I’ve spent the last 10 years building and maintaining my Training Business Pros online Google profile to keep Trainingbusinesspros.com on page #1 of the ORGANIC search results for the keyword “Business Training,” from coast to coast in Canada (we’re on page 2 in the US). We actually used to be just the number #1 result altogether no matter where you are in the country, but Google has since changed their algorithm to favour local search results. Still…
A pretty impressive feat. Beating out all major education facilities in every city.
But the question is, what actually comes of it?
I’ll be 100% honest, Training Business Pros gets about (on average) 50 unique daily visitors directly to our home page from organic traffic. Each of those people spend between 1:30 to 5:45 minutes researching what we do, reading blog posts, reading out Team Page.
The digital marketing training and implementation business is a very saturated market, so those results are pretty impressive. But out of all that traffic, would you like to know what comes out of it? Not a whole lot…
Actually, we’ve seen increasingly less and less revenue come from organic streams in relation to paid streams of traffic. Here’s why…
When you Google something and you skip the ads to go to the organic results, what are you doing? You are doing research. Psychologically, you are not prepared to part with credit card info, email, name, phone number, anything. You are simply compiling information to help you make a decision LATER, not now, but later…
The user comes, scrape your website, reads some stuff, logs that information in a dusty closet in their brain somewhere and goes to the next website. That’s what happens.
You can have all the organic traffic you want, and it looks great for google and anyone else you’re trying to impress, but at the end of the day, organic traffic does not bring home the bacon.
So what can you do if not rely on the 100s of unique visitors you currently have going to your site?
If you want to generate leads, collect funds, and generate your business’ revenue via the internet, you need to BUY TRAFFIC.
Now, if you have a lot of organic traffic, you have a great starting point for buying traffic. Here’s why.
After a user has left your site with all of the research they’ve collected, you can tell Google, Facebook, Instagram, twitter or whoever to show your ad directly back to that person to tell them to come back and buy your products. We can REMIND them of all the research they collected and prompt them to make a decision on us before anyone else. This process is called re-marketing.
Now, you have a lot of that original organic traffic coming back to your website, landing page, or blog post at what I like to call a higher buying readiness level because they’ve already been exposed to you, they’ve seen the ad, they KNOW it’s an ad, but they are willing to hear your pitch anyway. They are expecting you to sell to them, and they have their wallets ready.
But what if you don’t have organic traffic? What can you do? Here are a few ideas:
1. Buy email lists.
I know that’s pretty taboo now, but here’s the reasoning. You will NOT be sending emails to these people under any circumstances. But what you CAN do is buy an email list from a competitor, related business, or conference and upload that list to Facebook and make your ad appear for those people only. That way you can CONTROL who your ad is shown to and ensure your target audience is receiving your marketing material.
2. Use YOUR email list!
This one is pretty self explanatory. Use the exact same process for people already ON your list, because it’s easier to sell products to existing customers than it is to generate new ones.
3. Buy blog advertising.
One of the most powerful marketing strategies is to simply go to where your target market is.
If your target audience is doing research, place your ad where they are doing it. Simple! Buy an ad on a popular research website where people may go to learn more about your type of business. If you are involved in home renovations, you BETTER be advertising on Homestars!
In our experience for a small business is is MUCH too expensive to advertise broadly with just plain Google search to people whom may or may not have been exposed to you. It is much more cost effective and effective in terms of results to place your paid ad in places where people are more open and more READY to click on it.
So what can you take away from this?
If you’re relying solely on organic traffic, it’s probably time to start buying paid advertising.
If you don’t know where to start, because I guarantee if you just start blazing away you’ll waste a lot of money, you should take 1 day and spend it in our new course Fast Track My Sales which will help you get started with how to not only create ads, but setup the technical stuff as well.
Click here to learn how to not only create paid Traffic, but also organic traffic.