Massive Action Plan – Phase 3

I hope you have been using Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the Massive Action Plan to put together your own online business success plan that you can take right into the first 30-days of the New Year starting off Red-Hot toward achieving your desired outcome.

In Phase 1 we covered –

• Setting up the right focus and reasons to succeed with your online business
• Deciding & finding your ideal niche market and prospects
• What to do first and NEXT to get started with your online business

If you missed Phase 1 – it’s still available here.

In Phase 2 we built on Phase 1 by learning how to:

• How to setup the right websites, blog pages and landing pages
• Simply create the proper sales funnel that will result in 2X-3X more sales for your online business
• Some advanced concepts around improving conversions leading to higher profit and scaling your business

If you missed Phase 2 – you can access it here.

Ok, so that leaves us with Phase 3 which is all about Getting Targeted Traffic and will include:

• SEO, versus partner, versus paid traffic
• What your plan should be to get Search Engine Traffic
• Getting traffic from paid ads
• Some final thoughts on traffic generation and scaling your traffic and sales

Where Should You Go To Get Traffic First?

There are, broadly speaking, 3 main sources of traffic separated by 3 main ways people will find your websites, become engaged with your sales funnel and ultimately buy products and services from you

1. Search Engine traffic from content
2. Partner traffic (where they send you targeted traffic for something in return)
3. Paid traffic (advertising)

Let’s go through these and help you work out a plan for the next 30-days

Search Engine Traffic From Content

Wrapped up in these methods are the methods that most people consider as generating “free” traffic.

Here we have tasks such as:

• Blogging
• Article posting
• Article Syndication
• Publishing free videos
• Social  (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, etc…)
• Optimizing your existing websites for SE’s
• Bookmarking
• Publishing comments and signatures in forums aimed at backlinking

The objective here is to publish content, try and obtain backlinks (natural or otherwise) and over time get more and more of your content ranked highly enough in the SE’s that you begin to get natural search traffic

Although creating these types of content-rich sites is now less effective than it used to be (mainly due to the scale of how many others are doing the same thing and the various algorithm changes Google has made over the last few years that tends to favor larger, more established players) – posting content is still an approach we advise strongly to all of our clients.  Here’s why:

• It still will pull in thousands of visitors a day to your websites and if you post content properly the ROI is still positive (though be sure to keep track of your time and place a value on that time to understand if your content publishing and marketing is profitable for your business) 
• When you do attract visitors, leads and customers you still want to feed them content to help close them and to keep them focused on you so you can keep them as a customer for future sales
• You will increase your brand and chances of getting publicity through other means such as PR, interviews, news coverage, etc..
• Content can be strategically used to seed partnership traffic winning you more promotion from partners than simply sending their traffic continuously to a sales page or landing page
• Content pages along with their statistics give you huge insight into which topics, products, and content is MOST of interest to your market which you can then use to tailor future content campaigns, future products and to fold into paid ad campaigns making those ads more effective

So, what should your plan be?

Here are 5 recommendations you should implement in the first 30-days of launching your online business:

1. Setup a WordPress Blog – if you have not already done this as part of Phase – 2 setting up your landing and sales pages, you definitely want to do it now.  Most C-Panel accounts with your webhosting includes a simple installation front-end for a free WordPress Blog.  As we mentioned back in Phase – 2, we highly recommend getting Optimize Press 2 as your WordPress Theme making it simple to create professional looking sales, landing, squeeze pages as well as blog pages 
2. Focus on posting daily content with a mix of tips, comments on research or news/current events around your niche, a review of your product or an affiliate product and perhaps a step-by-step tutorial on something closely related to the product you are promoting
3. Get yourself social accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and make sure you bookmark each blog post with it’s title and link back to your blog post.  This allows consumption of your content on these other well-trafficked networks bringing the most interested back to your blog
4. Setup an account with an autoresponder like this one, go ahead and create your first (or a new one if you already have campaigns) list and either use their built-in opt-in box creator OR have one designed on odesk or elance to be added to your blog (ideally on the right Navigation Panel as well as above your main body posts and after each post) – This will also require you to setup a set of automated messages that your prospect will get when they sign up to your list which should start with delivery of the incentive you promoted to get the sign-up (video, report, article, ebook, etc…) and include 3-5 additional posts that walk them through the challenge they are facing, why nothing has worked so far and why what you have WILL work this time (including any proof you have in terms of case studies, testimonials, experience, etc…) which will be included in each email sequence back to your sales page to promote either your product or affiliate product
5. Of course, for number 4 to work you need to have put together an incentive which will serve as the basis for your subscribers to sign-up with you – the front side of your powerful, automated sales funnel. Many people find this challenging, but it really needn’t be.   What you really want to do is identify the #1 question that your target market has about the niche you have chosen, then you go about answering that question (either from your experience, by researching and finding the answer or asking someone else who knows the market better than you)  then package that answer into either a video, report, private member-access content or ebook.

Having completed these 5 critical steps, you now have the front-end of your sales cycle plus a regular posting plan that should get you between 50-100 unique visitors a day within the next 2-4 weeks.

