 Everybody in the back can hear me? Yes? Okay. How many of you already have a blog? How many of you would like to make money on that blog? How many of you have written a business plan to make money on your blog? Oh, there's like five people. Congratulations. That's more than usual. Okay. We're going to talk about traffic. And the thing about traffic is you probably don't have any. And there's probably a really good reason for that, because your blog's probably not very good yet. Quite honestly, when you start a blog, you're like, yes, I'm such a good writer. I'm such a good blogger. Anybody would want to read this. And then a year later, you look back and you go, oh my God, my blog was awful. I sucked. And you're right. You did suck. Most people have to go through about a year of sucking before they get good enough that anybody's going to want to read their stuff. And it's the same thing. Anybody play a musical instrument? Who in here plays well enough that you would charge money for somebody? How long have you been playing? Voice. Voice? How long have you been singing? Forty years. Forty years. Who else plays or sings well enough that they would charge money? What do you play? Several instruments. And how long have you been playing them? Twenty years. Twenty years. Anybody been playing an instrument for a year or less? Yeah? What do you play? Would you play on stage yet? Well, there you go. Kind of the same thing with blogging. Blogging is a completely different skill from writing. I was a writer. I had gotten paid to write things when I started blogging. And when I started blogging, I sit and still kind of suck sometimes. Because it's a different skill, you have to learn how to write in such a way that people want to read it, you can read it on their phones, that they feel like they're having a conversation with somebody and all those are things you build over time. So, if you've had a blog for less than two or three years and nobody's reading it yet, congratulations. You're exactly where you need to be. Because this is where you get to practice and try things and do stupid stuff and nobody's going to make fun of you because nobody's reading you anyway. But if you have a blog because you want to make money, you can't necessarily afford to go through that long process of getting good. So, we're going to start talking about building traffic, okay? There's some basic habits that you need to form in order to start getting people to read your blog. The first thing is writing stuff that people want to read. It's a simple concept, but it's harder than it sounds. And what do I mean by that? Usually when you start blogging, you're blogging kind of like a journal, you're writing for you, right? And you think people who are like me will find this. But you're writing from your perspective. Has anybody in here ever read a Realtors blog? Is anybody in here a Realtor that blogs? Okay, I don't want to offend people that badly, but Realtors are notorious for this. They start a blog because they're like, okay, I've heard if I start a blog, people who are googling things, they'll find me and then I can sell them houses and help them find houses. So, they write a blog about things that Realtors care about. Like whether or not it's a buyer's market or what banks think about certain things in the housing market. And if you've ever bought a house, you don't give a hoot what the market is, right? You don't care. When you're going to buy a house, what do you want? I want a house that I can afford that has these things that I like. I want a yard. I want a place where I can raise my kids. I want to be able to have dogs that I let out and don't have to walk on a leash. I want to live in a neighborhood where my neighbors aren't douchebags. Pardon me, aren't jerks. So, if a Realtor is writing a blog about the things that Realtors care about, how does that actually help somebody who's trying to buy a house? It doesn't, right? But that's the first beginner mistake that we all make. We're looking at it from our perspective. So, start learning to put yourself in the shoes of the people that you want to read your blog. So, anybody in here want to volunteer what their blog topic is? Anybody? Go ahead. Aviation. Aviation. Are you a pilot? Air traffic control. Air traffic control. Good job. More power to you. I have flown and I have great respect for air traffic control. I do not have the brain to do that. Who do you want to read your blog? Pilots. Pilots. So, people like me. If you were going to write something for a pilot, here's a good way you can start. What do pilots usually ask you as an air traffic controller? Anything that comes to mind? So, we're talking about aviation weather, about rules when you're talking as a pilot to air traffic control, flying in and out of certain areas, about what a pilot really needs to know from an air traffic controller, right? And there's a lot. That's got to be a two-way relationship. So, if I'm a pilot and I want to know the rules to fly in and out of a certain area, anybody in here familiar with aviation? Is that kind of a basic topic? Okay. When you're a pilot and you're flying in and out of controlled airspace, you have to do everything that air traffic control tells you to do so that you don't run into other planes, because if you run into other planes, that's really bad. It's a really basic way to put it, but that's true, right? So, there's a lot of technical terms to avoid confusion. You know that phonetic alphabet, alpha, bravo, Charlie, delta? You know the reason they have that? It's because C and D and E sound like the same thing, but echo and Charlie and delta do not. So, as a pilot, you need to know what the air traffic controller is going to say and what it means. They want to say it as quickly as they can, and they want to say it as clearly as they can. So, let's say I want to be a pilot, and I want to learn about air traffic control. I might Google what is the phonetic alphabet. I might Google air traffic control commands, right? Those are things called keywords. There are tools you can use to do that, but the easiest way to do this, and change optimization, helping people find you, is to say if somebody wanted to find this information, what would they type into Google? That does two things. First of all, it helps you figure out keywords so that you can put it in your post and people can find you. Second of all, it helps you put yourself in your reader's shoes so you can talk about things in the way that they are going to understand it, and in the way that they are going to want to find it. So, as an air traffic controller, you might know the phonetic alphabet, and somebody might Google, what's that thing where you use words instead of letters? So, somewhere in your post, you can say the phonetic alphabet is that thing where you use words instead of letters. Now you're in your reader's shoes, and somebody can find you, right? So, another way you can put yourself in your reader's shoes and figure out what people are actually wanting to find out from you and write in their language is to go to forums. Now, this