Ch. 15: Connect - How to Attract Your Audience to Your Message

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Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to the market. Your message show. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan and author. Of the book, your message matters, how to rise above the noise and get paid for what you know. And this is the next chapter of our book club series on the book. Your message matters. Today, we're going to be talking about chapter 15. This is the traffic chapter. This is a chapter. A lot of people want to know about because they want to figure out how to stand out. Amongst that noisy marketplace. That's what we're going to be diving into in this episode. Now, if you don't have a copy of my last book, your message matters. I would encourage you to go get a free copy. You can actually go to your message matters book. Dot com your message matters book. Dot com. And for just us 4 95 for shipping and handling, we'll ship you out a book. Of course we want you to be in the U S we are unable to do international orders, but if you'd like a physical copy of the book and you could go back and listen through this entire series chapter by chapter. Then go to your message matters. book.com. So we are in the middle of our book club series, and I had the idea about. A couple of months ago. Of how much fun it would be for me. If I had a book that I was really enjoying and I got to hear the behind the scenes, I got to hear further explanation. I got to hear more application of what I was learning and reading in the book. And so you can use this. Audio course, if you will, this podcast. As an audio course and listen chapter by chapter and implement the most important parts. So we are today going to be talking about chapter 15, connect how to attract your audience, to your message. No traffic can be this big overwhelming topic. When we talk about online traffic. But really you can boil every kind of strategy, tactic method down to just three. Alright, here we go. Free traffic. Paid traffic. Partner traffic. Those are the three. Now everything fits underneath those three. And I'm going to pull out for your highlight for you. The ones that I really love. I've been doing this for a long time now. It's a, I keep forgetting how long, but I started back in 2009 that's what's that approaching 15 years. It's crazy. But doing it full-time since 2011. And I've learned a lot about traffic over the years, and I want to boil it down to the best of the best in this episode. So first let's dive into free traffic. Let me give you an analogy for each of you, so you really understand why they are all different. In understand the advantages and disadvantages to each. So the free traffic, I want you to think about one of those. Old fashion, water pump handles with the well. Now, I don't know if you've seen one of these before. But my grandfather, they lived in kind of rural Indiana. And there were surrounded by cornfields. And I'll never forget that he had this old fashion. Water pump. And I asked him one day how do you work this thing? And so let me show you and walked over to that water pump started. Pushing on the handle. And if, you got to push it over and over again, over and over again. And I was like, there's no water coming out, grandpa. And he goes, no, you gotta stay at it. And so I kept going, and then all of a sudden that water came out and it was so awesome. And I thought that was just the coolest thing as a kid that I could just bring water out of the ground. That is what free traffic is like free traffic. Is not always. That you're going to get a bunch right now from your effort. You may have to put in a little bit of sweat muscle. And a hard work. In order to enjoy. The fruit of your labor later on, let me give you a really simple example, blogging. Blogging is awesome. I am still a huge fan of blogging. I still have people every day that find me from blog posts that I wrote years ago. But in the beginning you put a lot of work in and you don't see a whole lot of effort. And the reason why a lot of people aren't successful with blogging is because they don't give a time like a farmer. Remember we talked about, you got to. Treat your business like a farmer. You got to plant the seeds. You got to work hard during the summer. I don't give up before the harvest. And that's the same with blogging. So blogging is a great example. So what are my favorite? Free traffic strategy. So there's three. Search. Social in subscriber. Now search can be in the form of blogging. It could be in the form of podcasting. You probably found me somehow by searching. Or hearing about this in some way, right? And then YouTube. What do people do when they go to YouTube? They search oftentimes to find what they're looking for. Those are my favorite search traffic. Mechanisms to create awareness in your business. Then there's social. We all know social media can allow you to go post something today. And drive some traffic back to something you're working on. And then there's subscriber. Now, this is. This is helpful. Once you produce that email list that we were talking about a couple chapters ago, go read the capture. Chapter. About the importance of building that list. Because I can at any time. Send an email to my list. I just already did it today. And I could send traffic for free. To anything that I want, whether that's a new blog post podcast to a sales page. To go watch a video, sign up for a webinar. Anything I want. That is the power of having that subscriber traffic. So that is method. Number one is free traffic. Read all about it. Starting on page 2 0 3. All right, we're going to skip a couple of pages ahead. And we're going to go to paid traffic over on page 2 0 8. Now the pay traffic. I really boiled it down to cold lukewarm, warm and hot. And that's definitely a great strategy. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this podcast going through and explaining all that. It would be an entire episode. But let me simplify it down even more. All right. So paid traffic. If free traffic was like an old fashioned water pump. Then pay. Traffic's like a water faucet. If you want traffic to something. Today. All you have to do. Is go turn on the faucet. For many people, that's Facebook ads. You could go create a Facebook ad today. Send traffic to your sales page. Put some money behind it and you will have people looking at your stuff. Now I may or may not be the best strategy may not. You may want to capture people on a list first. But this strategy works, you can get instant. Traffic. I heard another marketer years ago. Ryan dice described it this way. If you want rice for dinner. You don't have to wait and grow rice in your backyard. You just go to the store and you buy rice. And that is what pay traffic's if you want traffic, you go pay for it. Now there's two types of paid traffic. I call them lead ads. And conversion ads. Now lead ads. You're not necessarily looking to make money from it. Or you offer something low dollar in order to break even on your cost, but a lead ad is all about building the list. And then you have conversion ads. Now conversion ads are really selling something. And you want to make sure you have something that converts before you really spend a lot of money on conversion ads, because you can burn through money quick, right? But paid traffic is absolutely doable. And the number three. Let's talk about partner traffic. So what is partner traffic? If the free traffic is like the old fashioned water pump, it takes a little while to get it going, but once it gets going, it flows freely. And paid traffic is like a faucet. Turn