Quick & Dirty - Moving Traffic to Your Pages
Zack Greenfield • November 3, 2020
Traffic or getting traffic or delivering traffic, or however you want to express, that can be tricky. And I can tell you what it isn't going to happen by magic. You know, back in the old days, the internet you'd publish something. You were probably maybe the only one out publishing this stuff. The people that are interested, sort of arrived and came, and you could generate traffic by doing a lot of content marketing. Now I'm a believer in content, which is part of the reason I like to do these videos. I think it's part of a healthy sort of big picture, but I also think that you'll be lost if it's the only way that you're trying to get traffic, because for one it's a long game. And if I'm guessing you're watching this video because you want traffic now, like we all do. Nobody wants to wait two years for a video to rank or an article to suddenly be relevant or something to get shared and go viral because you know, the news went your direction or something.
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I mean, nobody wants to wait to grow their business. We want to grow our business this quarter, this week, this month, this year, not in a couple of years from, uh, you know, doing 500 blog posts. Okay. So content is one piece of the pie and it definitely can bring in some relevant and quality traffic. There's, there's no argument on that. However, it's also a long game. It can be slow to evolve, especially if you have, you know, early authority and your new and your site property is new and so forth. So then that kind of leads us to the other side was so, uh, of the equation, which is paid traffic. Okay. So just to be clear, I see there's like the way I see it is there's kind of three, well, maybe four realms of traffic, but for online purposes three. So you have content based traffic.
You've got search-based traffic, which is kind of tied to it, but we can call it sort of its own thing. And then you've got paid traffic, which has, you know, a whole menu of different sources that it can come from. And then if you want to bring in offline, you could say there's also, you know, offline traffic that comes to your digital property. So it's somebody that got, was referred to you, or you handed out a business card or you shook a hand or they went to an event or it was a conference or whatever the deal was. And you're going to get some traffic from that. So that's like kind of offline to online traffic. All right. So content, I think is good. I encourage all my clients to put some stuff out, um, at least weekly, because I think here's, here's what I've seen with that clients we've worked with for years who have been consistent, have really benefited from doing that.
And there is a significant amount of traffic that they gather from that content. Now that it's out there, did it change the needle dramatically in one week? No, isn't an amazing foundation down the road in one or two years. A hundred percent. Yes. So, you know, understand it that way. Now that doesn't mean in today's content world, there aren't some pops. So if you look at things like tick tock and then Instagram reels and some cool viral videos and things, those are content marketing and they can be dramatically successful. However, for most of us, those are the exception to the rule. Those are not something that you can quote unquote bank on. They happen, like getting struck by lightning in a lot of cases. Now there are, you know, quote unquote experts in viral videos. And I think, you know, I'm not going to take anything away from those people.
I think it's definitely an art and a skill and it can be done. Um, but I also think that it has little to no guarantees and it can be a little bit like Russian roulette, like where you're, you know, you may make five or 10 of them. You may get lucky with one. Um, I don't know, but I do know, no, I don't want to say that there aren't content. Okay. Instances that can result in incredible marketing returns in a very short term. Cause that would be false. It is true that it can be done for most of us. That's not going to happen overnight. Like it, like we hear the stories up and remember the stories. Nobody tells the story of the guy who did 300 videos before any watch, anybody watched one. Um, nobody talks about that because it sounds painful and boring.
What people love to talk about and makes the rest of us kind of feel bad about ourselves is the kid who did one viral video and then got a sponsorship deal from Reebok or something. And it happened in like a week. And then we all go, well, how come our marketing? Isn't that? Why can't we just do that? Why, why, why can't we build a multimillion dollar, you know, brand or authority or lifestyle brand or, or recognition in a week on one video? And I'm not saying you can't, I'm just saying, that's not something you want to bank on. So that brings us to the next thing, which is paid traffic. Now paid traffic is really the magical sauce of all local businesses and business. In general, the idea that you could take one advertising dollar and turn it into three to $5 or even $10 of revenue is really what business is built on.
So if you want to get back to like the nuts and bolts block and tackle core business building paid advertising is really what that's all about. This is where most of my clients, um, are definitely running some version of paid advertising. And now it's so it's even better than it's ever been because you have so much data. You can see exactly what's going on. You can control your spending. You can follow up and retarget, you can target audiences. There's just a whole entire universe of awesomeness with paid advertising. Now online, I encourage all my clients to, if they want to grow their business, to put some money into paid advertising. Okay. And then the last piece of that is SEO and search, which I think for a while was like super fashionable. I see a lot of people, not necessarily paying a ton of attention to it now, but it's still really important.
And it's important to build great web pages with great keywords and make sure that your content that you are putting out has great keywords. So that starts breaking. And you just can't ignore the power of search. One of the tricks that, uh, we've been working with a lot of our, our local businesses is that is understanding that reviews and reputation are also kind of the back door to search when it comes to maps and near me searches and local relevancy for the best of whatever your niche is. Okay. So don't discount reputation. When it comes to traffic, having a great reputation online will actually bring you traffic. I'm a hundred percent certain of it. I've seen databased evidence here in my agency that when we take somebody from 50 to 250 reviews, uh, over, you know, a year or something like that, they're ranking in maps, they're ranking.
And all of these other relevancy searches actually starts to be one of the top three because Google now knows they're the most recognized in the market for that niche. So reputation is a piece of search now, clearly because those are social votes about how great you are. And the more votes you have, I mean, exams stands to be logical that you should be returned in search results. So don't, don't discount that. So you kind of have just to summarize on today's video, it's a really broad, I mean, we could deep dive into every one of these segments. There could be a course that I could do on every one of these, but just for high level, for your understanding, traffic really comes from three and a half places, right? You've got content marketing, paid advertising, paid promotions, and you've got search and organic search and just relevancy of your business for its niche.
And, and then the half or the fourth item, if you will, is offline, that becomes online. So those are events and handshakes and business cards and handouts and rallies. And I don't know whatever it is that you go participate in, in the real world that would bring your business. Some hits, uh, online is also part of the puzzle. So go attack those three or four items. And if you want to learn more, I think it's probably worth my time to do some deep dives on those. So keep up on what our next videos go ahead and like, and subscribe. And if this video is something that you think would be shared, I'd really appreciate that. Cause somebody out there might be swimming in what to do next. And my advice really to summarize all this is you need to do a little bit of everything, but if you really want to pop and you want some certainty and you want to do well, I think paid advertising is where you need to focus and then also have some sort of content that you're producing along the way.
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