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If you enjoy this podcast, we’d be so thankful if you’d leave us a review on iTunes!
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Each week we will be sharing some of your kind words, like this great review from K Murphy:
In today’s podcast, we are going to be answering one of our most asked questions, and that’s how to get more traffic to your website.
An online business isn’t any good if no one comes to your website, so we are going to share our top 6 non-SEO tips to drive more traffic to your site:
- The truth about SEO and why Jocelyn thinks it’s a dirty little word
- How to find your top competitors and use their comment sections or forums to link to your site without being spammy
- Use Facebook groups to find your audience and interact with them
- Do the little things because they have a big impact and make people want to come back to your site
- How to use Twitter the right way
- How to use smart marketing tactics to build your audience and get higher engagement
- Why you need to pay for traffic sometimes
Can’t Miss Moments This Week:
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
BONUS: The Flipped Lifestyle Guide to Daily Traffic Domination!
Click Here to Download Your Guide to Daily Traffic Domination
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey Y’all. On today’s podcast, we are going to tell you how to get more people to come to your website. [spoiler title=”Click to View Transcript”]
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about one of the most asked questions, one of the things that we get the most emails about probably and that is traffic. No, we’re not talking about traffic outside driving around the road because we don’t have a lot of that here in Kentucky.
SHANE: We have a lot of traffickers on there.
JOCELYN: Maybe a little bit of that. We are talking about traffic on the internet. How do you get visitors to your website? A lot of people talk about SEO and those three letters are just sort of like a dirty word for me. I just don’t like SEO. I mean, there are principles that are definitely important and SEO, which is also known as Search Engine Optimization if you’re just now starting out. SEO is really not as important as it used to be.
SHANE: It’s really just like a trick. SEO is like, “How can I trick the search engine? How can I convince that my site is better just because I position words in a certain way or use certain words?” Google is very smart.
JOCELYN: I’ll tell you a little secret and that is that I really pay very little attention to search engine optimization tactics. I think that people get a little bent out of shape about that because we’ve actually gotten several emails with SEO tips and things like that for our site. I appreciate people taking the time to do that. Thanks for doing that but really, we don’t care.
SHANE: Yeah, all we care about at the end of the day is finding our audience and touching base with them and speaking the language that they speak. You can look up keywords and things like that. We do believe that you need to look over the keywords a little bit just to see how your audience speaks, what language are they using to try to search for their problems, but Google is smart. The search engines will figure out what your website is about and if you’re solving those problems and put that in front of people.
We get crazy search engine hits all the time on all of our websites, things we didn’t expect to be found for, we never targeted those keywords but it’s just the content we write and the general way we create our blogs, it meets those needs so the search engine puts them in front of people.
We don’t want to make this some big episode of, ‘You have to use this keyword 1H1, 2H2, 3H3 in your headings and subheadings.” We’re not trying to do that in this episode. We’re telling you what we did at the very beginning to hit the ground, to go out there on a grassroots level and find our audience and bring them back.
JOCELYN: First, before we jump into all that, we’re going to do a quick iTunes review. We do this every week just to thank people who take the time to leave us an iTunes review. This one is from Kaye Murphy. The title is So Glad My Husband had Me Listen.
It says, “My husband had me listen to the show and I was in no way interested in online business. I’m glad I tuned in because Shane and Jocelyn are such down to earth people and have such an inspiring success story. They make things easily understandable even for someone like me who has zero online experience. Loving the southern charm too, y’all.”
SHANE: Awesome, that’s a great review. So basically, don’t think just because you mentioned the south, you’re going to get into the iTunes review.
JOCELYN: But you might.
SHANE: But you might. It does help, anything involving the south. Thank you so much for that review, K Murphy. We appreciate that. If you would like to leave us an iTunes review, we would be so grateful for that. They really help in the rankings and it helps spread the message to other families out there who may be looking to flip their life with online business.
All right, let’s jump into our topic today which is traffic and basically how to get people to come to your website. Traffic is a big thing. It’s a numbers game on the internet. The more people that come to your site, the better chance you have that somebody will want to buy something out of that group.
We want to stress like Jocelyn was saying earlier about SEO, I think a lot of traffic experts say, “If you build it, they will come.” It’s kind of like Kevin Costner and that Field of Dreams movie, he builds the baseball field and here comes the crowd — that is not how it works on the internet.
When I first started out the first couple of sites I started building before Jocelyn got on board and we were doing things together, I did all the SEO stuff. I was looking into all that and this was back a couple of years ago before Google really changed everything and it did mean a little bit more. I got some good traction.
I got, here and there, I would hit a keyword on page 1 of Google but it really didn’t drive people to come to my site or especially to come back to my site. That really didn’t work that way. It totally doesn’t work that way now. You can’t just build a blog and do all the keyword stuff right and magically, people are going to show up.
JOCELYN: Can I just mention that when I started my website shortly thereafter and pretty much didn’t know SEO strategies well, very little, I crushed Shane’s.
SHANE: She did. She crushed me at the very beginning. I got into all that stuff and Jocelyn started Elementary Librarian, I bought you that domain though. I forced that on you.
JOCELYN: Yes, sir. It was all because of you.
SHANE: That’s right it was. Anyway, so Jocelyn started doing some kind of like Guerrilla marketing ninja tactics because she’s a marketing major, and so she did. She started building a really large following very quickly. It made me scrap everything I was doing and I just went back and kind of copied her because what she was doing was working. It was getting the people.
It all goes back to this principle that we kind of found together is you have to go out and find your audience. It is your responsibility, just like if you opened a brick and mortar store, to go out and tell people and make sure that they know about your message. You can’t just rely on the search engines. You can’t just wait to develop enough content where you’re going to have so much mud on the wall that something is going to stick.
