This is how to increase traffic with inbound marketing. This article is the first part of a brand new series called The Traffic Tripod.
Not only will you will learn how to get organic traffic quickly, but you’ll see how easy it is to monetize that traffic immediately with a passive income sales funnel.
Table of Contents:
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing attracts visitors to your website through useful content designed to solve their problems.
As opposed to advertising, inbound marketing does not interrupt web surfers. Instead, it attracts targeted traffic organically.
This significantly reduces costs.
But knowing what inbound marketing is, and how it works is useless unless you know what to do with the traffic you’re pulling to your website. For this, we’re going to use a funnel to convert cold traffic into customers.
The Inbound Marketing Funnel
Now, in this first lesson, I will give you the big picture overview so you know exactly how it works.
So we have three legs of The Traffic Tripod.
I’ll go into each one of them in a couple of minutes, but we drive all this traffic to your content. From your content we ask them to opt-in to your email list, and then immediately that’s when the money happens.
The second they opt-in to your email list they have a choice to make, they can visit the thank you page and download the free gift that you promise them, or they can choose not to.
If they choose not to, then we can have a sequence to re-engage them and to remind them. So we wait one day and then send a reminder, and then ask them to visit that page.
If they don’t at that point, then we can unsubscribe them because they’re not engaged, they’re not really interested, or the email address might not be a genuine one.
So let’s assume they received the welcome email and they click through to the thank you page. From that point they can download the thing that you promise them.
We can also offer them a one-time deal, a one-time offer. But if they decline that, then we can offer them a cheaper alternative as a down sell. Now, this is not the same product, but cheaper.
It’s just a reduced version or something else that costs less.
But if they want that one-time offer, they’ll go through to the checkout page. Again, they have a choice to make, they can enter their details or not. If they decline the offer at this point, we can run a cart abandonment sequence to re-engage them.
For example, we could wait maybe 30 minutes and then send them a reminder. In the reminder email it will take them back to a checkout page.
But let’s assume that they are happy to proceed. Once they enter their credit card details and they make the purchase, we can then offer them an upsell. This is an additional product that will hopefully be so compelling that they have to buy it.
And this system can be built for free.
You do not have to invest in any expensive funnel software. You can do this with a WordPress website. And when you build out this passive income machine, all you have to do now is fuel it with traffic.
Inbound Marketing Strategy
Introducing The Traffic Tripod inbound marketing strategy.
This is where you will learn how to drive organic traffic into this funnel for free.
The three legs of the traffic tripod are:
- Search traffic
- Email traffic
- And social traffic
Let’s delve into each one.
Search Traffic
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Guest blogging
- Press releases
Search traffic is made up of on-page SEO. Now this is what you can control.
We also have off-page SEO and largely you can’t control what happens on other people’s websites. We also have guest blogging. That is when you put your content on other people’s blogs with links to your landing pages and to your websites.
We also have press releases. This is when you create a new story and you publish that content on news websites.
What Influences Search Traffic?
- Search engine algorithms
- Your outreach program
- The quality of your content
So what influences search traffic?
It comes out to search engine algorithms. Now we don’t have much control over that, but we can structure our content and the way we do our marketing to respond to those algorithm changes.
Also, your outreach program is a vital component of your success.
We’re going to delve into all of this later on, because we’re going to focus on the quality of your content. That is a major factor in how well you perform in search engines and from other traffic sources that will promote us.
If you’re looking for blog post ideas I’ve got you lots of content strategies to share.
Email Traffic
- Your Email List – traffic you own
- Joint ventures – traffic you borrow
So let’s move on to the second leg of the traffic tripod, which is email traffic.
Email traffic is really made up of two things. First of all, it’s your email list, and that is the traffic that you own and control. So you have traffic on tap anytime you want it, but we’ve also got joint venture email traffic.
This is when you borrow traffic from other people. So you might have a joint venture project that you’re working on with someone else and you both agree to email your list where you cross promote effectively.