is, of course, assuming that you're sitting behind your computer and not actually talking to people that are going to read your blog post because you know we're bloggers and we like to sit behind computers and not socialize. So, forums. Anybody in here use forums? Occasionally? Very prominent in the tech world because Googling in the tech world is a little sketchy. You don't know what you're going to get. In forums, you get a conversation of people and you have a back and forth, right? Well, here's the thing about forums. Somebody goes to a forum first. The reason that somebody goes to a forum is because they googled it and didn't get a clear answer. So, if somebody's asking a question in a forum and you're seeing a question come up a lot, you know that that's an answer that lots of people are looking for, and they actually wanted an answer bad enough that they went to a bunch of sketchy strangers on the internet and asked a question. In certain industries, you'll see this a lot. In blacksmithing, you see it a lot. Different artisan crafts, little kind of niche areas. In technology where things are updating so fast that people can't keep up and keep relevant information on the web. That's something where you're going to find answers in forums and you're going to find search topics. And you're also going to see what language people are using. The people in the forums are actually looking for blog posts like the ones you're going to write. Now, this does not mean go to forums and say, hey, I wrote a blog post, here's a link to a spammer and spammers are a-holes. Nobody's going to click on that. But it does mean that you can go in and see what people are actually wanting to read from you and get better at providing relevant information. Does that help? The next thing you can do to make your writing better to write stuff that people want to read is to work on your communication skills by cutting out the first half of your blog post. So anybody, food bloggers are notorious for this. Sorry, food bloggers. Anybody ever go to a blog post where you're looking for a recipe for fried chicken and the first three quarters of the blog post about the recipe for fried chicken are, well, you know, this one time I went to a church thing and they had this cute little border collie dog and I went up and I pet this little border collie dog and I was talking to the lady that owned it. And about, you know, 150 words in, 200 words in, you get to the point. And she gave me a fried chicken recipe. But you still don't get the fried chicken recipe. Then you get another whole bunch of story about how you tried this fried chicken recipe with your family and everybody loved it except one kid. So you had to switch out the time with oregano because you're, anyway, those posts are hard to read. And in food blogging, sometimes it kind of works, which is why it continues to be common. But in most types of blogs, if you've got a bunch of fluff at the beginning of your post before you get to the point, people are going to leave and they're not going to come back, which means somebody found you, they didn't find what they wanted and they will never come back to your website again. And you don't want that. So the way you fix that is you write your blog post the way you normally would and you walk away for an hour or two, go walk your dog, talk to the lady with the fried chicken recipe and then you come back and you go through the blog post and you read until you find the place where you get to the point. And then you highlight all of the text before that and you hit Backspace. And it's hard to do because you put so much work into making that stuff fun to read, but nobody cares but you. And you're not writing for you. You're writing for the people that are going to come to your blog and read. You don't have to get rid of that stuff entirely. You can move it to the end of your post if it's still relevant. But I'll tell you what, if you take that stuff out and you try to move it to the end and it doesn't fit and you're trying to cram it in, then it's not necessary because it doesn't have anything to do with what you're writing about. Do this for about a year and you will start getting to the point automatically so that you don't have to delete a bunch of text that you worked on. That stuff that takes guts. But if you actually want more than 12 people to read your blog post it takes a little bit of guts. So now you know how to get to the point and you know how to put yourself in your reader's shoes. The next thing we're going to talk about is search engine optimization. This is what I do for a living during the day. I write blog posts that are designed to get more traffic from search engines to websites. And you don't do that by writing blog posts for search engines. Google is getting better and better and better at figuring out what people want to read and giving it to them. Google's whole job is to say, you are looking for things that say this. Here are things that say this. Go visit them. There's something like 8 billion Google searches a day. It might be 12 billion somewhere in that... a very large billion number. Not very good at numbers, that's why I do words. Billions of Google searches every single day and they send every last one of those people to somebody else's website. That's their job. Google doesn't want to send somebody to a website that's just a whole bunch of search keywords jump all together. Back in the day, Google used to figure out what things were based on keywords. The more often you set a keyword, the more likely you were to show up in the search results. Circuit City got in trouble because on their pages for printer ink, their descriptions would be like, this is printer ink when you need printer ink and it's black printer ink and blue printer ink and pink printer ink. And then at the bottom of the page, there would be a big white space and what they had done was white text on a white background with printer ink, printer ink, printer ink, printer ink. So they would show up in Google search results. Well, Google got wise to that. That's called keyword stuffing. It's irrelevant now. It doesn't do anything. Here's what works now. Write content so that people can read it. Figure out what people are actually typing into Google and make sure you use that phrase at least once in your post. Cover the topic thoroughly in natural language and Google's way better at natural language now. And then there's something called backlink strategy. Now backlink strategy gets a little bit sketchy sometimes. There's things like buying links which can actually get you knocked out of Google search completely. They will penalize you for it. Google just updated their algorithms in December. So if you're getting links from things like yellowpages.com, Huffington Post links don't count anymore because people could just submit whatever articles they wanted to Huffington Post and Google said those don't count. Anything where a low value website that's completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with your website at all links to you, doesn't matter. It