Traffic For The Gurus

Traffic... it's all about the traffic. It doesn't matter how wonderful your product is, how long you've worked to put together just what people need and want, or even how well your professionally-done sales page converts - if you don't have traffic, you won't make sales.

So the million dollar question is, how do you get traffic? Many people spend a ton of time developing their product, which isn't a bad thing, but then don't spend the time introducing the product to the world in every way they can. Time and money needs to be spent after product development. Put another way, it's your marketing that will make you the money.

You might think, sure all Mr. Guru has to do is send one teeny tiny promotional email to his list and he makes big bucks. He doesn't have to bend over backwards to market his products. But there are two things wrong with this assumption.

1. Gurus spend a lot more time and dollars marketing their products than you know. They hire the best copywriters to write the sales copy, have tools created for their affiliates, let the affiliates know all the details, oversee everything or hire a launch manager to do that, use social media to get the word out about the product, put together series of emails, blog posts, questions and answers, and more. If it's not a big seller, they've lost lots of money.

2. Gurus do have to bend over backwards to market their products because of the current economy and stiff competition. Yes, there are more people than ever jumping on line these days and they're looking for a way to make money, but many are keeping their wallets shut. There is more than enough free stuff online to tell them what they need to know (moving the free line) and they're already feeling the pinch of layoffs or decreased income. The competition is fierce, many products are so similar that a marketer really has to make his stand out as unique, even gurus.

So, how do you get traffic? You've heard the different ways already - using social media, writing articles, doing Pay-Per-Click, backlinking, guest blog posts, getting affiliates/JV partners to promote, commenting on blogs, answering forum questions and putting your link in your signature, etc... and don't forget to use your keywords. Whew!

Have you tried all these ways? Perhaps you've tried some of them, maybe a lot of them, but you're not sure which is best. You might even be trying to spread yourself too thin by trying almost all of them, yet you don't have enough time or money to do each traffic method justice.

Come up with a plan that you can implement systematically. Once you've dived in deep enough to a traffic method, only then can you analyze your results.
Let's say you decide for your new product to do article marketing, guest blog posting, and forum answering.

Decide on how many articles you're going to submit, where you're going to submit them and strategically use some of them on your own site with some text anchoring and backlinking between articles. Note - you can't write just a couple articles for this method to work. The more articles, the more traffic to your site.

For guest blog posting, contact 3 or 4 bloggers who get good traffic numbers and have a decent page rank, and offer to write a blog post for each of them. Obviously you want the topic to tie in nicely with your product and you don't want to write the same thing for each guest post.

You could easily get sucked into the forums and start reading everything, but focus on your mission - finding questions related to what your product's about and answering them. That's one of the ways you become an expert. The better the answers, the more people will notice you and the link in your signature.

To get traffic, you have to work for it. That means employing different methods. And you have to really give a traffic method a fair shake before you pass judgment. Also keep in mind that what works for this product might not be optimal for a different product in a different niche.