Why Monetization Is Your Key To Building Your Traffic

Traffic has changed – big time. And many bloggers haven’t realized it yet. In this episode, we talk about the new world of blog traffic and why your monetization strategies have EVERYTHING to do with how you’re going to get traffic to your blog.

Driving traffic to your blog is actually a secondary priority. The model you use to bring them in the door has everything to do with how this is going to work.

Don’t miss this episode of CBB to get acquainted with how you should be looking at blog traffic moving forward.

So that is everything that we are going to be talking about in this episode of Coffee Break Blogging. We will be talking about “Why monetization is your key to building your traffic.”

The first thing I want to address is the idea that many; I would say “most” bloggers have, and that is that traffic is hard to get. That it is scarce and that we have to work very hard to get it. We have got to slave to satisfy Google. We have got to guest post our butts off. We have got to be everywhere with podcast and videos and all these stuff in order to attract people to our sites. Maybe hopefully build our list and then someday, when our audience is big enough we try to monetize it.

Now I am here to tell you that everything that I just said was the dumbest, freaking thing I could ever say in my life because THAT is BACKWARDS. And if you are still with the mindset that you have got to slave and work in blood, sweat and tears to grow your audience, then maybe build your list, and then monetize it; you are going down the wrong path. The truth is that traffic is not scarce, whatsoever. It is abundant as it could ever be. There are tons and tons… well over a billion people on Facebook, alone. So there is way more than that that is on the internet. More and more people every single day are getting connected to the worldwide web.

Traffic Has Changed

There is no shortage of traffic. It is abundant. The truth of the matter though is that traffic has changed. Many bloggers have not adjusted with the times. They are still of the old school mindset that they have got to be everywhere and post all these content; post a lot… All these stuff to get traffic to theirs blogs, do the right things; build a list and then hopefully eke out a few pennies with some ads or something and while that, pissing of their audience. It’s just the old school way of thinking.

Traffic has changed. It is because there are so many people online. That is why traffic has changed. If you are doing it by throwing out lots and lots and lots of content as your exclusive way of getting traffic then you are going to be running up against the problem of a lot of noise. There is a lot of noise out there! Go on Twitter and realize that when you put a tweet out there, it disappears for all practical purposes within a minute or two because it goes by in the fire hose of tweets. That is Twitter. Well, the whole internet works like that. There are people putting out content all the freaking time! And so it is really hard as a newbie to standout in that sea. Okay? That is why traffic has changed.

Traffic Has Evolved

The other thing is that traffic has evolved into the point where you now have all these companies that is in the business of selling you traffic. And you can name them… You got Facebook, you got Google, you got Pinterest, you got Instagram now, you got YouTube which is Google; but you get the point. There are tons and tons of places our there where you can buy traffic. It is called being an appetizer rather than the publisher on AdSense. Okay? Being the supplier of the ads is a much more lucrative way to go than being the site where they put the banner ad. That is the weak way to do it.

Now back in Episode 87 of Coffee Break Blogging, I equated the idea of traffic to that of “rice”. Now this is an analogy that I first heard over at the Traffic and Conversion Summit in San Diego, California and I just thought it was one of the best ways of putting it that I have heard. Here is the thing about rice: We know that if we want a bowl of rice, what do we do? We go to the store and buy a box of Uncle Ben’s or buy a bag… It’s really cheap. Boil it and you are good to go. That is what we do when we want rice. We go to the store and we buy that rice.

What we don’t do, typically, is go out and buy the land, cultivate it, put the seeds in the ground, manage that field, water… I’m not a rice expert, so everything that I am saying, if you actually know how to grow rice; I’m probably sounding really stupid right now, but you get the idea. It is a multi-month affair to grow a field of rice and you got to go out there and pick it, you got to prep it and all these stuff just to get it! Well, that is the organic way, you could say; of growing rice.

And the analogy is perfect to what most bloggers are still doing with their traffic where they are going out there and trying to grow it organically. Whereas the smart people just go to the store and they buy in a bag. All nice and wrapped up in a pretty bough, ready to rock and roll. Well, that is what you should be doing with your traffic as well. You need to change the way that you think about traffic from this hard to get thing that you got to toil over for months if not years, versus you can simply go to the traffic store and buy it. That is the mindset that I want you to adapt.

Monetization, The Key To Building Your Traffic

Now let us go back to the title of this podcast: Why Monetization Is Your Key To Building Your Traffic. Here’s the thing; if we know that the absolute most reliable and easiest way to get traffic to our sites is to buy it, well that will obviously cost money. And the only way that you can do that without wasting money, without literally farting it into the wind, is that you got to make money on the other end, right? If you spend $1 and you make back at least $1, you are good to go. You could build your traffic; you can build your list because at least you are breaking even. If you do it right you will actually be profiting from it. If you spend $1 and you make back $2, you can do that all day long. In fact, you will probably be happy to.

So that is why monetization is your key to building your traffic. Monetization is not… I don’t care what any other guru out there in the world says “You have got to build up your audience before you monetize”. They are just full of crap. That is the old school way of thinking. Today, I think that if you want to have a good chance of building your site and your business up into something respectable, something that you can actually rely on financially, they go hand in hand. Your monetization and your traffic go hand in hand.

2 Simple Facts We Need To Look At

Fact no. 1: You don’t want just anybody on your site. You want the right people. And the right people are those who are willing to buy things.