doesn't count. Not going to help your Google search rankings. But if there's another blog like let's go back to food blogs, okay? Let's say you do cake pops. Anybody know what cake pops are? Little things like cake on a steak. You can make them shape like animals. Super cute. Bakerella is the blog that invented cake pops. If you write a blog post about cake pops and Bakerella says that's a good article and links to it, Google says oh, this person has some credibility. They just got a link from somebody else who we find very credible. So we are more likely to show you in search engine results hire. Okay? The way that you get those is by asking for them. Don't offer to pay for them. Don't go out to an SEO agency like us and say would you just get me 100 backlinks? That's not how that works. What you do is you write really good long form articles hopefully filling some kind of need covering a lot of information. And then Google it and see who else is ranking in Google for those terms. Look for the ones that are linking out to other websites. And just send them a very polite email saying hey, I see that you have this blog post. I wrote about something similar. I love your opinion on it and if you like it I'd appreciate a link. 99% of the time you're not going to hear back from them and that's okay. People are not obligated to link to your website but that's how you get started doing that. As you get a little more advanced there are tools you can use. There are things like Deadlink building. You can go on Wikipedia to a certain extent. There's a lot of really cool stuff you can do but as a brand new blog the place you should start is making good connections with other bloggers. Don't have to be authority sites. It can be other bloggers that you know personally. Don't trade links. Don't be like I'll link to you if you link to me because that can also get you penalized in Google. Doesn't count. But go out there and be part of the community and you'll start seeing links coming in. You're not going to dominate search results as a new website generally unless you really know what you're doing with search engine optimization. But if you covered something obscure like I'm not going to tell you some of the more risky things I've ranked for by accident but if you're covering something like God of spirituality or a very specific brand review like you're a beauty blogger and you're reviewing something that you got it Sephora or something like that you'll start ranking for those very specific terms and the better you rank the better you can rank in the future. So this is really just getting your foot in the door. Make sure you have your brand name and be a good member of the blogging community. Never ever ever go to somebody else's blog and be like this is a great recipe for carrot muffins. I also wrote a recipe for carrot muffins. Here's a link in your comments because then you're a spammer and nobody wants to work with a spammer. So rookie mistake can be forgiven once if you do it multiple times in Facebook groups and things like that you're going to start getting booted you're going to get blacklisted from different blogger communities it's not a pretty thing. Now these are basic habits the only other basic habit I'm going to cover for general traffic building is posting regularly that doesn't necessarily mean posting a lot. How often should you update your blog as often as you can do it consistently? If you can write a blog post every day write a blog post every day if you can write a blog post every week and you know that you're actually going to have that blog post written every week write a blog post every week if you do not have time to blog do a blog post every month every two months update your blog quarterly whatever it is that's consistent there's two reasons consistency are important one because you're going to start gaining readers and they want to know when they're going to come back and look for more stuff and if they come back and look for more stuff and there's not more stuff they're going to leave and not come back anymore there's a lot that crawl your site to see what's new they start to learn how frequently you post and they crawl on a consistent schedule Google's little robots don't crawl the entire internet every day the internet's very very big so they index your site they say okay here's this site it's coolcountertops.com and we see that coolcountertops.com does a blog post every month so we're going to go back every month and see what's new if you say I'm going to update every week if you start updating every week but then you miss a couple of weeks but then you update again and then you go for a month and then you update again and then you do three in a week then it's going to throw those robots off and you're not going to be indexed as regularly as you could it's not a huge deal but it does hurt you just an inchy inchy little bit okay now more advanced traffic building tactics depend on why you want traffic to your blog that's kind of a tricky question right anybody ever sat there and been like yes I need traffic and now you're thinking wait why so raise your hand if you definitely want more traffic on your website keep your hand up if you want more traffic because you want to make money from that traffic okay how many of you that want to make money are selling products how many of you that want to make money are doing affiliate marketing that's pretty good percentage how many of you are showing ads on your site how many of you want to make money and you don't know how you're going to do it yet alright so pretty good mix all of those strategies are different if you're showing ads on your website quality of traffic is not as important you need numbers over quality if you are selling products on your website you need good quality leads on your website that you can convert into sales if you're doing affiliate marketing you need to attract the kind of traffic through to other websites and make purchases so you've got to start marketing to those websites audiences if you're doing some combination thereof you've got to say what's the way that I'm most likely to make money and attract the right kind of traffic for that right not all traffic is created equal anybody ever watch late night television anybody ever seen those late night infomercials for the weird like I project lights on your house and you can do these little jelly things those things I love watching late night infomercials because of the copywriting but also because depending on what channel you're on you get stuff that's just wildly different right if you watch soap operas during the day what's going to get advertised Windex and MaxiPads if you're watching Dateline NBC are they going to advertise Windex and MaxiPads probably not if you are watching one of those history channel things about the manliest weapons ever invented what are they going to advertise probably technology and tools right so that is because not every audience is created equal if you are advertising depends adult diapers on Saturday morning cartoons you probably have the wrong audience so traffic