You have to go out and get your audience. You’ve got to drag them back to your website and you’ve got to say to them, “Look how awesome my stuff is. Here are the solutions to your problems.” I’m where you need to be and you can’t rely on just, “I started a website. Why isn’t it working?” That is not how it works at all. We’re going to give you, I think, is it five or six tips, Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: I think six.
SHANE: It is six. We added one. Okay. It was going to five but you’re getting a special bonus tip in this episode. We’re going to give you six non-SEO tricks for bringing more people back to your website. No more SEO, no more keyword research, no search engine optimization. We’re going into the trenches, Guerrilla marketing today and tell you how we go out and find new people for our websites.
JOCELYN: So when I started www.elementarylibrarian.com, I did look into some of the keywords and kind of knew the keywords that I wanted to target. We started searching on Google just to see what was up there and I thought there’s probably no way that I can break into this top 10. So what I decided to do instead is I started looking at who was in the top 10 and could I possibly get my web address into these top websites.
It just so happened that, I believe that the top 1 at that time was some kind of an article and so I could leave a comment on that. So I left a comment with my name and my web address. Even though my site wasn’t number one, the site that was number one, it had my name and web address on it and you would be surprised the amount of traffic that came from that.
I do stress if you’re going to do this strategy to use genuine comments. Don’t get on there and say, “Great post.” Put something else on there. Talk about what was in the post. “I really enjoyed this post because you talked A, B, and C and I agree with you.”
SHANE: You didn’t even put the link in your comment. It was just like where you can go name, email, web address, and then you left a real comment or something and they just click on the link to see, “Oh, this person made a good comment.”
JOCELYN: Yes and you would be surprised at how much traffic came from just that.
SHANE: A lot.
JOCELYN: So I would say definitely do that if there are certain keywords that you’re targeting, and that gets into a little bit of SEO but not really. I mean, it’s not really SEO strategy. It’s just kind of using that to your advantage. Another thing that I did in the top 10 of Google that I would also find wikis and wikis are pretty common in education. I don’t know about other fields but if you can find those, you can edit those.
It’s just like Wikipedia. You can go in and you can put your information on that wiki. Just make sure that it’s useful. Don’t spam sites or wikis with your information if it’s not relevant. As long as it’s relevant to that conversation, that’s a great strategy of getting your site out there in front of people who are searching for those keywords.
SHANE: And if you can’t find wikis, there’s still nothing wrong with going out and finding forums. Forums are still a powerful conversation place on the internet. They are not as relevant as they used to be because of the rise of social media but there are a lot of search terms where you search in the top 10, a forum post is going to be one of the top 10 results because somebody wrote a really good answer or the conversation got really long. You can go put your link in a forum topic just as easily as you can a wiki or anywhere else, or even a comment.
The first tip is you might not be able to get into the top 10. Don’t let that scare you out of your market. Just see if you can become a part of the conversation on the people that are in the top 10. That’s a whole lot easier than writing 1,000 blog posts targeting specific keywords in exactly the right way to get one of those in the actual top 10 on Google, just kind of become a part of that conversation.
JOCELYN: Just remember, as I said before, do leave genuine comments. Don’t just go out there and paste your site address all over the place because people can see right through that. You don’t want to see spammy comments on things and you are not going to click on it and if it’s just a web address. Just keep that in mind as you are using these strategies.
SHANE: Exactly. Number two is, I’m going to go into something that I love. This is a powerful tool that I do all the time is Facebook Groups. I’m not talking about pages, like fan pages for people in your space. I’m talking about actual groups of real people who create groups or come into a group to talk about a very specific issue.
Once I saw Jocelyn having a lot of success adding her links and stuff to these wikis and joining these conversations online, I said, “Man, I’m not having as much success with the SEO stuff. I’m going to forget this. I’m going to go out like she did and I’m going to find my audience and go to where they are talking about my topic.”
When I started coachxo.com, I went out and found groups on Facebook and I chose Facebook because coaches just like to talk. There are not a lot of people out there writing a ton of articles and things like that. There are those magazines and stuff like that but coaches just get around and talk ball. It’s what they do and social media allows them to do that easier than they’ve had before.
There a lot of football coaching groups. They can be youth coaches, they could be talking about a specific offense or defense, or whatever they do. High school coaches join groups, all sorts of different Facebook groups exist for coaches. So the whole idea was I just looked up every group I could find about anything on football and I didn’t care if it had 20 people in it or 2,000 in it.
I went and joined every Facebook group. I am an active member of dozens and dozens of football groups on Facebook. I just go in and I actually just became a part of that community. I love talking about football. You probably love your niche or whatever your topic is that you are trying to start an online business for. Go in and join the conversation, be a part of it.
What happened was, as you are accepted into the group and you talk more, you provide value and you join, and you comment on people’s things. I would add links to articles that I would write about what we were talking about. Like if they were talking about a specific way to defend passing in football, I would join that conversation and then I would go write a blog post and then I would link back to that in the group because I wasn’t trying to spam it up.
I never tried to sell in the groups. I don’t ever try to drop a link to anything that’s like, “Give me money.” That’s not what you want to do. If you’re just wanting to build traffic and if you are writing valuable content that you really want to get in front of people because you know it can help them, a great place to do that is to go where your people are already congregating, and Facebook; we all have a Facebook account, love or hate Facebook it’s there and it’s a powerful tool if you use it correctly.
Joining groups is a great free way to become a member of kind of the community of where your people go to talk about your topic. We use Facebook Groups a lot. I actually have just started my own Facebook Group a couple of months ago to try to test the waters if I could build an audience there. I have over 1,000 coaches in a specific Facebook Group that I started already in just a couple of months.
