why I developed the unlimited free traffic technique. You get traffic using just about every method out there, and you get it on a risk free basis.
Face it, you're going to have to pay for the traffic eventually, but you don't have to pay until you make sales. Instead of buying advertising; pop ups, email or whatever, you simply get other people to send you their traffic, to do mailings on your behalf or run pop-ups and banners on their website. The only time you pull money out of your pocket is after a sale is made, and that's to pay a commission.
Mitch: That's fantastic. For all the Guerrilla Marketers out there, it's a great risk free, money saving way to go.
Jonathan: In fact, if you are a Guerrilla Marketer, this is probably the best way to get traffic to your site. The reason is you don't pay for anything other than performance. But there's another aspect of this that's quite interesting· if you implement this properly, your competitors, those people who normally see you as a problem, are the ones who send you most of the traffic! They do this because if you follow the steps I'll lay out in a minute, and align your interests with theirs; they will make more money sending you their visitors than trying to sell to them directly.
Mitch: That's incredible! I am curious about the steps; what do we do first?
Jonathan: The first step is to have an affiliate or revenue share program in place that tracks sales from resellers. There are systems out there for a couple of hundred bucks (like EasyOnlineSales.com and Your Own Affiliate Program) that are more than sufficient. You can also use ClickBank, 2Checkout.com or other third-party system. It's not about the technology, so simpler is actually better.
For example, if you wanted to sell Yanik Silver's products, you would sign up for his affiliate program and receive a specially tracked page to send your traffic to. Then on your own site, you could put a pop up advertising Yanik's products. When people see the popup and go to his site and buy, you get a commission.
The key is creating a sales process that is so attractive to customers, that marketers (even your competitors) will run your ads because when they do, they make money!
Let me give you an example of something really cool that happens when you maximize visitor value and pay a generous commission· affiliates search you out and without any work on your part (or even your knowledge), they join the program and start promoting it. They find you, they sign up, and they send you traffic.
I was at a seminar a couple of years ago and I asked how many people would like to do a joint venture with me. Everybody raised their hand and looked very excited. I said "It's real easy; we don't even have to speak with one another. Just go to our website, sign up for the affiliate program and do the joint venture. And if you sell something, I'll send you a check. It's that simple."
There are no negotiations and I don't have to set up a special page and hope and pray you are going to promote it. The expectations are low, and the system is completely automated. You sign up as an affiliate, and if you think you can sell products, go ahead and send me all the visitors you want using nearly any method you like (except spam) and I'll pay you after the sales have been made.
Mitch: So anyone can partner with someone who has an affiliate program?
Jonathan: Absolutely. We have seen a huge increase in the number of people starting affiliate programs in the last couple of years because they realize traffic is getting more expensive and they want to minimize their advertising risk.
Pay per click search engines are taking over the free search engines, and in some cases, you have to pay fifty cents, a dollar, even five dollars or more to generate just one visitor. And of course, there is no guarantee even if you pay that it will result in a sale. It's much easier to get traffic for free and pay someone based on the performance they get for you.
In fact, when we talk about free traffic, I think people don't understand how it works. They think there is some secret source for high-quality traffic that will send it to you with no cost or strings attached, and that couldn't be further from the truth. All quality traffic costs money, and in some cases, big money. That's why the easiest way to get it is not with search engine optimization or article postings or any of that stuff. The best way to get free traffic is to ...
Get someone else to pay for it! And they will, if your sales process and visitor values are better then what they can find elsewhere.
Mitch: Wow, what an amazing idea.
Jonathan: I've talked about visitor values, and I'd like to clarify what I mean by that and discuss metrics and tracking for a moment, because it's the key if you want free traffic:
In order to really make the unlimited free traffic technique work, you need a sales process that converts traffic to money better then any other sales process out there. It must generate the maximum amount of money from each visitor.
Let me explain; If you pick up a thousand hot affiliates and all of a them send you a hundred visitors a day, that's over half a million visitors a week, which is amazing. But let's say your site is not a direct response sales site, your conversion rate stinks, and your visitor values are virtually non-existent. What's going to happen is those affiliates are going to stop sending you traffic as quickly as they started. You can't force them to send you visitors. They joined your program voluntarily and the reason they send you traffic is not because they like you, but rather because they expect money in return.