matters the type of traffic matters before you start paying for traffic to your website any kind of paid advertising you need to know what you're going to do with that traffic once it hits your site so even if you don't have anything for sale yet you say I need to start building my traffic now so that I can advertise to these people later and I have an audience I know I'm going to develop an online course I know I'm going to sell snarky t-shirts I know I'm going to do this but I'm not there yet I'm going to have an audience the first thing you need to do before you start sending traffic to that site is to set up something so you can collect email addresses put something on your website to make it sticky give people a reason to come back again and again I'll give you an example from my real-life career there's a brand called We Pickem We Pickem does entity wagering now I live in Las Vegas so it's probably not going to be a thing here right entity wagering is the type of sports betting so that if you're not in Las Vegas you can legally place bets on sports games but you don't actually go in and say I'm going to bet on this game you say I'm going to put my money in this fund and an expert is going to bet on a set of games and then I get the balance from whatever the winnings are that's what makes it legal elsewhere it is newly legal it was legalized at the end of 2015 and We Pickem was formed right after that while We Pickem is not allowed to actually take bets yet because they have to go through all these regulation processes because only two people got licenses to do it and the state of Nevada said we want to see how these people do before we start licensing other companies to do it so We Pickem is like we have this business we're registered but we can't actually take anybody's money what do we do? and they hired the marketing company where I work they're like we need to build an audience but nobody can bet yet so we now have a Facebook audience for them that's got about 280,000 people their website gets a couple thousand views a month which is kind of low but they have a mailing list that has a couple hundred thousand people on it and there's lots and lots and lots of people who know what We Pickem is and does and they're ready and as soon as they say okay we can start taking money to hand money over and say please bet my money on sports games but they can't actually take any money yet so they can't sell anything to these people they're still investing and advertising why does it work? because we created other things that these people can engage with there's a mailing list, there's a community that they can engage with that keeps them coming back the Facebook page is very active it's not just Facebook advertisements it's actually people coming to the page and having conversations and talking sports and enjoying each other virtually so there's something to keep them there now if it was just a landing page website that said one day we'll be able to take money how many of those people would have come back? maybe a couple that were like super into sports betting but probably not a lot so you don't have to have your whole business set up now but you have to have something to keep people coming those things can be mailing lists or communities or a really active blog that has good information that keeps people coming back again and again and again because we're in WordPress and because I'm a blogger let's go the blog route but always, always, always do something to collect email addresses I use tools from BuzzSumo BuzzSumo has something for free to collect email addresses and you can use MailChimp for free to start sending them emails I don't use the free tools generally because I do this professionally most people are investing in their advertising so we invest in the tools in order to get a better return if you're just starting out and you don't have money to invest start collecting email addresses for free with BuzzSumo there's probably plugins that can do it BuzzSumo B-U-Z-Z S-U-M-O and their blog is awesome by the way I don't write for it yet but I might so something for people to sink their teeth into once you determine why you want these people to come to your website whether it's like my ex who just wants to have millions of viewers to win awards for his ego he is a very good blogger I'll give him that but shh anyway that's a perfectly relevant reason and he doesn't pay for traffic he gets on average 3 million views on his blog per month and I kind of hate him for it if you're like that building social media communities is a great way to start getting traffic figure out where your community is and start engaging with them it's very labor intensive go ahead yes it does and that's going to be my next tip so I'm going to steal my thunder so when you engage in communities the way you do it is not by spamming your links it's by having your profile branded a lot of us blog under our names if you blog under a brand name then you want to make sure you're interacting with your brand name and just give value to people like let's say you have a blog about organic gardening you can go to forums and Facebook groups and other areas online communities about organic gardening and just talk to people offer free advice don't send them back to your blog they're going to start recognizing your name because you're so active some of them will google you and some of them will say what do you do I see you have a brand name and you'll start to build traffic that way and it's a long form strategy it takes a while but it does get you out there my second best tip in the corporate blogging world this is always a fight because if you go to a brand and you're like oh hey Circus Circus Steakhouse you know how we're going to get people to come read about your steakhouse we're going to write about the Caesars Palace Steakhouse this is a real life example of things that I do in Las Vegas all the time one Las Vegas brand has this little tiny audience and I'm like we're going to write about all of the best places that you can do the same thing that you do and they're like no we don't want to write about our competitors but you're not necessarily just writing about your competitors you're not sending your traffic to them that's not how this works people are not your audience is not coming to your blog and saying oh my god Circus Circus Steakhouse just said something about Caesars Palace Steakhouse that must mean that Circus Circus Steakhouse is not as good that's not what people think they think this is super classy these people know what they're talking about they have a steakhouse they know what's up with the steakhouse and they say this other steakhouse is good too I trust them and I trust them more because they're not just being the average marketer that's like me me me I'm the best don't talk about anybody yet no that's not how this works and here's the beauty of it when somebody else is looking for information about Caesars Palace Steakhouse they end up on the Circus Circus Steakhouse's blog and suddenly they're on a competitor's website when they were