It’s amazing how many people will find you on Facebook because of the algorithm. Facebook shows them things they are interested in because the ultimate goal of Facebook is to get you to use it every day. They know if you are in groups every day talking about your favorite topics, they can show you ads while you are doing that.
Just go in, start your own Facebook Group if you want to, but go out at first, find other people that are talking about the topic that you want to go over in your niche. Join those groups and become an active part of the conversation. But don’t spam it up. You don’t want to go in there just say, “Hey, I wrote an e-book. Give me $25.” That probably will not work.
JOCELYN: Facebook has a really cool feature. If you have not used the- is it called graph search or something like that?
SHANE: Yeah, at the top.
JOCELYN: Yeah. If you go up to the top bar…
SHANE: The search.
JOCELYN: You can even search for like groups liked by people who like Flipped Lifestyle and it will show you groups that like Flipped Lifestyle and other things that they like. If you are looking for groups liked by people who like Elementary Librarian and that will show you different interest groups of people who like that same kind of thing. If you are having trouble finding groups that people are in, you could use that strategy. If you cannot find any groups, you could always start your own.
SHANE: Yeah. You could even go up and keep it real broad at first. For example; football coaches are one of my target groups that I want to sell things to. In graph search, I might say, “Groups football coaches” and I will see all the things that are there. That will show me at least a couple of groups. I’ll join those, kind of start with the couple. Don’t join 50 at once. You’ll never be able to keep up with it, but then you can go back, say, one of the groups is “youth football coaches,” like a group is called that, then I can go to the graph search and just type in groups, what is it? Groups that like…
JOCELYN: Groups liked by people.
SHANE: Groups liked by people who also like youth football coaches and you will be able to go out and look for more people that way.
JOCELYN: Our third tip is to do the little things. By little things, I mean things like updating your blog frequently. If you have a blog, which most of you probably do if you have a website, you need to have it updated on a schedule. This is a hard thing to do. Shane and I are still trying to get the hang of this on the site.
SHANE: It doesn’t have to be perfect. We have a schedule that we stick to but if we miss a day, sometimes you may miss a day, sometimes you could get sick. Sometimes something happens. The key is just trying to- 90% of the time, 80% of the time you are sticking to the schedule.
JOCELYN: A great place to get ideas of things to write will be in those Facebook Groups that we were talking about. See what people are struggling with and just start writing a post about it. Do something that could be helpful to someone else. Just remember that you need to upload what’s called a sitemap to Google. If you do not have this on your website, you need to have it ASAP. There are several plugins that will help you do this.
It’s basically just a way for Google to know very quickly when you have updated. There are some of the plugins that will update automatically when you write a new post. This is something that’s really, really important so that Google knows that you are regularly updating your site. Also, as we said before, don’t stress about keywords. Don’t stress about SEO.
There are definitely some merits of doing it, don’t get me wrong. There are tons of experts who would say, “You guys are complete idiots,” but they also say that about a lot of other things that we do and we’ve been very successful. So I say…
SHANE: Keep talking, bring on the haters.
JOCELYN: I’ll say, “Don’t worry about it.” It is important, but it is not the most important thing. Do not stress about all that. Let that take a load off your shoulders. I think the most important thing really when I talk about doing the little things, it’s actually a big thing, and that just creates content where people want to come back.
Make them want to come back to your website. Give them tons of value. I’m not saying that everything you make has to be free but make your free stuff so good that people say, “Wow, this is incredible and I want to come back here and learn more.”
SHANE: Yeah. A big tip there could be too, like, a lot of people create a product sometimes like, “Man, this is really great. I’ve got to sell this as an
e-book,” but sometimes you are better off giving away that first thing that is amazing, like, if you write an e-book and it’s 50 pages, which is as good as a book on Amazon or something, give that stupid thing away and write another one. That’s the one you sell. Once you answer people’s questions and you get them hooked, you can write that stuff.
You can sell the next thing because they are already like addicted to your awesome free content.
When Jocelyn says, “Do the little things,” the little things are also like sharing every day. Spending time every day going out and finding those wikis, finding those forums, those Facebook Groups that we just talked about, number one and two.
There is a whole lot of little things that add up to big things over time. I just helped someone create a website recently or we’ve just gotten to the point where the website is near launch and he’s been creating content on this site forever, probably for about a year creating this product, creating blog posts, starting to look at how the site is structured, but he’s been doing the little things a little bit every day and all over sudden now, he’s kind of on the verge, the site is bringing in $200 a month now and it’s really on the verge of doing very well and making a lot of money.
Those little things over time are going to add up and if you are really looking to gain the system with SEO, you are trying to look for that big hit, the home run, when really, you could just hit singles all day and you’d probably be a lot better off in the long run. Really focus on the little things every single day and try to just let it add up over time. The overnight successes look like overnight successes, but there is always a couple of years behind that of hard work and something just happened to happen where they hit it big. All those little things are really going to add up over time.
Our fourth tip is to tweet like crazy. When we say that, what we mean is go to Twitter. Twitter is a powerful tool. Twitter is one of the coolest things on the planet because it’s like the only place you can reach out to someone who’s famous or someone with a major audience and they’ll actually write you back sometimes. You can reach out to some of the people who are big names or movie stars and every once in a while you might get a re-tweet.
You can also reach out to anyone at any time just by saying @ and their name. Facebook, they kind of have some checkpoints in place, where if you are not really their friend, you’ll get stuck in their other inbox or you have to add them before you can talk to them but in most things on Twitter, you can just add anybody at any time and get some response.
What I did when I first started CoachXO along with going out and finding out those groups, I would sit and search for about 15 minutes a day on Twitter and I would just search for football, football coach, #football, NCAA football. Anything I could figure out that a coach might be looking for and I would just see all the people that were involved in those conversations.
