You won’t believe how badly I screwed up. Check this out. You’re going to see how we took a website that WAS getting over 1000 unique visitors every day and messed things up so much that it dropped to less than 50 people a day. EVEN THOUGH we used the exact same traffic sources consistently, every single day.
Well, I’m going to show you how you can avoid making the same mistake and drive targeted traffic to your website as a result.
Table of Contents:
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Rush Transcript
You know how all those hyped-up marketing videos ONLY ever show you the flashy stuff, how they get amazing results and make it look easy, and never show you the mistakes, the reality of what actually goes into building a successful website? Well, I’m not going to do that.
I’m going to show you what actually happens behind the scenes. This is the stuff that nobody talks about because most people who make these kinda videos want to appear flawless, but that’s not real, is it? We all screw up and that’s absolutely normal.
So if you’re worried that your website isn’t doing as well as it could be, or it’s not doing as well as someone else’s, then stop beating yourself up ok? Nobody gets things perfect all the time.
Listen, I’ve been doing this stuff for about 20 years right, I’ve literally devoted my life to digital marketing, I eat, sleep and breathe this stuff, and I’m still making mistakes. It’s perfectly fine to screw up, so don’t feel bad about it, it’s all ok.
So today it’s all about how I’ve failed this month and how you can avoid making the same mistakes as me. But before we get into things, pause the video now and go create a new folder on your desktop and call it Profit Copilot tips. Or something else descriptive because you’ll be using this later in the video. You see, my videos are designed so you to take action, so you can get the results you want, so do your website a favor and follow along.
Avatars are essential for targeted traffic
Ok, when it comes to getting traffic to your website, you’ve probably heard of the term ‘avatar’, right? You might know it by another name, ‘customer profile; ‘target market’, ‘buyer persona’, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same thing and it’s like the first rule of digital marketing, An avatar is just a profile of your ideal client, your ideal customer, or the specific type of person that your blog will speak to. Think of it, primarily as a set of values and interests.
So today we’re going back to basics and figuring out why a customer avatar is so important and how you can create one from scratch, in around 10 minutes. I’ll walk you through it. This is a crucial step because if you mess this up, then you’re not going to get anywhere. So I’ll show you how to make an avatar for your website and I’ll show you how bad things can get when you don’t stick to one of the fundamental rules of digital marketing.
And if you don’t get this right, then you’re not going to be able to SEO your website properly, in a way that gets meaningful results anyway, you’re not going to be successful with building an email list, you’re not going to get conversions, so you won’t make many sales.
You see, the first thing I ask any potential client is “Who are you trying to speak to? Who are you targeting?”… And every now and then, I get a someone who thinks their website appeals to everybody, these clients are typically they’re new to the Internet so I gently explain that a website needs to operate within a fixed boundary, that the content needs to be tightly focused and cater to one specific interest, otherwise it will appeal to nobody.
So have a look at Google analytics, and this is a test website we started at the beginning of the month. This is a website that plays on controversy, it’s a political website but it’s nothing too serious, we’re only investing a few minutes into this each day – it’s actually one we set up just to experiment with and try new things. And as you can see, things started out pretty good, we were getting a good supply of traffic pretty quickly and it looked promising.
Then, towards the middle of the month it peaks and then the traffic starts to fall off. Then we have this slow descent from thousands of people hitting the website, down to just a fraction towards the end of the month.
This is exactly what we don’t want to see. Ideally, we want the traffic to continue growing, or at least level out to a consistent and stable amount. Now, we didn’t change the source of traffic, the only changes we made, were to the type of content being published on the site.
So we started a new website, drove traffic to it, then we somehow steered off course and ended up going nowhere with it. So what happened? What went wrong, and can it be fixed? Well firstly, yes, it can be fixed and I’ll explain how we’re going to do that. You see, here’s what happened.
When we first set up the website, we made an avatar and it worked out great.
We knew:
- WHO we were speaking to
- WHAT kind of content to publish
- WHERE to promote that content
Those three things all worked perfectly together, everything was in sync.
But as the days went by, and maybe you’ve experienced this too, we started to diverge away from what the avatar would be interested in, and instead, we started publishing content that WE found interesting. But everything else stayed the same, the promotional vehicles stayed the same and the traffic sources didn’t change.
Now, because we often become emotionally attached to the projects we’re involved with, it’s easy to lose focus on what’s actually working and on what’s producing the highest rewards. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and start believing that JUST because YOU find something interesting, then other people will too. And that’s not always the case – in fact, generally, it’s pretty rare when that happens, unless you’re talking to people who share that specific interest.
You see, in this instance, the website started to serve our own needs, our own interests, instead of the needs of our avatar. And this is a very common mistake to make.
What’s the right template?