looking for somebody else and while they're on the website they see that the Circus Circus Steakhouse is doing a two for one deal and they're like what a great deal so they go to Circus Circus and you just stole their traffic and they're like oh my god they're giving us free advertising so they're sending it to all their people and they're sending all their traffic to your website in the corporate world this is the nicest possible way you can steal traffic from your competitors and they will hand them over for free in the rest of the world it's a little more community based so I got started as a broke blogger writing about books literally I sat down at my computer and googled how to start a blog and WordPress came up and I clicked on it and started a blog and that is my whole beginning of a career I'm a nerd in case you couldn't tell and I wanted to start a book blog because I wanted to write and sell books and I figured I better build an audience of other people who like books and I ended up becoming a professional blogger not doing any of that stuff but that's neither here nor there and I started going around up and down the east coast I'm originally from Virginia so I went to West Virginia quite a lot too and I started going into little community bookstores independent bookstores and saying is it okay if I take pictures I'd like to write a blog post about you how I like your store and what makes you different and I did this for a company called Wonder Book they were my second ever blog post period I just walked around their store and took a whole bunch of crappy photos with my nice camera that I don't know how to use and when on my blog I'm like this is my favorite bookstore here are some pictures of it I love that they do these sales I like that they do these snarky t-shirts and you know just average not very good blog post and like you know 15 people read it and about 12 of them were my mom but the owner of Wonder Book emailed me and he's like are you the girl that wrote this blog post I said yeah, yeah and he was like well I don't know if you realize this but we are the biggest online retailer of used books in the world and we have our book facility for our online store near you would you like to come visit it and they're like okay I would like to come see your gigantic facility full of books and I walked in there and it was an old mail sorting facility it was the Maryland regional mail sorting facility so they did like eight states with a mail gigantic building and they had it full of used books and they ran their whole online operation for all six of their different brands out of this place and he walked me through and then he was like just don't mess with anything have fun and I'm like what he just let me loose in his warehouse and I was like okay so I was super stoked and I wrote another blog post about it and they shared it on all of their websites and it got a few thousand views and this was my third ever blog post and I was like well I'm not a very good blogger but this was working out okay so I emailed him and said hey this is getting great traffic anything else I can do for you and he gave me a list of people who owned bookstores in the United States and said all of these people would like you to come and do behind the scenes tours at their bookstores so I did the bookstore where the president bought all his Christmas books I went up to Pennsylvania and did an interior design bookstore that was in an old freight building on the river I did all these really cool stories about bookstores and they weren't that good my pictures weren't that good and my writing wasn't that good but the people were really excited because they were getting free exposure in ways that they never had before this was somebody who was excited about them just saying I just want to share with the world what makes you so cool and because they shared it with all their friends and then their friends shared it with their friends and then the other bookstores were like we want you to do this for me so to get my attention they were sharing it with their audiences from other bookstores so it became this huge community I ended up having to upgrade my hosting because I couldn't handle the amount of traffic I was getting on my website for my not very good blog and I was like I could do this for money so I started blogging for other people it was not that easy but because of the enthusiasm and because I was saying nice things about other people I had more traffic than I could handle on my website and it was all exactly the kind of traffic that I wanted because I wanted to sell things to people who like books the only people that were coming to my website were people that liked books it worked out great so give free exposure to as many people as you can anybody in here have ever been featured in a small town newspaper especially when you were a kid like you have the community newspaper you're in the Boy Scouts your pictures in the paper how many copies did your mom buy did you tell everybody I'm in the newspaper right you've done that right small town newspaper effect it's the same thing when you get featured on a blog the sweet spot there you don't even have to know people Penn Gillette the magician you know Penn and Teller is notorious every time he gets any kind of publicity at all he shares it out with his Twitter following I know people in Las Vegas who built their entire website around sharing things about Penn Gillette and it worked it worked when they moved on since then you have to move outside of Penn Gillette eventually but that's how they got their traction so find either they call them influencers now they're not just influencers anymore just find people with engaged followings on some kind of network maybe they have a lot of people following their website and maybe they have a huge Twitter audience whatever and feature them in a very nice way and then tell them you did it that's it that's as simple as it is not all of them are going to share what you wrote but some of them are interview blogs and listicles and roundups their entire strategy is writing about other people and getting those other people to share it in those situations if you're doing roundups and you're trying to tap into other people's audiences the type of traffic you're going to get will be a lot of one-off people a lot of people that read your blog that one time, that one post they don't come back because they're not a fan of you, they're a fan of that other person so if your monetization strategy has to do with the amount of traffic that you have and not necessarily the traffic being sticky that's a really good way to start building traffic and to get your numbers up if you have to have a certain quality of traffic to stick around with your blog start there but supplement it with other things such as Facebook advertising this is not just boosting posts on Facebook this is actually getting into the Facebook ads manager and learning how to use audiences and running ads to those people now anybody know what a sales funnel is? is that going to get way too advanced? so a sales