If you have a website that doesn't generate the quantity of sales the affiliate expects, your affiliate program will wither and die. It happens to most programs. The people running them don't do a good job of selling. No matter how many affiliates join, when they run a test, put up a banner, or buy some traffic and the sales don't follow, they leave in disgust. (That's what we call the Limited Traffic Technique!)
But let's talk about what happens for the 1% of sites that do a really good job of turning traffic into sales. When we talk about tracking in it's most basic form, we are referring to counting the number of visitors who hit the site versus those who make a purchase. Let's use a real simple example. Let's say you sell a hundred dollar digital product, which would be nearly all profit. Let's say one percent of all visitors convert to customers. So out of each hundred visitors, you make one sale for one hundred dollars. What you do is you take the dollars and divide it into the number of people and that gives you a very important metric or calculation called gross visitor value. In this case, it's a dollar.
100 visitors = $1 gross visitor value
1 sale @ $100
If you are paying a 50% commission, then the gross visitor value is still a dollar, but the net visitor value (what the affiliate gets) is $0.50. That's what they focus on, their particular piece of the revenue.
100 visitors = $1 gross visitor value x 50% commission = $0.50 net visitor value
1 sale @ $100
If the traffic quality is consistent, using the above example, every time someone hits your site, you just made a buck of revenue and the affiliate made fifty cents. Of course, in reality, you don't make money from ninety-nine of the people, you only make it when that one out of a hundred buys. Nonetheless, in aggregate, it's a visitor value of a dollar.
The reason that's so important is you now have a good idea what will happen when the visitors arrive, how much can be spent for traffic, and how to set expectations. You see, there are sites and businesses who control massive amounts of traffic, they have giant mailing lists in the millions, and their websites get tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors a day so they can easily promote a banner or pop-up for your products. The thing is, they're not going to give you that traffic unless they are compensated for it, and the only way to compensate them (outside of writing them a big check upfront) is to have a site that makes sales.
Another cool thing about knowing your visitor value is you can more accurately invest in traffic for yourself. If your gross visitor value is a buck, but Overture and Google are charging $2.50 per click in that niche, you know it'll be tough to make a profit with PPC ads. On the other hand, if you are able to get traffic using banners or pop-ups for $0.25 per visitor, you can reasonably assume that you'll be able to make a profit, since a dollar of revenue is more than a quarter per visitor.
I talked to a client recently who was contacting his top affiliates, asking them to send him more traffic. One responded· "Well I've got another program and I when I send them traffic, I make a $1.00 per visitor, but when I send you traffic I make $0.70 per visitor." He wasn't thrilled about it but what could he say? This was the motivation he needed to get off his butt and try to increase his visitor value. After many tweaks (including adding audio), he got it up to nearly a dollar and a half, and what happened? Now he can't stop this guy from sending him traffic!
That's because every time he does, he knows he's going to make more money than if he sent it to a different affiliate program. When you have a thousand affiliates and they all feel that way, you've activated the first stage of unlimited free traffic technique. Because you've got all these people out there and all they want to do is make money, and frankly, they could care less how they make it. They need to send their traffic where it generates the most revenue. In real-estate, they call this "best-highest-use."
Here's another example· We have a client who sells a consumer electronic product. This guy had a visitor value of about 30 cents when we first started to work with him. He read and studied a lot of our materials, and did something very important, he tested multiple versions of his sales letter and found one that out-pulled every other letter that he had tested.
This sales letter produced a visitor value of about $2.50 which was 800% better than anything else he had tested!
In fact, his visitor value was so strong, he discovered his competitors were sending him traffic via an exit pop-up.
Let me give you another example, because I want it to be extremely clear how this works. Let's say you're selling high performance tennis racquets. Now there are all sorts of people who sell to the tennis market promoting tennis camps, tennis accessories, tennis clothing, tennis balls, tennis videos and training products, the whole ball of wax.
Each one of those people with a website has a visitor value. When someone visits their site, they can say a visitor is worth X. Let's say your visitor value selling these high performance tennis racquets is high; you get it up to five dollars because your sales letter, your ad copy, your guarantee, your payment plan; all the elements of a successful offer that compels people to take action are in place.
If your visitor value is outrageously high, much higher than anyone else, you'll probably find other sites selling to the same market (but not the same product) start to send you their traffic to make some extra cash. Of course, the guy selling tennis balls is not going to send his visitors directly over to you. But what he may do is put an exit popup on his site that sends the traffic to your high performance racquet offer (tracked with his affiliate link, of course) after visitors exit his site.
