Looking at traffic acquisition through the SOI lens requires a unique and nuanced perspective.
Underpinning this perspective is an approach heavily biased towards being a strategic thinker over just a pure tactical executer.
I’m going to keep this lesson very high-level, but still give you enough details, insights, and meat-on-the-bone for you to figure out the tactical details yourself.
Remember, the strategic layer changes very rarely; it’s the tactical details that change and shift all the time. So the former should form your foundational approach to acquiring and attracting prospects, with the later simply a means of executing on your high-level strategy.
Here’s what SOI & ARM [Now Art of Email] looks like zoomed out if you had to put them together (front & back-end of your funnel):
How Most Businesses Use Traffic
Before I talk about the best way to acquire traffic to your SOI, I need to shine a light on how other companies focus on traffic (acquiring new leads), and most importantly, why.
The yellow shaded portion in the image above is where the Venns intersect is where the majority of businesses — especially direct response (DRM) businesses — bring new leads into their business:
- Traffic > Buy
- Traffic > Thin Squeeze > Buy
- Traffic > Thin Squeeze > Email > Buy
- Traffic > Blog Post or Article > Thin Squeeze > Email > Buy
- Hybrid
- SOI
With #1 there is zero lead gen. It’s either buy-my-shit or bounce. E-commerce typically lives here (unless you’re smart like Ezra Firestone).
Most lead-gen happens within the sandbox of #2 and #3 (of course, #1 and #2 also intersect; buy-my-shit or btw, before you bounce, signup to our email list and we’ll send you a 10% off coupon).
Direct response marketers typically focus on #3, as they understand the value of email more than most (read: make big promise to bribe a lead onto their list asap, then relentlessly hammer them to shit with offers, until they 1) buy or 2) unsubscribe!).
And yes, I was being a little facetious on purpose. Not all DRM do this (just the overwhelming majority).
Number 4 is typically the stomping ground of startups (and content companies), who see the longer-term value of content marketing and growth hacking. Although a lot of the time this is because they have less money set aside for paid lead acquisition (as most of their VC funded cash horde is spent on hiring and tech).
Number 5 I call “hybrid” — or multi-touch contextual advertising* — where some of the very smart operate. I’ll come back to this small segment later, though.
So far I’ve probably told you nothing new. You already know all of this.
Here are some meta-facts:
- paid traffic costs money (d’ah!),
- and can therefore be (very) expensive until there is a positive ROI (requiring you to bankroll funds upfront).
I’ve been around doing this for a long time…
I look back fondly on the days of Google Cash (ah the good ol’ days!), when advertising on Google AdWords cost cents for a click, and a few more cents for a lead acquisition.
Now that same traffic costs dollars for a single click, and a small mortgage to get a lead on your list or to show up on a webinar to buy something.
The dynamics are very different today.
There are more advertising channels and distracted eyeballs on the internet now than ever before, yet it’s also the most expensive it’s ever been in terms of click cost or CPM.
… and this trend won’t change. It’s only going to go up and to the right.
This has forced a shift in thinking and mindset in how new cold leads are acquired (to be far more short-term focused).
It is what it is, though. The pressure to recoup those advertising dollars ASAP, trumps all else.
Sooner the better.
Buy now, screw later.
Apply pressure at every opportunity to get that sale; fakery deadlines, expiring coupons, flash sales, etc etc.
(Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not saying that using deadlines is bad when used for good; at the end of the day we humans are world class procrastinators — it’s part of our DNA programming — so adding some pressure is not just smart, it’s required.)
So how does this all link in with sending traffic into your SOI?
Well, if you want to send paid traffic to your SOI, just know that there are TWO OPPOSING FORCES at play:
- paid lead acquisition needs ROI quickly (short ROI cycle)!
- yet SOI is built on a long ROI cycle, where the primary focus is on building attraction, desire, and bonding, FIRST, long BEFORE any “sale”.
There’s an obvious disconnect between 1 and 2, so very different dynamics are at play. No doubt you can see the potential problem, right?
Okay, sweet … time to go a little deeper now.
Interruption “Curiosity-Click” vs Multi-Step “PULL-Click.”
I have nothing against FB Ads.
But because of the nature of FB Ads (it being a form of interruption-advertising), the ATTENTION the advertiser typically controls is FLEETING at best.
Meaning, the dynamics at play are really RIGGED AGAINST the advertiser.
This is why DR advertisers will try to get a lead on their email list or registered for a webinar ASAP! It’s an attempt to try and extend the short-lived window of attention opportunity.
It’s also a very competitive space.
And finally, there are other factors like “banner blindness” that need to be monitored continuously, with new media assets and marketing hooks continuously created (it’s never ending).
The best people in the business at driving FB Ads have full-time media buyers on staff. Or pay an agency to run this all for them.
I call social media traffic channels like FB, “Interruption Advertising.”
That’s neither good or bad. It is what it is.
So long as you understand the dynamics that underpin the advertising engine you’re using, you should be mostly good.