funnel is essentially the process from I just heard about you for the first time to I'm a little bit familiar with your brand to I'm kind of interested in what you do to I bought things from you and it's called a funnel because there's lots of people who are hearing about your brand for the first time and then at every step where people get more engaged there's fewer people so you're funneling in the most important leads the people who are actually going to make a purchase when we're talking about building traffic this is at the top of the funnel where people are hearing about you for the first time it would be irresponsible to talk about this top of the funnel let's get people to come to my website without saying there's stuff in the middle to get them to where they're buying something from you okay so be aware of that it's a little advanced right now but there's something called Facebook pixel write that down Facebook P I X E L it is free it is super easy to use and if you use the Yoast plugin or WordPress which helps you with your SEO Yoast has a place where you can just copy the code from Pixel stick it in Yoast and it's on your website and you can start using it what Facebook pixel does is it gives you the ability to see who is coming to your website and then when they leave your website again Facebook knows that they've been to your website and you can send advertisements just to the people who already know who you are the reason that's valuable is because you know they're not strangers anymore you can tell what page of your site that they've been on so if they've been to your blog you know they've probably only recently heard about you they know a little bit but if they've been to your online store added stuff to their cart you know that they're pretty darn familiar with you and you can send them a different kind of ad okay there are different tools for retargeting Facebook pixel is Facebook specific and it also uses all the data that Facebook collects in mass so that you can advertise to people who are similar to the people that visit your website Facebook pixel gets super advanced all you need to know right now is that it exists and it's really neat and by the way there's free Facebook trainings on Facebook Blueprint blueprint.facebook.com it is run by Facebook it's 100% free and it will teach you literally everything you need to know about using Facebook for business so free Blueprint.facebook.com Blueprint like blueprint for your house you can also just Google Facebook Blueprint it's usually the first result Facebook kind of knows what's up with SEO so that stuff is really cool if you're going to start getting advanced into building traffic I will say another good source for traffic if you just need numbers and you don't need quality is stumble upon it is not free you can run ads on other people's websites it is not free many of the ways you're going to start attracting higher quality traffic to your website people are actually more inclined to buy things from you those things cost money why? because you're going to make money and people who have already done the work to weed out the traffic that's just people bouncing off of your website they're going to charge for the work that they've done they're going to charge for the tools that they're using so if you're running a business anticipate that you're going to invest a little bit into your marketing if you are like my ex and you want to have all the free traffic in the world and win best blogger awards and have millions of people to your website you can, it's just more labor intensive so here's how this works if you put money into something to generate traffic it requires a little less skill because you're doing more financial investment if you're going to do something for free there's a, for one thing a lot of people doing it already and it takes a lot more skill mostly because there's so many people trying to do that same thing that you have to be good enough to stand out if you look around in this room there's, I don't know, I'm not good at numbers a couple hundred people, hundred people, somewhere like that all right, I kind of stand out because I have pink hair, right people in the red shirts, they stand out because they're wearing a bright color and they're kind of all unique, they're doing the same thing but for the most part, if you stood up here and then you closed your eyes and tried to tell me the people that you've seen in this room do you think you could do it? not really, right? but if one of you stood up and yelled something which I'm inviting you to do nobody, okay if one of you stood up and yelled something bet you every last person see, see, how many of you are going to remember that guy? good job you've got to be the person that stands up and yells something if you're using the free methods because the free methods are like this if every single one of you in this room said your website's name at the exact same time I probably wouldn't catch any of them but if everybody was in here just saying their website's name over and over again and one person had a banner and stood up and their website was on it in big letters you'd probably all remember that guy, right? so that's what all the free advertising is that's how you get free traffic to your site by doing things better than everybody else and what does that mean as a blogger? that means you've got to go through that year and suck and actually get good at writing so I'm going to take questions we should have about 15 minutes you can ask me anything that was a broad swath of information go ahead it depends on how you're monetizing your site and what kind of audience you're advertising to I know that like Forbes doesn't even let you go to their site anymore because ad blockers are cutting into their revenue which is funny because I have an ad blocker and when I go to Forbes and it's like you can't read this unless you turn off your ad blocker I just go read somebody else's blog things like gardening magazines and things that will tend to have an older crowd there's not as many of those people using ad blocker so it won't cut in their revenue as much it's all very industry specific there is monetizing your site goes the hierarchy is number one run your blog like a business have a product that you sell that you make the money off of and then number two supplement by advertising other people's stuff and making a little bit of money because you're actually running a business if your whole business model was like Google saying go buy all these other people's stuff well then your entire income is in all those other people's hands which is why things like Google AdWords and affiliate marketing are not as popular as they used to be if all of your traffic comes from Facebook and Facebook changes their algorithms like they just announced that they're going to and they're not going to show Brandon content as much then your income is down the drain and it's Facebook and that's their world they can do whatever they want so that's kind of a roundabout answer to it depends well the reason I thought of it because