And as others in the tennis market see what's happening, they also join your affiliate program and start sending you traffic. And if you really have a super high visitor value, people start contacting you with special JV offers. And they'll mail their e-zines for you, and put pop-ups and banners up for you, and buy PPC keywords for you. And they'll even perform back-breaking, time consuming search engine optimization for you. All because ...
They want the fat commission you pay!
And here's what happens· you then become in essence king of your key word or demographic profile because nobody else in the tennis market makes as much per visitor as you. So at the very least, after people are done with their traffic, after they've tried to make a sale, they will send it to you.
Now listen, if you just pick up the phone and ask a site owner, "Can you put a pop up on your site to send me your traffic after you are done with it?" Most people are going to say no way. Some will flatly refuse, some will try to sell you advertising, some may even hang up the phone on you. But if your monetization, if the amount of money you make per visitor is higher than anyone else, then these people are crazy not to give you their traffic.
A great source for JVs, by the way, is Overture, a pay-per-click search engine where you actually pay per visitor. If you search under the word tennis, the top bid may be a buck or buck and a half per click. If you aren't interested in spending that much, it's easy to send an e-mail or pick up the phone and contact the top bidders with an offer like this· "Would you be interested in recouping some of your advertising costs? I don't compete directly with you, and I'd like to help you make some easy money. All you have to do is send me your traffic after people have left your site via an exit pop up, and I will pay you a commission for each sale which helps defray your advertising costs."
Alex Mandossian sells a course on Marketing with Post Cards. He found the keyword 'postcards' was being bought by all these printers who were bidding very high. So Alex contacted them and said, "Look you're paying all this money to bring traffic to your site. I don't even compete with you. After people are done with your site, will you send them to me through the use of a pop up and I can help you recoup some of your advertising costs?" And these guys said sure, because there is nothing to lose on their part. He basically said look, all you have to do put this little code in your website and I will send you a check every month.
Mitch: So Jonathan, what I am hearing and tell me if this correct, if you have a site that's not performing well because it doesn't convert visitors into customers, it may be better to redirect that traffic elsewhere or to at least put a pop-up on the page that leads to an affiliate site for non-buyers?
Jonathan: If you are selling to the same demographics, that's absolutely correct. Here's the beautiful part- you might have to initiate a few contacts to get people to sign up as an affiliate, but the Internet is pretty small when you break it down demographically. I bet the top people selling tennis accessories know most, if not all the other people who are players in their industry.
And seriously, once they see your exit pop up on a couple of sites or receive an email from their competitors advertising your hot new racquet, they'll say "I wonder why this offer is so visible and why I keep seeing it? I better check it out!" They are going to visit your page, sign-up for your affiliate program, and start sending you traffic! If you've got an offer that converts, you can't stop it; the traffic flows in so fast it makes your head spin!
Mitch: Are there any other strategies for building traffic?
Jonathan: A lot of people have said, "Well gosh, I need to generate traffic before I can even figure out my metrics. How can I do that?" Let me give you some ideas.
1) The first one is pay-per-click (PPC) search engines. To me it's the easiest way to establish your visitor value calculations. The reason pay-per-click search engines are so good is the quality is generally going to be higher than any other type of traffic. We always recommend starting with PPC traffic. If someone goes in and enters the word tennis racquet in a search engine, they are not looking for anything except for tennis racquets, right now. So it's going to be a good gauge for conversion.
2) The second way is to use conventional optimization strategies like blogs, reviews, and video sites to get into Google, which is one of the only remaining true search engines still left.
3) The final way is with an opt-in list you have either colleted on your own, or one you can rent. Once you've done some initial pay-per-click search engine tests, and you've submitted to the search engines, mail your house lists, even if it's only 500 or a 1,000 people. You're going to get an idea of what real prospects are looking for. If you don't have a list, or you want to test outside mailing options, we offer these services at Cyberwave. Just drop us a line at: support@cyberwave.com.
What we're really trying to do with these methods is to generate traffic and see what it's worth. I don't mind losing a little bit of money when I'm trying to figure out visitor values. I might have to do several tests, and even spending a few hundred (or even a thousand) dollars, but it's worth every penny to establish a process so good, you'll start getting traffic from your competitors.
Mitch: Thanks so much Jonathan for your time today.
Jonathan: Thank you very much Mitch!
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