So let’s look at that. What most bloggers are doing is they look at Google Analytics, whatever traffic thing they are using; and they think that the higher that number, the better. But that is not true. I would rather have 100 really good qualified people on my site than 10,000 crappy ones. If they are coming to my site and they are just not doing anything, why have them there? And so, don’t get too worked up on your number of page views or your number of uniques. Those things are not as important as looking at who are those people… Why are they there?

Now if you are building a business around this, and that really is how you are best able to grow this thing because monetization is your key to building your traffic, then you are going to want to have people coming to your site who are there to buy something. They are at least there to solve a problem; to fulfill a need that they have. And that need is probably something that you are going to help them fulfill by way of your content and product offerings.

So you want people there that are interested in something. Now if you just send random people onto your blog and you are like “Whooo I have got 50 people on my site today!” Great… But they probably were not the right people because it was very untargeted. Hell, half of them could be bots, for all you know; they are not even real. And so you need to be much more strategic in how you bring people into your world, into your environment.

Fact no. 2: As I said, you can literally just pay for this to happen; if you have something for them to buy.

Now they go hand in hand. If these are people who are the right people for your business and they are ultimately the kind of person who would be interested in buying something and at the same time you have something for them to buy, that is the perfect match.

So those two facts go hand in hand. You don’t want just anybody; you want buyers. You want truly interested people coming to your site even if the numbers are less. But if you are meeting their demands you are giving them an opportunity to become a customer of yours by giving them this thing they are looking to solve, then you are good to go. Those two facts go together into allowing you to run traffic to your site.

Giving The Opportunity

Now here is the key: Are we just sending them to our blogs? Well, you could be. But really, what we are looking to do is get them into a funnel; a sales funnel. We want to get them into a something that is specifically set up to facilitate the exchange of value. Now in the funnels that I teach people to set up inside the Blog Monetization Lab it typically starts up with giving them something for free in exchange for their email address. It is a lead magnet. And so at that point we have them on our email list and we have the ability to follow up. Now right from there, I usually teach that that is the best opportunity right there after the opt-in to ask them to buy something; to give them the opportunity, I should say.

Now most people are not going to buy it. That is just the world as it works. But a percentage of people will buy that front end offer right after the opt-in. That percentage of people is what is going to fund your traffic. Now as long as you manage those numbers right you can grow this thing; you can grow the traffic. Not only that, you are going to build your list along the way because people are going to be opting in. Those people once they are on your list, you are going to obviously direct them to your blog to read posts so they become blog readers… It all comes full circle. The big thing here is that you are not just sending them into your blog, per se, you are sending them into a specifically designed funnel. They go through the funnel and then they become a blog reader; not go into the blog first and then hope for the best.

Now, I am going to add a caveat to that because there most definitely is a place for paid traffic directly into a blog post; it’s just that the blog post is going to be set up in a way that is going to funnel them into something that pays off. Or you are going to set them up with retargeting which is something that we talked a little bit about here in Coffee Break Blogging.

So there are some other strategies in mind here but it is all done in a strategic way. The most direct thing that I want you to understand is that your blog is a marketing vehicle but many times, in order to get people in there; the right kinds of people, we are not going to send them just directly into the blog; unless you have got other strategies going on, many times you are going to send them directly into a funnel. And then they become a reader of your blog on the other side of it.

But by doing this, by having a percentage of people who buy that front end offer, and maybe you have got other offers in that funnel, that is how you monetize people who are coming into your site. That is how you are able to afford to go and buy traffic at the traffic store. And as long as the math works out on your favor which is not a matter of luck, you just simply work it until the numbers do work on your favor; you have got to be willing to do that in the beginning, then you will be able to grow this thing. You will not have any problems growing your blog traffic, no problems growing your email list, no problems making money. It is all a matter of your approach and it is a marketer’s way of looking at this versus what most bloggers are doing and that is to send people on the content, looking at their quantity of page views and just hoping the numbers go up. It is very untargeted, it is very unstrategic and not the smartest way to go.

What’s Coming Up

In the next episode, we are going to quickly review where we have been with the last many episodes dealing with traffic. And then we are going to be moving directly into a whole series of episode here on Coffee Break, where we are going to be talking all about the business side of this. Monetization; which really is the same thing. I am actually a much more fan of just calling this what it is: Business, rather than monetization.

Monetization tends to be an afterthought. It tends to be what most bloggers think and that is “Let me grow this nice, big audience and then I will try to extract money from them.” No. That is not the way you should be thinking about it. We need to be thinking of this in terms of real business; Business 101 principles that have existed way before internet showed up on the scene. Okay?

So that is what we are going to be talking about very soon here on Coffee Break Blogging; I hope you will stay tuned with me because it will definitely be some good stuff. This is where we are going to start getting in to how to make money doing all these.

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Now I will end of this podcast by asking you, if you haven’t already done so, to attend the big Blog Monetization Webinar that I do because everything that I have just talked about on this episode, I go into a lot more detail in order to show you the approach to setting up the actual business model. You can choose a date and time that works best for you and I would love to see you on that webinar and really get the full picture of everything that we are talking about here at Coffee Break Blogging.

And if you are enjoying the Coffee Break, I would highly appreciate a review and star rating inside of iTunes. Just bring out your iPhones or your iPad or whatever it might be if you are using one of those and I would highly appreciate if you just run on over to this podcast and give me a quick star rating; I would really, really appreciate it. 😉

All that being said, I will see you in the next episode of Coffee Break where we will be going into a pit stop episode of where we are in our overall course here in Coffee Break Blogging.

See you then!