You can go search on Twitter for hashtag anything. If you are into kayaking, go search for #kayak or #kayaking.
JOCELYN: You can also, on the same line, search Google so, hashtags about kayaking.
SHANE: Right, exactly. You are going to find people involved in your niche or in your conversation. Those are the people you want to come to your website. You don’t have to wait for Google to find them. You can go out right now on Twitter and you can find people that are talking about the same thing that you want to talk about. What I would do is I would even look at their names. People are very creative with their names. Most of the times, football coaches always have, it’s @coachsmith or @linebackercoach1 or something like that. You can tell, too, I could specifically see if they were really in my niche.
I started following people who were football coaches who were talking about football things. I would send them messages. I would retweet them. It would only take me about 20 minutes a day and I would just find 15-20 people a day. They would always follow me back. They would always join in the conversation. Even the bigger type names, like, at one time, Kirk Herbstreit said something back to me and retweeted it or something. That’s a big-time announcer on ESPN.
Even those famous people see that and that puts your message in front of more. If you are really active on Twitter and you go out and use that search function on Twitter, you are going to be able to find people in your audience way faster than you are ever going to get them to come from Google. You are going to know who they are, you are going to be able to connect with them, you are going to be able to build that connection.
Once they follow you, you are now going to be in their news feed. What you can do is you can start sharing your links back to your site and you can build an audience off of the traffic you’ve already found. That’s one of the big things online about being successful is once you get traffic, you have to keep those people involved, keep them engaged, keep them coming back.
It’s not about getting 1,000 new visitors a day. I would much rather see 1,000 returning visitors a day than I would ever want to see 1,000 unique random visitors that just found me on the search engines because those are the people that keep coming back and those are the people that will ultimately be so engaged to my content that they’ll buy something from me.
There are ways to do this too. You can automate your Twitter feed. Once you build an audience and when I say build an audience on Twitter, if you get 50-100 followers, you need to treat these people like gold because they are going to retweet you, share you, they are your number one fans. You need to make sure you are giving them good value and giving them things to share.
We use a tool called Buffer App to actually schedule out tweets throughout the day. On CoachXO, I share a link back to my site every hour on the hour. People check Twitter at different times during the day. You always want a link in front of them so they can come back to your content. I actually have scheduled out all my posts.
I say, “Come back here for an article for past coverage or past events. Come to this one for an article on offense” or whatever the forum post of the day is or anything that I’m talking about on CoachXO, I have all that automated to where there are just tweets rolling. That way if I’m not on Twitter, I’m still communicating with my audience and bringing them back to my site.
You also need to be there yourself. I tried to post a few times a day on every Twitter account that I have just to make sure that I’m really engaged with my audience. I am understanding what they are looking for and I’m talking to them. Twitter is an awesome place to really reach out and go after your audience, find them.
Forget Google, who wants to wait around for a computer to find your audience. Go out to Twitter, jump into the conversation. Find some people that are talking about what you are talking about and give them a window and a door back to your website.
JOCELYN: We should mention that on those Buffer App tweets, nine times out of 10 they are for a completely free content.
SHANE: Yeah. We don’t ever just spam up, “Buy this. Click here to buy my stuff.” We always want to bring them back to something that has value, that we give to them and that it’s something that we know will improve whatever they are trying to accomplish in that niche with our content. Make sure you are showing great stuff.
Another thing on that real quick before we move on, don’t share a lot of other people stuff. I think a big trend you are going to see, you see on Twitter these days, a lot of people just are looking for content or they are kind of taking the curation route where they are going and getting other people’s content and sharing it.
That’s great, we have five or six people that we loved to share content for on Flipped Lifestyle because they are friends or because we really enjoy their material, but for the most part, 80% of your content that you share on your social media should link to your site. This is your content, your business. Why spend 20 tweets a day or 20 hours a day, a tweet every hour, why send it to everybody else’s website? You are in this to help your audience with your content. Make sure that you are sharing valuable stuff but you are also sharing your stuff. Go out, get the content, create it and bring them back to your website.
JOCELYN: Our fifth tip is a marketing tip and this is like my favorite thing. I was telling Shane I could talk about this for probably like an hour.
SHANE: She might do a solo podcast actually just on the marketing stuff.
JOCELYN: This is one of my favorite things and I’m just going to kind of wrap it up into the most important points on today’s podcast. We may do a full podcast on this later, so let us know if there is something you’d like to hear. One thing that I do fairly often is I do giveaways related to social sharing usually or it’s whatever desired behavior that you want.
For instance, we just wrapped up a contest here on Flipped Lifestyle for leaving iTunes reviews. We wanted people to leave iTunes reviews for us so we decided to have a contest where we gave away a free entry into our e-course. With that, when you do give away, you want to make sure that your give away is related to your target audience.
I have a lot of people, we actually talked to somebody the other day on a consulting call who was like, “Maybe I’ll give away an iPad.” That’s great and a lot of people would enjoy an iPad but the problem with that is that anyone would enjoy winning an iPad. You really want your give away to be really super targeted to the person that you want to be as your ideal customer. You don’t want people just joining or just liking your Facebook page, just following you on Twitter because you are giving away an iPad.
SHANE: Or joining your email list. That’s a random email that just wants an iPad. That’s not someone who wants to learn how to ride a unicycle or whatever your niche market is.
JOCELYN: When you are thinking about your give away, just make sure that even a piece of your own content is a fantastic giveaway. Maybe it’s an entry into a course you have, maybe it’s a free copy of a paid e-book that you offer, something like that. Those are great examples of giveaways because if you are giving away a free e-book about how to ride a unicycle, probably I’m not going to enter that give away because I would not be your target market for that, just like I might do a give away on my e-book of how to run a half marathon, which I have not completed yet.