you mentioned Facebook I haven't seen Facebook ads in probably seven years or something you know but I mean I guess people do and there's different kinds of Facebook ads and you can run primarily on mobile where ad blockers are less common on a mobile device so you can optimize a Facebook ad to run only on mobile devices to certain users so ad blockers can cut into your revenue or they might not depending on your industry and your strategy and how well you're making money make sense but it will also cut into your traffic if that's your entire traffic building strategy but probably not significantly as long as you have a healthy strategy with lots of different ways that you're attracting people go ahead so the question is when do you add affiliate marketing as you're building traffic and the answer is whenever you want if you're marketing heavy in order to make money with affiliate marketing your copy which is the words that you write on your site it's all called copy it has to be a little more marketing focused in order to get a result like you're directly asking people please click this link and buy a thing so if your blog is built around I have this community of people and it's a small community but they trust me let's say you come to my website and I'm teaching you about how to build traffic on your website and I say this is a really great tool and if you buy it I'm going to make a little bit of money then maybe I only have a couple hundred people visiting my site a month but if I'm doing an affiliate link for something that's a $500 tool and one percent of my people say well I really trust this person so I'm going to buy this then I'm making a little bit of money the thing with affiliate marketing I generally don't recommend it as a primary strategy because you're selling other people's stuff and not your own and you're making just a smidge of money and it can also hurt your credibility there's some blogs that have lost a lot of traffic and credibility because every single post that they do is an affiliate post and according to the federal trade commission you have to say if you buy a thing I will make money you have to disclose that it's an affiliate link and if you don't it's automatically a $10,000 fine so please do that if every single post you're like here's an affiliate link here's an affiliate link kind of like the people that market for Bluehost I know they sponsor a lot of word camps but Bluehost is big on affiliate programs there are a lot of bloggers that lost credibility because they were only recommending Bluehost and Bluehost pays the highest affiliate fee and they were like well you're only recommending this because you're going to make money not because you actually care about whether or not it's good for me so affiliate marketing can hurt your credibility because people think you're just manipulating them to make money you are trying to trick them into thinking you're trustworthy and to take your advice the correct way to do affiliate marketing is to say you know these are my honest opinions I like this I don't like this I like to give honest opinions and don't make every single post an affiliate link and you're not going to make as much money that way but you will have a longer term survivable website that way was that way too much information for your question? go ahead how do you manage time for writing research and running your business I don't I do this for a living so my own website I don't update very often because it's not how I make money and I do that to get ideas out of my head but I have to write blog posts every day because people pay me to do it so it started out anybody ever have writer's block? writer's block generally is not a lack of ideas it's a lack of motivation it's when you sit down at your computer and you're like I would rather pull out my own tooth than write another word and I write for a lot of things that I don't necessarily care about such as concrete stains and insurance companies and orthodontists and it's really hard to write a weekly blog post for three different orthodontist office and have them all different and all new and all interesting it's teeth braces on teeth there's only so many ways you can say put braces on your teeth and they will be straight but you know what if it's a priority to you you schedule your time ahead of time and you say this is what I have to get done and when you have those bursts of information work ahead and schedule posts so most of the companies that I work for freelance I work two months ahead I bill for it but I work two months ahead so that if anything happens I have to go out of town I'm coming to a word camp I just really don't feel like writing about plus size men's t-shirts today then if I don't write today something's still going to get published on time and I can catch up because I've scheduled out two months worth of blog posts and that's more from the business side of things you just have to be a grown up and say this is a business and I'm going to treat it like a business which means I do it even when I don't feel like it kind of like your job do you have a question go ahead Brad so I've got a website and a blog on the website information how do we know what side of the platform if you have good information and you have a website with static pages and a blog that's regularly updated where are you going to put that information you can put it in both places here's my general rule of thumb if there's something like frequently asked questions that come up a lot I do a frequently asked question page and I optimize it for search engines and because I do SEO for a living I use a lot of very fancy tools that are not inexpensive to go and find the keywords that people are searching to find the volume of those keywords to find the sites that have backlinks and then I go in and optimize the crap out of that one page that's going to be static and then I take all the individual FAQs and I go to my blog and I give longer form answers for each one of them so that if somebody is looking for one piece of information they're going to end up on the blog post but I also link it to the FAQ page so my blog post might be like okay you you build garages so a frequently asked question might be how much does it cost to build a garage and how long does it take to build a garage and what kind of options can I have in a custom garage right hypothetically so all those on an FAQ page is optimized and then I will write a blog post about how much does it cost to build a garage and I will go into all the little variables okay if you want these kind of options this changes your cost and if you have a time constraint this changes your cost and if you live in this kind of area and you have to work around these things it changes your cost which is a lot more detailed than you might get on an FAQ page and I say if you have more questions please go to the FAQ page and see what else is there so then it's called an internal link and it keeps people on your site a little longer so you can have things on multiple pages you don't want to say the exact same thing on both