Personally, I’m not a fan of INTERRUPTION anything, especially when:
- it costs big bucks,
- requires a very short ROI cycle (unless you have a monster bankroll).
Multi-Step PULL-CLICK Traffic Strategy
The INTENT behind a “click” is very important to me. If you’re an ARM customer, then you’ll know why I value this so damn much.
Attracting people into my SOI is no different. I PREFER to acquire someone who has:
- already “clicked” through to read a piece of content that they have deemed valuable enough to read to the end,
- then “clicked” the CTA to get more.
These multi-step people, driven by CONTEXT and powered by INTENT and DESIRE, are HUGELY VALUABLE.
Each “step” in the click process increases their level of attention and commitment. You should read that again. It’s important.
Yes, this traffic requires more effort to get.
There’s typically less of it available “on tap” so to speak.
And the lead-flow is less predictable (in the sense that you’re not BUYING an INSTANT “click”).
But this has served me very well over the past decade, and then some.
These multi-step highly contextually relevant “clicks” that come from content on OTHER people’s websites and web-properties, ARE PURE GOLD.
I get these clicks from (independent) blogs. A result of guest blogging, or them just organically linking out to cool amazing content they feel their audience will eat up, and citing me as part of that.
Over the years I’ve earned THOUSANDS of citations from blogs — including the BBC — who have linked out to one (or many) of my PS’ without me ever asking for a link or a mention or if I can write a post for their audience.
Evergreen, Contextually Relevant, Long-term Traffic
Presell Sites are different and fascinating — bloggers love linking to them. Then there are the more commercial media and content publishers, who also see the long-term value, like:
- Inc.
- TIME
- Huffington Post
- Business Insider
- Forbes
… and the list goes on and on, well into the hundreds of thousands of web properties that control a LOT of mostly high quality and contextually relevant traffic (read: eyeballs with intent).
Every market has their own versions of “Inc. & Forbes”…
For example, if you operate in the fashion space, there’s Perez Hilton and jezebel.com (and a million more)…
In fitness, there’s bodybuilding.com and menshealth.com and LIVESTRONG.com and T-Nation.com, etc.
For “men” stuff there’s askmen.com, GQ.com and artofmanliness.com.
Each market and niche category has a mashup of both big media players and smaller passionate indie outfits (like blogs).
You gotta understand (and leverage) the two-sided business models of these media companies (and in many cases, especially the independent bloggers).
They make money by selling advertising (either directly to advertisers, or through platforms like Google AdSense).
And to sell advertising they NEED CONTENT (remember, these content publishers are not Facebook or Twitter, so the value exchange for them in earning the right of attention, is relevant news and great content).
Which makes it relatively easy-ish to get (evergreen) content published on their platforms.
Think of this content as the “seed” piece to one of the front-doors into your SOI World.
I was chatting to a friend a while back and he told me about his MOST SUCCESSFUL single article he’s written — a guest post published on copyblogger.com.
That ONE article has resulted in over 6 FIGURES of revenue for him.
Think about that.
A single guest post; multiple 6-figures. Yes it’s an outlier, but nevertheless, it demonstrates the potential of doing this.
Guest Blogging / Articles
If you do write a guest post for an indie blog, an article for one of the big content publishers, or even just a story on Medium.com…
… it should “setup” the reader for what your PS will continue.
If someone else is just linking to you PS in their own guest article, like this one I just found, you of course have no direct influence in what it will say.
That said, you DO have indirect influence, because of the theme of your PS. It establishes the context for others. In the same way that whenever I link out to someone else, it’s ALWAYS contextually relevant.
The original Frank vs Matt page had over 50 outbound links, and ALL OF THEM contextually relevant. Each link sent people to those other sites with a “frame” that I had already established.
So, by just building and putting out badass Presell Sites, you build an evergreen empire of assets that will automatically ATTRACT targeted people to you over time.
You win! (This is of course a long-game.)
How to Write for External Audiences
Okay, back to when you write a piece of content for an EXTERNAL audience…
It should start (seed) the context you want someone to be in BEFORE they clickthrough to your PS.
Or, if we take AffiliateBully.com as an example, because you already know the site well…
The article on Business.com or Forbes.com or Inc.com or Medium.com could be about my story of getting fired from the 9-5 rat race of London, then using that as an opportunity to build my own location-independent online business.
The only reason for the article would be to attract, inspire and motivate a SPECIFIC POP (those actually considering an alternative lifestyle), to click through at the end of the article to my PS (where AffiliateBully.com would continue the narrative, and expose them to my SOI, which links out to TLB, Frank & Matt, and a bunch of other places).
I could leverage that one article about my story, and syndicate 20 “versions” of it to all the big sites like Inc.com. This could easily drive 100K people into my SOI over time.
I prefer leveraging my time and resources doing this, rather than trying to spin-up a FB Ads campaign that’ll only fizzle out a few days or weeks later.