SHANE: Working on it. that one is coming.
JOCELYN: Shane would not be my target audience for that so he would not enter that give away.
SHANE: Because I don’t run unless I’m being chased. That’s pretty much my rule of thumbs. There is no way I’m joining anything about a half marathon. But if I stumbled across a half-marathon site that was giving away an iPad…
JOCELYN: Or an iPod.
SHANE: Or an iPod, I’d probably join that just to try to get the iPod whether I’m going to use it for like running anyway. Let’s take our unicycle. How do we get talking about unicycles?
JOCELYN: I have no idea. The same way we get to talking about kayaking.
SHANE: That’s exactly right. Let’s focus on unicycles for a minute, folks. Take the unicycling, if you are going to give a contest and you have an e-book and how to video about learning how to ride a unicycle, what if you gave away a unicycle? There is no way I would join a contest to get a unicycle because I don’t want one. I don’t want to ride one, I don’t know how. But I bet you the people that would love to know how if it was like a Schwinn unicycle. Is there a Schwinn unicycle?
JOCELYN: I have no idea. If anybody knows about unicycles…
SHANE: This will be a great niche, you might want to go and explore this a little bit. If you could win the top of the line unicycle then you would probably enter that contest. We do a lot of stuff too. Jocelyn gives away products all the time. We’ve been making digital products for a while and Jocelyn gives away. She has small products that are low priced, like entry-level type products into her store. They are like $9-$10 and she gives those away all the time as contests and people love it. People absolutely love it.
JOCELYN: Yeah. I do like totally off the wall things, like the other day I got a check in the mail that had like this weirdo school mascot on it. I took a picture of that mascot and I crafted down so you couldn’t see anything else, and I got people to guess what the mascot was. I actually looked it up, so I knew what it was.
SHANE: It was a goblin, by the way. It looked like a devil. We will put a picture of that in the show notes so that you can see the goblin. It’s awesome.
JOCELYN: Yeah. It’s really freaky actually. I have people call me and tell me what they thought it was and the first person who guessed it correctly won a free mini-lesson pack. It’s just fun things like that.
SHANE: People were all over it too. Everybody struggles with Facebook reach but Jocelyn doesn’t really pay anything for Facebook because she does stuff like that and gets 2,000 or 3,000 people look at it. She gets 50 comments, 20 shares, just craziness because people just really get into this stuff.
JOCELYN: While we’re on that subject, you could also ask questions on your Facebook page or on Twitter. Ask reader questions, I do that all the time. I ask people to submit reader questions and I get one almost every day. That’s another way that you can engage your audience along with that marketing kind of feel.
We talked about doing giveaways. Giveaways are awesome because people love getting free stuff, especially if it’s something good. Don’t spend thousands of dollars on giveaways if you are not really making a whole lot of money that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
SHANE: Give away your time. You can give away, say, you are an expert in something and you are trying to show that, and you know people who want… give away 20 minutes. Say, “Hey, I’ll give you a free 30-minute talk where I will teach you how to do this personally.” That might be something you can give away.
JOCELYN: Definitely keep it within the scope of the sites of your business right now but giveaways are so important for building that initial traffic and just keeping that going.
SHANE: Let me add something there real quick, Jocelyn. Even if you have a small audience, like 10 people, when I first started CoachXO I had five people the first day or two actually register for the site. They started talking in the forums and stuff. I actually got on a Google Hangout with three of those guys and talked to them for two hours, just about football about what they wanted in a website. Those first people that follow you, if you will treat them like gold, they will share your message. They will go out and find it.
I had one coach, one of those first three coaches went to a youth group in Washington DC and made flyers himself and handed them to people, to show them www.coachxo.com. Don’t think I’ve only got five people. Figure out how you can treat those people like gold and these giveaways, and then turn around and watch them share it with five other people each. Now, you’ve got 25 people. Then they share it with five people each, now you’ve got – math – which I can’t do. It’s over 100. But you just see, kind of just grows after that.
JOCELYN: You can even offer them something in exchange. If you do have four or five followers say, “Hey, I’m trying to grow this site. I really appreciate your help. If you could help me and kind of share this with some people that you know, then I will give you X.” Maybe it’s a free copy of a product, maybe it is like Shane said earlier, 30 minutes of your time. Whatever it is, that is a great opportunity to get people to share your message. You don’t have to do it in a scammy way. Really give them something of value in exchange for doing that.
Another thing that you can do is you can find other people who are doing something similar to you. This goes back to the myth of competition. They are competitions in online business just like anything else but the thing about it is we can all win in online business. Even if we are in the same niche, our products are probably different and so that is a great opportunity.
Find someone who has another blog like yours. Find someone who has a podcast. Tell them about a giveaway that you are doing, and get them to share it for you. Chances are they may do that especially if you are doing something in exchange for them. Shane has a very good friend online that does pretty much the exact same thing he does and they make it work.
SHANE: His name is Joe Daniel and he’s over at www.footballdefense.com. He was actually the first person that ever came on my podcast for the CoachXO show. We talked a lot and we figured out we were in the same space. We both were selling football defense basically but he had a little bit different twist on his stuff and I have a little bit different twist on my stuff. We both created products that the other one didn’t really carry.
Even though on the surface, it would like if we were across the street from each other in brick and mortar world, we would be competitors trying to put each other out of business but what we did was we just started collaborating, talking about “I’ll make a product, you make a product. I’ll email my list and send them to your webinar.” That’s football coaches getting value, I love it.
We started just helping each other and basically selling each other’s products and it’s been a great partnership where we’ve both benefited. We both collaborate on data, like what we are seeing with open rates on our emails and things like that. Go out and reach out to some people who are already doing what you are doing and you will be shocked at how you can help each other be successful online.
