Traffic Stampede
welcome to traffic stampede
Day 2
"Who Are You Going To Leave Behind"
Ok so we are back for day 2.
Right now you have a formula for success and it looks like just 274 visitors per day to your website.
But I am about to throw a spanner in the works.
Getting traffic is easy, what is hard is getting the 'right' type of traffic.
Yes, it is great to gain thousands of visitors but it's not great if they will never buy anything from you.
So you need to break down the basics of marketing before we begin and in the process I need to share a story with you.
It's All About The Gin
The Gin.
Yes you heard that right it is all about the Gin.
So let's look at Gin, in the space of a few years it has gone from the Mothers Ruin to the best selling spirit in the UK.
But how?
It has everything to do with what we call culture.
Gin created a culture of class, sophistication and with it came the pretty bottles that look like they could carry perfume, the gins named 'Poppy Rose' and the glasses with more fruit than your 5 a day.
Yes, Gin has gone from grannies to grand.
It all has to do with this one statement.
People like us do things like this
People like us drink gin.
People like us drink craft ale.
People like us love dogs.
People like us buy £25 bottles of water chipped from ice that has broken off from the Antarctic (yes there is such a thing).
People like us eat vegan food.
People like us drink expensive coffee, not the Starbucks kind, our coffee has a history, a culture.
People like us eat bean to bar chocolate at £5 a bar.
People like us ...you get the idea,
Your business or blog is exactly the same, it needs to create a culture.
Here is my culture, rather than being a one man SEO agency (basically a freelancer) I am actually an SEO consultant.
See the difference, hiring a one man band SEO agency is a risk and people don't like risk, but people love consultants.
"Companies like us hire consultants"
Here is another change, I am not a one man agency, I build bespoke teams of the best talent in the world (which is actually more accurate).
So my clients can say "Companies like us only hire the best"
Creating the right culture creates the right story for everyone to use.
And stories matter.
The Power of Stories
I want to share with you a personal story.
When I first started my online business I went to a networking meeting.
I got invited and pretty soon I realised I would need to tell people what I did for my living, what my business actually was.
So I decided to call myself a 'professional blogger'.
I laugh now when I think about that. People honestly looked at me as if I was from another planet.
They were intrigued but they weren't buying.
So, later on I became more refined.
I became an SEO specialist.
Not an SEO agency owner or a digital marketer, a specialist.
Interestingly when I did this I started to attract incredible clients.
I worked with 8 figure businesses.
But do you know what work I lost?
Local clients.
I just couldn't convert those clients.
I was losing out to the large local agencies who offered full services (websites, PR, SEO, graphic design etc).
The reason was all down to stories.
You see, we all need a story to tell ourselves and often another person (usually a boss).
So, when the 8 figure business owners wanted my services they did so because they told themselves 'we want to work with an expert not an agency'.
But when the local businesses met me they wanted to tell themselves and their boss another story 'we have chosen to work with that agency because they are award winning and have 25 staff'.
The point is stories matter, but you can't be everything to everyone.
To control the narrative of your story you need to know who and what you are for and who and what you are not for.
This is key to establishing the right culture.
And if you get the right culture you will grow online.
Leaving People Behind
Now here is the thing, you need to work out who you are going to leave behind.
This is an essential part of establishing the culture of your business or website.
If you have a blog or business based around dogs, you leave the cat lovers behind.
But we can and do need to go deeper.
You might decide to only work with small dogs; 'a dog groomer for small dogs'.
You can go deeper still and be the dog groomer who specialises in Dachshund grooming.
The more narrow you go the better, as long as their is enough demand.
Ultimately you need to attract the right kind of visitor who will buy from you.
And this means you have to stand for something.
Because we can get boring anywhere, your website needs to stand out so you get peoples attention and they say "hey this is for me, this business gets me"
You can be something to someone or nothing to everyone.
Be the gin for gin lovers, be the bean to bar chocolate for the chocolate connoisseur.
Be there for a focused group, be there for your smallest viable audience and rejoice in the fact that not everyone is going to like you, buy from you or get the joke, and that is OK.
The Smallest Viable Audience is a concept I have borrowed from legendary marketer Seth Godin and it underpins everything in this course.
The aim is to seek out the smallest audience that you can.
The smallest audience that will allow you to make your living and connect with others.
Because if you go small you can always scale afterwards.
And so, the website that gets 100 visitors per month but makes £10,000 is better than the website that gains 100,000 visitors and makes nothing.
And when you mean something to people, this usually means they will pay for goods or services.
Homework
Your home work for today is simple.
Sit down and decide who your website is for and who it is not for.
Do you sell SEO to small business owners, are you a Yoga teacher who tends to work with under 30's?
Because your content and traffic generation needs to be aimed at the people you want to have as customers.
Your website is key to creating your culture.
Because once you know who you are for and who you are not there for you can get hyper focused with your marketing.
And when you do this you waste less of everything.
Less money and of course less time.
See you tomorrow.
P.S. I would recommend reading this article on the smallest viable audience