Today I want to take you back to the beginning of learning about website traffic. You’ve probably been told so much garbage information and so many different things that I’d like to just wipe your brain and unteach you all the wrong stuff. So, take a deep breath and dive in with me here as I take you through the truth about website traffic through a few lessons.

Lesson 1: Be Ready

The first lesson I want to give you about website traffic is that you need to be ready for it. Yes! Before you even begin to decide what traffic tactics to use you need to make sure you’re ready for it.

Is the page your sending traffic to ready for traffic? Does it look professional? Is it easy to navigate? Does it have a strong call to action? Etc. Whatever it is that you’re sending traffic to (be it a lead capture page, a sales page, a blog post, etc.) needs to have one job and that job needs to be crystal clear to the visitor.

For example, if you’re sending traffic to a lead capture page. You need to make sure you’ve got a good offer there that people will want and copy that makes them want to get it right now along with an easy way for them to get it. No other distractions or links. Nothing!

So, the first step in getting traffic is making sure whatever you’re driving traffic to is ready and will actually work to do what you need it to do. That could be to get someone to join your list, buy something, click a link, etc.

Why would you want to go through the effort of driving a bunch of traffic if what you have isn’t going to get you the results you need?

Side Note: 99% of the time you need to be driving traffic to a lead capture page or something that builds your list. Once you have people on your list you can email them and drive them wherever you want. Stop wasting time and money on one off traffic that you can’t reuse. Build an email list so you can send traffic to anything you want, anytime you want!

Lesson 2: Decide How You’ll Get Website Traffic

The next step is deciding what route you want to go with getting website traffic. Meaning, what traffic tactics are you going to use? This is where most people melt down and try to learn how to do everything and never do enough of any one thing to get any amount of traffic. You do not want to do that because you’ll never see any real results without being focused on just a few website traffic strategies.

There are basically three ways to get traffic and they are:

You can buy it.

You can pay for ads on social networks, you can buy advertising space on sites that offer it in your niche, solo ads, and the list goes on and on. If you know that what you have gets results (meaning people buy from you, or opt-in to your list, or whatever result you want) then this is a great option because you will be able to recoup your investment and then some. However, if you don’t know that what you have gets results then you’re going to spend a lot of money getting it all figured out.

My rule of thumb with paid advertising is that I won’t use it unless I know I have something that will get results. Pulling in an expert to help you with website copy and everything else would be your best bet here. If not, you could waste a lot of money.

You can borrow it.

When I say borrow, I mean use the traffic that others can send you. This is where you’ll setup an affiliate program and get affiliates to send you traffic. You pay them a percentage of your profits (a commission) or pay them for actions their people take. There’s a lot of ways to do this, but you need a product and an affiliate program. This is a great option if you have your own products and services.

You can mine it.

This is where most other traffic tactics live. This is where you are doing things to get the traffic. You’re “mining” it. You’re digging for it. Tactics like blogging, social marketing, guest blogging, SEO, YouTube marketing, and the list goes on and on and on and on are all examples of mining traffic.

Take what I’ve taught you here and figure out what traffic strategies you’re going to use. Educate yourself and learn how to effectively use what you choose to use, but don’t try to do them all at one time.

Now the last thing when it comes to driving traffic…

Lesson 3: Be Consistent

Look, no matter how you decide you’re going to get website traffic you need to make sure that you’re doing something to get traffic every single day.

If you’re using paid advertising you need to make sure that your ads are working (stat checking), you need to be testing other ads against your ads to get them working better, you need to be looking for more places to advertise, etc.

If you’re running an affiliate program you want to be working on reaching out to affiliates, creating new promotional tools, etc.

If you’re mining it well that’s hard to say because there’s about a million different ways to mine it, but however you decide to mine it you have to work on that each and every day.

You get the idea here. You need to be doing something each and every day no matter how you’re driving traffic. The minute you stop doing what it takes to get traffic is the moment your traffic stops. When you have a day where you don’t feel like doing the work or you find yourself getting distracted with other things then you need to keep in mind that your traffic is stopped and so are your profits.

Go Get Started

Now that I’ve taken you back a little bit and reset your brain, I recommend that you check to make sure whatever you’re driving traffic to is actually ready for that traffic, that you create a traffic plan to follow, and that you be consistent each and every day with driving traffic. This is the bottom line and the real truth to getting website traffic!