JOCELYN: Yeah especially if you approach it that way. Don’t just be in it for you, like, “What can you do to help me?” Make sure that you are asking that person, “What can I do help you?” Make that relationship beneficial for both people.
SHANE: If they already have an audience, say, you find someone who is doing what you want to do; if you can go to them and be like, “Hey man, I’ve made this product and I see you haven’t made anything like it and it’s in your space. I’ll tell you what, if you will just send some people to this landing page for me, I’ll give it to your audience for free as a gift.” Even though you were going to sell that, then you can get some feedback but you can tap into their audience. You can provide them value.
People hate writing blog posts and stuff. Creating content is the most overwhelming part of any online business. If you can write blog posts for them, do one a month. That takes some pressure off them, they get good content, and you can tap into their audience while providing value for their people.
JOCELYN: One final thing that has been just so, so powerful for me is using Pinterest. If you have a female audience… if you have very many females, that all Pinterest should absolutely be a part of your marketing strategy. Make sure that every post you write or every product that you create, make sure that it has a nice image with every single post. Make sure that you pin all of your own posts. I think a lot of people leave out that step and that’s so important. If you are not pinning your own post, then chances are nobody else is pinning it either. Make sure that you have a very nice looking post.
I’ve actually written a blog post about using www.canva.com to create nice looking pictures. We will put in a link to that in the show notes. Definitely, take a look at that. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s pretty much what I use all the time to make my post. Finally, make it easy to pin. Make sure you have some kind of sharing buttons on your site where people understand how to easily pin it. If people can’t figure out how to pin it, chances are they are, probably not going to. The same thing on the sharing, if you don’t have sharing buttons right there, then people might share it but if you make it easy for them, they will be more likely to share it.
On today’s show notes, that’s www.flippedlifestyle.com/podcast12, we will have some links to a few plugins that we use and a few other ones too, just so you can see some social sharing icons or plugins.
SHANE: These tools do crazy things. They’ll put a pin it button on your picture automatically. They’ll just like, “Click here to pin.” Sometimes you can even do it with your words. There are plugins that will take quotes from your text and say, “Tweet this.” It just clicks a button right in your sentence. We will look up a few of those and will put them on so you can find some good tools for sharing your content.
The last tip and this one is going to hurt a little bit to hear, but this is our last tip, number six, for getting traffic back to your website and that is the play to play. It has never been easier to go out and buy traffic. A lot of people don’t like to hear that because when they start out, they don’t have a lot of money, they don’t know where they are going to sacrifice to get money to even start the website or do these things. The bottom line is if you are not getting traction and if you’ve been doing this for a little while, it doesn’t necessarily mean your content is bad. It doesn’t mean that you are wrong necessarily about your niche. It just means that for some reason the search traffic is not coming.
You can blame it on SEO. You can blame it on the competition. You can do these things or you can just focus on a solution, which will be: go out and buy a little traffic. Traffic begets traffic. The more traffic you get, the more your traffic will grow. There are so many ways to go out super cheaply and buy ads. Facebook, you can go out and buy ads and target people in your markets. Basically, you can pay like $5 to boost a post, a click, or a link back to your website. It costs you $5 just to do it.
You can go out and buy Google Ads. I buy many Google Ads in the past for like 20 cents a click. If I’m just trying to get a new product launch, I might buy $50 worth of Google Ads, just to give it a jump start and that sends a lot of people to the page. If you can’t get the number one in Google, you can put an ad above the number one result by being the highest bidder for the click.
If your content is awesome and you are just not getting traction, don’t be afraid to go out and buy a little traffic. Pay for some ads to get those first few people coming to your stuff to make sure that you are getting your message out there. If your content is valuable and you really think it could help people, you kind of owe it to your audience to jump-start that process. Just to give you some initial traffic, if anything just to give you a little confidence boost to see a few people coming to your site, maybe they’ll leave a comment.
That’s going to build some engagement, give you some social proof and other people come organically, but don’t be afraid to go out and pay to play. I really want to stress this. Think about it this way, number one; if you sell your product, you are going to make that money back eventually. Consider it like an investment in yourself. Don’t consider it as you are giving money to Facebook, Google, Twitter, or whoever you are buying ads from.
A lot of people really complain and say, “I refuse to pay. I should get this organically,” and things like that but look at it this way, if you won’t put money down on your own product, if you won’t put $5 down to boost a post on Facebook or to buy some Google Ads for a day or two, if you won’t bet on yourself with your own money, how on earth are you ever going to convince an audience member to bet on you by buying your product?
If you don’t feel confident enough, if you don’t think that your stuff is good enough to put your own money down on, then there is no way anybody else is going to give you money for that product because you don’t believe in it. We don’t necessarily want to say it’s the last resort. We do pay for some ads here and there just to kick start products and things like that, but that is a great way to get traffic. It’s quick, it’s easy. You go in, you set it up. You let the systems on Facebook and Google find your target audience for you and it really doesn’t take a whole lot of money.
We talk a lot about how we canceled cable like one of the first few months into our online business to free up that $100 a month. If you are willing to sacrifice something like that, like give up cable and have that $100 free, take that $100 and invest it back into yourself. Get your message out there.
Pay to play. Get your product in front of the right people and then your audience will start growing as you collect their emails, you get them to follow you on Twitter, and you can re-engage and talk to those people in the future. Number six is Pay to play. If you’re not getting any traction, go out and buy some ads and see what happens.
JOCELYN: I just wanted to add, the best thing about buying ads is that it’s not permanent. If you buy an ad and you see that it is not working at all, stop the ad. It’s not like you’re going to automatically lose whatever amount that you set. You can set a lifetime expenditure so you can tell it, “Don’t spend any more than $10,” and it will not spend any more than $10. If you get to $5 and you’re seeing that nobody is really clicking or nobody is engaging with your stuff, guess what, go in and stop it.