And then you both grow at the same time.
What Influences Email Traffic?
- Sender name
- Subject line text
- Pre-header text
- Personalization
- Email copy
- Call to action
- Sending time
- Sending frequency
Now what influences email traffic?
First of all, it’s the sender name of your email. That’s very important to build trust. So we want to make sure that your emails come from a real human being and not a company.
Listen, I’m from the world of direct response. It’s all about increasing response, increasing engagement, increasing conversions.
And I know that there is this belief in the corporate world that you need that corporate identity, you need that branding. But when it comes to email marketing, people response to people. You need that human element.
That’s what’s going to build trust.
Another component that influences email traffic is the subject line text, because you want them to click on that. You want them to open it and read it. And the first thing that they’re going to see after the sender name is the subject line text.
Then you have the pre-header text.
This is a little preview of the body of the email. So we want to be aware of the first line of the email. And then that leads us into the personalization aspect of emails, because people respond positively to seeing their own name in emails.
However, you might have to split test that, excuse me, you might have to split test that, depending on your niche.
Also, the email copy itself plays a massive role in people taking action. It has to be compelling. It has to motivate them to take action, which brings us to the call to action. So it has to lead to some result for you.
There has to be a click, there has to be a reply, there has to be some form of action that is going to benefit your business. Also, the sending time is vital.
You don’t want to email when there’s nobody awake, right? You have to study your analytics, you have to watch when people are opening your emails, the best time for you to send.
Also pay attention to the sending frequency.
You don’t want to send too often and you don’t want to send too little, because if you send too often, people will feel spammed. It’s like overkill. If you send less often, people won’t know who you are. They won’t remember you are and they won’t connect with you.
The third leg of The Traffic Tripod is social media traffic.
We’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, you know them all.
We’ve got a whole bunch more that we can get traffic from, but what influences social media traffic?
- Network algorithms
- Branding
- Posting frequency
- Posting times
- Headline
- Visuals
- Hashtags
- Call to action
It’s the network algorithms.
You probably know the organic reach has been decreasing every year, and that is due to the algorithm. So we have to be aware of the reach and the action that we take and how that influences the algorithms.
We also have to be aware of branding.
This is where branding really does come into its own, its on social media. So your profile has to look a certain way.
Also, the posting frequency is important.
The algorithms will reward consistency. So if you post every day, if you post multiple times every day, then in theory the algorithm will reward you.
However, you can’t just go and schedule a whole heap of posts, one every hour. If you don’t have an audience that’s responding to that engaging with that, then it’s not going to work. You have to build up to that kind of level.
We also have to be aware of posting times, because again, you don’t want to be posting when everyone’s asleep, right?
You want to make sure that your audience are online. They’re there to receive your content as you hit publish, because listen, you’re competing with a whole bunch of other stuff on social media, so it’s pretty crowded. So you have to be aware of the posting times.
On the actual content that you post, we have to be conscious of the headline.
That’s what’s going to get people to click on it. That’s what’s going to get their attention. So we use visuals to assist, and that visuals on social media, very important.
We have to have striking images that leap out, that grab their attention.
It’s called a pattern interrupt.
So we interrupt their scrolling behavior and we say, “Hey, this is something that you might well be interested in.” We do that through communicating visually, that’s what’s really going to grab their attention.
We also have to use the right hashtags so we get the right audience for our content. And then we have to have the call to action.
Just like in email, it has to be compelling. It has to lead to something that they want and we have to communicate that very clearly. But listen, I’m going to go into more detail about this and all of the other traffic channels in upcoming modules later on.
But the key here really is, no matter which channel you choose, you have to be consistent. Because when you are consistent, you can get amazing results
What’s Next?
If you’re serious about growing a website through inbound marketing, you are going to need more web traffic. So I will give you the traffic methods that I never share anywhere else. And you can get them for free when you go to profitcopilot.com/traffic.