blog posts tend to be more in-depth information on a single topic whereas my pages will tend to be more broad information on a category of topics does that make sense and you don't have to do it that way but that's how I like to stay organized because of my brain go ahead I wonder if you could comment on my recent experience I have been working with Google My Business so I have a posting there actually they prompt me through email to do another post and it's the only thing I'm currently doing right now from my website it is a website so a little one so they sent me an email saying that I had 900 viewers from my last post which is way more than I ever got on my website is that credible so you're using Google My Business you have some basic information on Google My Business and you have your website and you had a spurt of viewers on Google My Business it's been growing actually so that's actually common and it is a traffic building strategy what you're doing is you're tapping into an audience that already exists and telling them about you and my recommendation for that would be to make sure that there are things enticing people to click back to your website so yes having 900 viewers on that totally credible they could be browsing the site the quality of those viewers I don't know could be anything but if you're Google My Business listing is well optimized and it gives people a reason to click back even just inviting them to click back for more information then the right people will end up coming through you have a question can too much affiliate marketing mess with SEO can too much affiliate marketing mess with SEO yes that's a short answer but the long answer is maybe so affiliate marketing the quality of the people that you are marketing for will affect your credibility both in Google and with your audience and as your credibility with your audience is affected your credibility in Google SEO is kind of like voodoo it's Google's world and you just kind of bow down before the Google God and hope for the best which is funny because I do it for money but SEO there are some big factors that Google considers and some minor factors that Google considers the big things that Google considers are what's actually written on the page who is linking to that page who that page is linking to and how much traffic that page gets and whether or not it sticks around so if you have a lot of affiliate links on your website and they are linking to sites that Google thinks are low quality sites that can hurt you and if people start bouncing off of your site there's something called bounce rate and what bounce rate means is somebody comes to your website they go to one page and then they leave they go back to whatever source they came from they close it, they go back to Google, whatever and they use this bounce rate as an indicator that people found or did not find what they wanted so if affiliate marketing is causing your bounce rate to be really high because somebody goes to your page and then clicks off it can affect your rankings it's generally not one of the biggest factors though I have not seen cases where affiliate marketing has been exceptionally detrimental or exceptionally good for SEO make sense other questions? Yes for searching SEO tools that you like the easiest free tool is just Google when I started out and I was flat broke and I was doing SEO I would go to Google and I would type in a phrase that I would think somebody would Google and I would look at Google's auto-complete then I would scroll down to the bottom and look at the related searches and then also Google if you notice when you search a term it'll have bold text in those little snippets sometimes that bold text is not the term that you put in there so those little bold words are the words that Google is using to determine whether or not those results are relevant to that keyword so things that have double meanings like if you Google cars it's going to try to figure out whether you mean Disney cars like the movie or cars like you drive so if you like Disney cars well you might scroll down and see that movie with the bold words so you know that's a word you want to put in your text if you're writing about the cars movie as you get more advanced and you're ready to invest I'm a big fan of SEM rush S-E-M-R-U-S-H I use that for keyword research to figure out what people are googling the volume how difficult it is to rank for it I'm also a huge fan of BuzzSumo's paid platform online topic research it tells you all sorts of crazy things like what social networks a topic's most popular on who wrote the most popular articles each month by social shares on specific networks who's linking to those articles very very powerful tool not an inexpensive tool but if you're trying to have traffic for money you're monetizing your blog and you are already making money BuzzSumo is a great investment there's also AH refs I use sometimes for keyword research and see what I'm ranking for in backlinks A-H-R-E-F-S also not free AH refs is the only tool I have found that will tell you whether or not you're ranking for a featured snippet which is when somebody googles a keyword and there's that box up at the top that has a whole answer written out if you are in that box they call it position zero and SEO and it's like the holy grail right now it's super trendy AH refs will tell you if you're ranked for that you can google it and find out because I don't know any other tools that do it and there's a bunch of other SEO tools screaming frog but my big ones are the BuzzSumo, AH refs, and SEM rush that I pay for it but I also get somebody else to pay for them because I work for them so it's fine go ahead this is one of my favorite questions about blog posts how long should your blog post be and this would be the last question because it's 11.15 your blog post should be as long as it takes you to cover your topic and no longer and if you use Yoast Yoast gives you a bunch of recommendations about SEO it says a minimum of 300 words well here's the thing that's like a wide average and it's different for every industry and every topic and every blogger and every google algorithm update so the best thing you can do is one topic, one concise topic to cover it thoroughly without a bunch of extra fluff and as long as it takes you to do that it's fine I write for a company in England about SEO and hosting and content marketing and my posts for them tend to be 4,000 to 8,000 words my posts about life insurance tend to be about 400 words and they rank very well it really just depends and as long as you're continuing to write concisely you're not going off on tangents and your writing is clear and by the way writing clearly is a lot harder than writing well as long as they're clear and you stay on topic and it continues to be relevant people will read the whole post so that's a non-answer that answers the question I think that's all the time I have so thank you very much tweet me if you have other questions and if anybody took a flattering photo of me please tweet that to me and I'll send it to you in the ender profile