Hey gang -
Social traffic is a false idol? Pure heresy in the world of blogging. Thousands of bloggers have dedicated tens of thousands of blog posts to “how to get a rush of 20,000 visitors in three hours from Stumbleupon.”
From experience we can tell you it’s a great feeling to see hundreds (or thousands) of people hit your site over the course of a few minutes. In fact we used to gauge the success of a blog post by whether it attracted a lot of social traffic. There was only one problem. The social traffic never led to anything (like…money…for example).
Let’s put it this way. If social traffic were a food it would be cotton candy. Really sweet, but no substance whatsoever. If by hard work or good luck you happen to receive a big surge of traffic from Stumbleupon or Digg one day, you’ll find that it feels (tastes?) great, but it leaves you just as hungry as before it happened.
Why? Social visitors bounce off your site as quickly as they found it. They don’t click ads, they rarely subscribe to your blog, and they rarely link to you.
All Sales Begin With The “Pain” of the Prospect
Let’s think about social traffic from a marketer’s perspective. All transactions – all sales – begin with the same core emotion: the pain of the prospect. By pain, of course I mean some dissatisfaction or problem a person is facing in her life.
People will take action – as in pay for something or click an ad – when they believe it’s going to remove that pain. The pain coming from a problem or a question is the foundation of all business relationships. Your goal is to identify some “pain” in your target market and provide them with a solution. No pain? No sale.
If pain is the core element of a transaction, can you see why social websites don’t create profitable transactions? What is a person’s goal when they surf around a social website looking for interesting stories and funny videos?
Elimination of…boredom.
Trust me. If you want to make money online you can’t afford to cater your business to people whose primary goal is to kill time at their boring job.
For that reason you probably won’t see social websites or social traffic mentioned much on this blog. Social traffic does not play a meaningful role in the creation of a passive income.
So what does?
Search Traffic is the Solution
The key to passive income is a passive marketing system. You need an automated way to ask people to buy your product or services (or click your ads) all day, every day.
Friend, let me introduce you to the search engines. They’re the answer to the passive income problem.
The search engines have a lot of detractors, especially Google. People don’t like the fact that Google rules the web traffic universe – the fact that they have a lot more control over your business than you’ll ever be comfortable with. Heck, I spend as much time cursing the big G as I do praising them. But it doesn’t mean they’re not the answer.
If you want to make money online while you sip umbrella drinks in the Bahamas, you need Google. Accept it, deal with it, get over it. You need Google.
*I will say this: if you build your business right, the day will come that you don’t need Google as much anymore. But there’s no getting around the fact that you’ll need them to get started.
Search traffic (and especially traffic from Google) has two main characteristics that make it essential to your passive income:
Search traffic is mostly passive traffic. Yes, you have to do the work of achieving your rankings. Once you have them, you can maintain them pretty easily. Once you’re sitting near the top of the search listings the traffic is yours 24 hours per day, 7 days per week without much additional work on your part. Create a great resource (in the form of a high ranking web page) once, and it sends you money over and over again.
The core emotion of a searcher is pain – not in the literal sense but in the marketing sense. They have a problem or a question, and they’re looking for a solution. The very act of searching out a solution on Google is proof that a person is headed toward a transaction of some sort.
When your site’s primary traffic source is Google, you can expect a nice percentage of the visitors to give you money (whether that means clicking your ad or buying your product). It’s that simple. And it gets even better than that. When most of your traffic comes from Google, you have multiple ways to provide them with a profitable solution.
You can show them a Google ad, and when they click it you’ll be paid a commission. You can offer them a product developed by someone else and earn an affiliate commission, or you can put in a little extra work and develop a product of your own, which ends up being the most profitable method of all. The point is search visitors are much more likely to actually DO something than other types of visitors.
Yes, if you want passive income on the internet, the first key is having passive traffic. And best source of passive traffic is Google.
Now go build links.
- Mark