SHANE: Yeah. Turn it off.
JOCELYN: We’ve done that several times.
SHANE: I did it today. We had a post today where Jocelyn took this awesome picture of something from the gym. What did that say?
JOCELYN: “If it’s important to you…”
SHANE: “…You’ll find the time. If it’s not important to you, you’ll find an excuse.” I was like, “I’m going to boost that and see if everybody gets motivated,” and nobody engaged with the post. It was like $2 into a $5 boost so I just turned it off.
JOCELYN: That’s like a cup of coffee or something. We always talk about not making little sacrifices but for stuff like this…
SHANE: Think of it as a little sacrifice.
JOCELYN: Yeah, like don’t order a pizza on Friday night and put that money toward some ads and just see what happens.
SHANE: If you pay that $20 for the pizza and you buy $20 on ads, and five people are going to buy your $20 e-book, guess what, you just made $100 for $20. Go buy two more pizzas next week and I’m fine with the other $60 later.
JOCELYN: All right. So we’re going to move into our Can’t Miss Moments segment. This is where we talk about things that we do with our family or just otherwise, we may not have had the opportunity to do when we were still working full-time or before we started our online business.
For me this week, we spent some time with our kids just a couple of days ago. We are really, really making an effort to go technology free when the kids get home in the afternoon.
Anna and I were playing together in the playroom and I walked into the living room for a minute and Shane and Isaac were laying there. Isaac was actually lying on top of his back and they were playing Mind Craft on the iPad.
SHANE: It wasn’t totally technology free but it was definitely direct focus time with Isaac. I was lying on my stomach with my iPad and Isaac was lying on my back looking up playing his iPad. I don’t know how long we laid there but we built a house or something. He just lay on my back the entire time.
My Can’t Miss Moments from the same day, I walked in just to see what Jocelyn and Anna were doing and they were just sitting there playing with their dollhouse. It just looked so sweet. I kind of snuck in behind them and took a picture before they noticed. This was all happening during the day. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. We’re all sitting around just playing with toys and games, and just spending that quality time with our kids. A year ago, we would have been out to the parking lot for bus duty.
JOCELYN: Shane would have been at football practice actually so we wouldn’t have been doing this. It was just awesome. It’s so much fun just to have time to spend with them and actual quality time, just doing things together and having a good time.
All right, we’re going close up this episode. I hope that it has been great for you. I feel like that we’ve put a lot of things in here so it might be a little overwhelming but we hope that if this content is helpful to you that you will head on over to iTunes and give us a review of our podcast. We appreciate that so very much.
SHANE: We also have a free gift for you. We’d like to close every show we can with a free gift. We try to create some kind of tool for you related to the content of our podcast. We don’t do it every episode but more often than not, we do. We are going to, this time, I’m going to create a free gift, like a guide, to show you what you should kind of be doing, those baby steps, those little things that Jocelyn talked about earlier in the podcast. I’m going to call it the Flipped Lifestyle Guide to Daily Traffic Domination. This is just a day to day- you like that?
JOCELYN: That’s a football coach title.
SHANE: Yeah, we’re going to dominate the traffic. So the Flipped Lifestyle Guide to Daily Traffic Domination. What this will be, this will be just a checklist of things you should do every day, those little things to make sure you are going out on the ground Guerrilla warfare style. You’re going out and finding the traffic and dragging it back to your website. You’re not waiting around for SEO. You’re not waiting around for Google or some algorithm to find your people for you. Things you should do, it will only take you about 15 minutes a day, a few days a week to go out and find that traffic and bring it back.
Go to www.flippedlifestyle.com/podcast12 and you will be able to download the Flipped Lifestyle Guide to Daily Traffic Domination absolutely free.
I would thank you for tuning in today. We hope this was helpful. Don’t get overwhelmed. Pick one of our tips, go take action on it as soon as you get the earbuds out of your ear after you listen to this podcast. We will see you next week right here on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Catch you all on the flipside. See yah.
JOCELYN: See yah, bye.
SHANE: Bye.
Do you need step by step instruction? Do you need us to help you create your digital product and get your online business started? Well, you can do that. We actually now offer a course called the Flip Your Life e-course where we show you how to create your first digital product in 29 days or less.
All you have to do to get more information on this program is, go to www.flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and that’s all one word, and you can check out everything that we do in that course to help you get your digital product created for sale online even if you don’t have a website. That’s www.flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. You can check when our next session is starting at that link.
Victoria Wilson says
Hey y’all!
I work at an online marketing company by day and I wanted to say that you are spot on with your ideas of SEO. We have changed our “SEO” department to be called our “Search Marketing ” post. Everything you’re describing is what we do for our clients (and what I’ve been doing on my personal site, and seeing great results!) A quote that’s been floating around our office is “Google doesn’t want to make websites popular, it wants to reward popular websites.”
Shane Sams says
Awesome Victoria! Thank you for your comment! Very cool quote, and it’s totally true!
Patrick M Matherne says
Loved the podcast. Just curious, you talk about using Facebook and twitter, but have you ever tried using Linked In
Also why did you decide to not go with the traditional menu bar across the top?
Shane Sams says
Thanks Patrick! We have not done much on Linked in. I share in some Linked in groups, but we’ve not had a lot of success there with engagement.
We don’t like to do anything “by the books” or “as the experts say.” We chose our layout to keep content front and center, and to move more information above the fold. It also helps with navigation, visitors always have the menu close at hand, no need to scroll up. It encourages people to explore the site, improve bounce rates, etc.