Ok, so now we know WHY an avatar is important, how do we make one?
Well, it’s pretty easy to do and we can delve really deep into avatars and go into a lot of detail depending on what stage of the funnel you’re focusing on – especially if you’re planning to sell products and services. But for the moment, let’s keep things really simple and just focus on just the things that will drive the RIGHT KIND of traffic to your blog posts.
So I’ll give you an example right now, and you can use this as a template to build your own avatars. In this example, let’s pretend that you have a blog that’s all about making videos. I’m going to use myself as the avatar because I’m really into shooting videos, as you can tell, and I’m spending a lot of time researching and learning about it all. In fact, I’ve been learning about shooting video for over a decade, so I’m devoted to learning as much as I can about it.
So if you had a blog that was all about making videos, the avatar might look something like this.
Interests
Ok, on the left-hand side, we have a list of interests. Keep this as specific as you can, so start with an interest, like ‘shooting videos’… and then drill down a little further and get more specific.
Things like the types of cameras available – I’ve got a few different cameras and I’m always looking at what’s new. I also spend a lot of time reading about editing software, the production techniques and how to get good results – again, I use a couple of different software programs depending on what I want to achieve. Another topic I invest a lot of time and money into is getting good audio for my videos.
At any one time, my desk is covered with 4 or 5 different microphones because each one is used in a slightly different way. Then I’m always looking at places to host videos – which isn’t always Youtube because I need to secure some of my videos and keep them exclusive for my customers. And then finally, lighting is another really important topic that I spend a lot of time learning about. So when you have your own list of topics, you can almost think of these as the categories on your blog.
So right there, even with this quick example, we’ve got a ton of interests we can use to target the right person with.
What do they want?
Then next, we need to think about what your website visitor wants to do, what they want to achieve. In this case, the avatar wants to create high-quality videos, and they want to share solid information. So we need to make sure that the information we give them is really good.
What do they avoid?
Then we move onto the stuff they want to avoid, so here we’ve got ‘amateur advice’, so I avoid information from people who don’t have much experience. I also avoid cheap and low-quality gear. And the production techniques I learn have to be the industry standard, and I’m not interested in taking shortcuts or cutting corners.
Right, so looking at these three sections will tell you precisely what kind of content to create.
Where are they?
Ok, so, now we need to find out where your avatar hangs out online.
Here you’re going to be very specific and you’re going to embed yourself in online communities and contribute value to them. Or, you can pay to advertise on them instead. Either way, you’re going to put your stuff in front of these people – and the important part to remember is, these are the people who are SPECIFICALLY INTERESTED in the content you’re creating.
On this section of the worksheet, this is where you list all the Facebook groups the people who you want to reach hang out in. Write down the URL of the mailing lists they’re on, the youtube channels they subscribe to and the forums they post on. Also, include the Reddit subchannels they use and the URLs of blog and websites they read. So write down the website addresses in this section and now you know precisely where to promote your content.
And of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to avatars. We can go into amazing detail if we want to but this is enough to get you started with.
So spend a good 10 minutes or so, get this stuff down in front of you, and you’ll have a clear roadmap on what type of content to make and where to promote it. And when you do things this way, you’re keeping the three fundamental parts of your marketing strategy in perfect alignment.
So the things you need to think about are…
- What are your ideal website visitors interested in?
- What makes them happy? What do they want to achieve?
- What makes them angry? What do they want to avoid?
- And then finally, where do they hang out? Which places do they congregate in, in large numbers?
Remember at the start of this video, I asked you to make a new folder on your desktop? Well, that’s because I’m giving you a copy of the worksheet we’ve been using. So you can download a blank one right now, so just print it out, fill in the gaps and you’ll have an avatar done in about 10 minutes.
And when you do, I can almost guarantee that if you match the right content to the right audience, you will experience greater success.
And remember at the start when I showed you the stats of a test website that we set up a few weeks ago? Remember how it got decent traffic at the beginning, but because we didn’t stick to the avatar we lost a lot of traffic? Well, it’s really simple to fix this, we just start using the avatar again. So everything we publish has to be in line with what the avatar wants, and not what we want. It’s simple, right?
Here’s what happened when we went back to using the avatar, and as you can see traffic is starting to increase again. It’s going in the right direction now and it’s happening fairly quickly because we’re putting the right content in the right places.
Right, so today you’ve seen what happens when you don’t use an avatar, and that means driving traffic to your website is very difficult, you’ve learned how to create your own avatar and how to put the right content in front of the right audience.
Ok, so I hope you’ve found this to be immensely, and if you have then you might like my other videos, and you can get them when you join my mailing list at profitcopilot.com/subscribe.
Ok, that’s about it from me for today, thank you for checking this out and I’ll see you again next week.