it on, turn it off. You can go spend$10 a day for a week and then turn it off and see how you did, it's a water faucet. Then what is partner traffic? We'll partner traffic. It's like somebody it's like inviting friends over to a party. That you're hosting. And they're bringing the goods. They're bringing the water cooler. It's got all the drinks, it's got everything in it. Right there bringing the goods. And that's what partner traffic is all about. Partner traffic. Is really you thinking about who already has access to your ideal audience? And how can you get in front of those people? And there's multiple ways that we talk about starting on page two 12. There's guest contributor. Guest teacher. And a guest host. So let's talk about each of these, and I'm going to frame this in the form of a question. So guests contributors, where we're going to start. This is answering the question. Where can you join a conversation that's already happening online? Where can you join a conversation that's already happening online? The first. Practical application to this question. His guest posting. So which websites online already serve your market and they accept guest posts. And if you enjoy writing. Guest posting can be a great way to drive traffic back to your site. And there's a lot of large media sites like Forbes business, insider family circle, shape, entrepreneur, and self they're, always hunting for guest writers. So there's a great opportunity for you. Another one that I really doubled down on after I launched this book, your message matters is being a guest podcaster. There are hundreds. Of podcast out there looking for guests. There's a lot of podcasts. That are interview style now. This particular podcast is more a teaching podcast. Occasionally I'll bring on a guest. But there's many podcasts out there that are always looking to interview more people. And I called them the hidden stages strategy. Because you got these pockets of people that you can't see. But all you have to do is show up. Answer some questions around your topic of passion. And then that person, the host does all the work to present you to their existing audience. I still get book sales today on our free book funnel. From podcast that I did two years ago. It is a strategy that works. Here's another one guest video interviews. So which influences in your niche? I have been known to interview others on video. You might be able to get a video interview. Those are all the different ways. Again, that you can be a guest contributor. Then what's about what is this thing about guests teacher? What's the question here? Here's the question? Where can you add value to an audience by teaching? Now, one of the more popular ways is for you to put together a really good webinar presentation. That typically sells a course on the end or some kind of product or service. And then you go ask other people. If they would be open to partnering with you and you share in the the profit. So to keep it really simple, let's say I had a course. Maybe it was like how to make money as a writer on medium.com. And the course was$500. And the partner, I present this to him and he's oh, I have a lot of writers on my list. I think this is a great idea. And any sales that happen from that webinar? He would be able to earn$250. So I would earn 250. He would earn 250. That's the concept of a guest teacher. It's really an affiliate. Webinar strategy that works really well. And then there's guest host. What type of online event, can you host that other influencers would be willing to promote? Now I did this a few years ago. I created the amplify summit and I had three tracks of experts at writers, speakers, and coaches. I interviewed each of them for about 30 minutes. And I ended up with 30 people that I interviewed. I had a particular week that the online interviews were going to go live. And all those 30 experts. What they did was they promoted to their list? It was a free event. But people had to put in their email address. And guess who, whose list grew mine at the same time, all of the experts got exposure from all the other people, sending traffic to one source. That is what's known as a virtual summit strategy. It is a great strategy for list building and it can work really well. It involves you reaching out to people who you feel like are influencers, inviting them to interview. So you become Oprah. And you're interviewing them. And then they promote in return. They promote your free event. To their audience. And when you have a bunch of speakers doing that's a lot of traffic in one location, which is your website. Pretty awesome. Huh? All right. So let's boil this down to a simple 90 day traffic blueprint. Cause this could be overwhelming traffic. There's so much that you could do. And what I don't want you to do is doing a little bit of all of it. Here's what I'm going to recommend. I'm gonna give you four steps. It's on page two 18, and it's just a simple 90 day traffic blueprint. Here's how it works. Step one. Choose just one traffic strategy at a time. So out of those, I mentioned today, which one did you like, did you really the virtual summit idea, then only focus on that for the next three months. Number two. Run a 90 day experiment. Treat every one of these strategies as an experiment. It'll relieve the pressure off of you and it will allow you to be. Playful with this process. You're learning. And that's what I want you to do is continue to learn. And when you find something that's working double down on it. When something doesn't work. You learn from it. And try to improve it. Number three. Sasha results and identified the next strategy you want to return. You want to try, so take time to evaluate. So in other words, instead of trying to do social media everywhere, just say, you know what? I think my audience is on Pinterest. I am just going to go 90 days, deep into Pinterest, learn everything there is about it. And then just implement as much as you can and see what the results are. That is a profound way to approach this whole strategy. Let me give you a quick example years ago. I read a book. And I can't remember. I think it was called the power of less. And in the book it talked about. This illustration of, if I were standing. In front of the ocean. So I'm standing on the shore. And in my hand is this tiny little vial of ink. In my other hand. Is a cup or glass of water. No. I have two options to pour out this little vial of ink. I could pour it into my glass or I could dump it into the ocean. Which one is going to have the greater impact. Because. It's the same amount of ink and the vial. The simple answer is poured into the cup, right? And that's the application here. When you try to do all of the stuff, all of the things it's like pouring that vial of ink into the ocean doesn't make much of an impact. But what if you took that vial of ink that represented the time you have in the next 90 days to try to improve the traffic to your site or to whatever you're working on. And pour that into a glass of water. Hope that's helpful. I hope that really drives home. And coming up in the next episode, we're going to dive into part four of the book. Live your message. I oh, I love this part. And I think you will too. So again, if you don't have a copy of the book, you can go get a free copy by going to your message matters, book.com. And as long as we have. Some copies left. We will send you out a free copy and you can go through this. Audio course for free. Also take a moment and like share, subscribe, or even review our show and let us know what you would like me to cover on future episodes. And always remember. Your message matters