David says
When you guys talk about joining Facebook groups, and tweeting for that matter, are you doing this from your personal page/account? Or do you have a “business” page/account?
Shane Sams says
Both. On Twitter, we use pretty much “business” accounts exclusively. When I’m joining Facebook groups I use our personal accounts. People relate to people better in groups.
Nathan says
I just joined a bunch of FeeBee groups. Then I realized I joined them with my personal account. I want to join as my podcast account (MicroBrewr), or as my business person account (TheNathanPierce). But it doesn’t seem like I can do that… :/
Shane Sams says
Your page can like other pages, but I’m pretty sure you must join groups as your normal account. Groups are a more personal area on facebook, much less commercialized. So I think they limit groups to make sure its real people and not spammy brands infiltrating the groups.
Gina says
Great pod cast yet again, Mahalo! Can you tell me where the Show Notes are? I’m excited to see what you are using for plugins etc. but cannot seem to locate the show notes.
Thanks for being so inspiring <3
Shane Sams says
We decided to turn them into full blown blog posts. Coming soon 🙂
Gina says
Excellent! Well I’m hooked…see you then!
Much Aloha, Gina
Warren says
Great podcast guys, thank you for sharing this valuable information. So refreshing to learn there are ways of succeeding online without being so dependent upon Google, SEO and the like. I have never really heard any so-called experts go into these strategies that you guys shared on this podcast. For me this was very impactful and meaningful since these are the very strategies you guys used to succeed with your online ventures. The fact I have been wondering for some time out to diverse if I traffic generation away from Google since they have so much control over the Internet it makes perfect sense to me not to be utterly dependent on Google for all your traffic. I love listening to your podcast you guys deliver valuable content and I appreciate that very much.
Soren says
Hi Shane and Jocelyn.
Loving the show, this is probably my favourite episode so far.
Great idea with the “flipped” menu too, I wonder why hardly anybody else have thought about that…
I don’t think you mention it explicitly as a separate strategy in the podcast, but guest posting on more popular blogs targeted in the same niche can also be a very powerful tool to get the ball rolling when you are just starting out with great content and no audience. It works for exactly the same reasons that you mentioned with the other tactics, in that you get in front of your target audience exactly where they hang out.
All the best,
Soren
Jeremy DePrato says
The approach y’all have taken with engagement and ranking is really what google has been wanting all along.
Also, I really like the idea of digging through and becoming a part of the communities on both facebook and twitter.
Wayne says
Hey Shane and Jocelyn. This is really excellent information. And it sounds like everything is fairly easy to implement. I was looking for the plugins that you mentioned would be in the show notes. Is there another page for show notes???
Thanks for what you are doing.
Shane Sams says
Wayne, we started making the plugin guide and other resources for this podcast…and they turned into blog posts lol. We are going to link them here when we are done/they are released 🙂
Nathan says
What is the WordPress plugin that automatically updates my site map to Google? Preferably a free plugin. 🙂
Shane Sams says
https://wordpress.org/plugins/xml-sitemaps/ There are loads more if you don’t like that one. Many are free. 🙂
Beth says
Jocelyn,
Can you do a video tutorial on how to edit a wikipedia page and how to include a link without violating the etiquette there?
Thanks
Pauline says
I found your site from listening to SPI. I love your podcasts. As someone looking to build a business online, it is refreshing and inspiring to hear your story and know that ‘regular’ people like us, people with family and obligations can also succeed in this space (and not just the young tech superstars that surround me in Silicon Valley). Heading over to itunes to add my recommendation now! Thanks again.
Martin says
Outstanding advice. Exactly what I’ve been looking for. How to promote your website without getting sucked into the SEO jungle.
Thanks!
Anna says
Thank you guys for this podcast. For some reason, SEO was something I never wanted to get into. I think all this keyword-oriented stuff complicates things a bit (at least for me). I listened to your podcast yesterday, and today I am a member of 5 Facebook groups. I think you are right, connecting with people through groups gives you an incredible exposure. Thanks again.
Blessings!
Jorge Silvestrini says
You guys are really grabbing lots of attention and fans with your easy going and relaxes podcast and attitude. Finally some fresh air. You are just giving us, perhaps the same information, but with some easy to hear, understand and follow essence that makes both of you unique!
THANK YOU!!! Keep it up…
¡¡Suénalo!!™
Tim Seidler says
Love this podcast. I’m hardcore schooled in SEO and have recently made this same realization that SEO is dumb. It’s actually anti-productive. Most keywords that people target are very difficult to obtain. Just write for people and it all takes care of itself.
Antonio says
Hey you!
Just listened to your podcast. I’m from Brazil and find your content amazing.
You said in this podcast that you can find groups whose people that liked your page were in.
I’m trying to do so, but just coudnt figure out how….
Can you help?
Thanks e congratulations!
Israel says
Was listening to your podcast in my car. As soon as I could I went to FaceBook to find groups in my niche. I just hope FaceBook doesn’t turn into a time suck. Thanks for your great podcast!
Derek says
When it comes to traffic – and I haven’t read your free guide yet so I apologize if this is covered in there – but what kind of traffic numbers were you guys originally getting and then what did you start getting as you implemented these strategies?
With regard to SEO, I have always had the same opinion that it is more important to write for the reader as opposed to the search engines. When you write with an authentic voice the people will gravitate towards you, which I think you guys are seeing with your podcast and how so many people are connecting with both of you.
Marie says
Thanks for this podcast! I just started a blog and this was great insight as to how to get intentional about promoting my posts vs. just posting the link onto my social media sites and hoping people see it. I’m starting with your Twitter tips first & look forward to implementing the others after I get a handle on Twitter 🙂
Brittney says
This was exactly the type of post I was looking for as I head into this week! Thanks!