This initial traffic will help you begin to build a subscriber list, allow you to test your content and test your sales funnel to guage sign-ups, leads and conversions to sales before you start using other methods such as partner traffic or paid traffic.

 

Stepping Up Your Game – Paid Ads

Many people are afraid of paid ads, in some cases that comes from the false notion that generating content, SEO, partner traffic, etc…is all “Free” (which we already mentioned is certainly not true when you begin to put even a small value like $150/hr on your time), in other cases the bad knock on paid ads comes from jumping in ignorantly to Google Adwords or Facebook Advertising and losing money without seeing any results.

We are fond of kicking off our markets with SEO and content, spend anywhere from 2-weeks to 2-months fine-tuning the pages to get a handle on conversions, then perhaps role out a launch with your partners and THEN start to test paid traffic as a way to really scale your traffic and sales.

Others I know do very little other than paid traffic – but paid traffic does need to be part of your longer term strategy if not part of your marketing strategy right at the beginning.

Your main choices with paid ads are:

1. Facebook
2. Google Adwords
3. Paid Ezine or Blog Ads

Sure, there are others such as Bing, Twitter and Pintrest and Instagram will expand their ad programs in the near future as well.

For the purpose of this lesson, we are looking mainly at Facebook given that is where we put 80% of our paid ad budget these days – primarily because that is where we see conversions

Facebook Advertising:

With Facebook, you have a few options for posting ads:

• Ads that link to your website (outside of Facebook) 
• Ads that promote FB posts or pages (Engagement ads)
• Ads that promote mobile apps
• Ads that promote videos

For the purpose of today’s lesson we are going to focus on a system where you want to create and then promote a Facebook page or post that is designed to, in turn, illicit engagement in the form of someone clicking off of your FB post or page toward subscribing to your email list or purchasing one of your products or services.

To be clear, this means that your paid Facebook ads are designed to promote FB pages and posts only (not your off-Facebook web pages) and from there the FB landing page or post is constructed for further engagement and to click off of the page toward taking more action that you desire them to take.

Here’s a quick graphic of creating an Ad within Facebook with the Power Editor:

 

Facebook Page Post Engagement:

Facebook Page Post Engagement ads allow you to promote a specific post using a wide variety of targeting information – the objective here is to “soft-promote” Facebook pages that have been purposely setup to provide content and very clear call to action (which links back to your website for the purpose of either list building or product promotion).  Facebook page post engagement ads can result in higher conversions (clicks and/or likes to your Facebook page that is promoted) and assuming your Facebook landing page is well designed, can lead to quite high conversions from that page as well.

Facebook is most interested in ads that promote content within its own network – this should be intuitive if you think about it for a minute.  So, rather than running ads that take people to a website or off of the FB platform (which you can do), you are better off working on strategies that allows you to promote Facebook content and work to have that content direct traffic to your “call to action” pages for signing up subscribers and generating sales from customers.

Why is getting a Facebook like worth paying for?

What happens when someone “likes” your page is that content then appears on THEIR Facebook timeline where a good portion of their readers will now be exposed to that Facebook Page Post Engagement posting and you will get even more traffic from these posts that flow through.

This USED to happen with free Facebook posts, but we now know that Facebook is severely limiting the reach of free content LIKED and how that filters through to others timelines.  They did this to ensure people pay for ads instead.

What you want to do is setup Page Like ads that get people to LIKE your ad and are sent to your page – these LIKED actions will appear widely in timelines because Facebook wants everyone to see ADS that are liked as this further promotes their ads – don’t expect you to appreciate this activity from Facebook, but you certainly have to be aware of it and play to what they want.

Finally, on these Facebook Page Post Engagement postings you can still enter a link in the posting itself as long as you do it in the first few sentences of the posting – otherwise it will still appear but will be buried under a “more” button that most people will never click (in effect making it invisible)

Keep in mind that your cost per click here will be heavily impacted by how much engagement your posted ad receives – so you want to optimize the ad for engagement (Ex: if you create a Page Like Ads engagement post then you want to optimize for Likes or shares – the more engagement you get the lower your cost-per-click will get…you may start off having to pay $1 or more per engagement, but can often get that below .20 with a solid campaign and decent engagement)

You can use Facebook Insights (built-in analytics engine) to monitor engagement, clicks following engagement, etc…

Final Thoughts & Fast Track Action Plan

We realize that The 3 Lessons contained in the Massive Action Plan are quite involved and pretty intense – but they really do make up about 95% of the most important steps toward getting your online business setup, getting traffic and starting to see the cash roll in regardless of your business model.

Despite all of the information we have given you here, we know you will have additional questions, may need further clarification and can benefit from having further tutorials and training not to mention a private mentor option to hold your hand as you put all of this into massive action.  All of that is available through Information Marketer’s Zone where you will find a detailed 45-day video training program, tools, templates and ongoing updates to this strategy as well as your own private mentor’s forum to help you along the way.

We look forward to seeing you over there if you decide that NOW is the time you want to Fast-Track your online business building and profit growth plan.

Thanks for joining us – feel free to leave comments on the material, we’d love to hear from you.