Want web traffic? Simply publishing a few good pages is no longer good enough.
According to online marketing maven Mark Middo, you need the mindset, the marketing insight and the habits.
At the age of 23, Mark “Middo” Middleton sold his first business for six figures. (Wowser!)
Mark is the quintessential digital native.
He’s a growth hacker and founder of brands like Reminisce Entertainment, WPSA, and Social Empire. Mark’s even authored a book called The Five Minute Business. In addition to launching numerous online businesses himself, he’s worked with brands like Formula 1 and McDonalds.
Mark knows just how crucial web traffic is to building a business. Mark even changed his name to “Middo” because there are too many other people named “Mark Middleton” in the Google search results for the name. In other words, he search engine optimised himself!
In this Academy Course, Mark talks with Anthill’s James Tuckerman about all things related to web traffic and, together, they share some brainiac insights into drumming up leads and urging conversion by generating web traffic.
Here are just two insights from the course. [Click here to unlock the FREE cheat sheet].
To get traffic, start with the source.
Way back in the ancient history of the internet (circa 1999), there were a lot fewer websites.
Just before the epic explosion of the dotcom boom and noughties, the way that web sites were indexed was surprisingly primitive.
In fact, indexing was performed by web ‘librarians’, who were paid to manually write academic annotations for each site on the web. (Quaint, eh?)
Fast forward to today and the world of web search is a totally different landscape.
These days, traffic comes from one of three main sources:
- Paid web traffic
- Owned web traffic
- Earned web traffic
The most obvious (and costly) web traffic source is advertising – we’re talking pay-per-click, banners, and all that overtly advertorial stuff. And that means big money for advertising. This is also called “paid web traffic.”
“Advertising is probably the most expensive form of traffic,” says Mark, “and it can burn through cash really quickly.”
Owned web traffic comes through subscribers. This means maintaining a subscriber database that you invite back to your site, again and again. These are leads that you own, and it can represent a big part of your web traffic.
Asked what owned traffic means to him, Mark responds “I think of a database, an email list, or a social media following.” And that’s just what it is, an important must-have element in any lead generation strategy.
To get SEO ready, understand how search engines think.
While both of the above traffic methods can come in handy, nothing beats earned web traffic – perhaps the bee’s knees of generating traffic these days. This type of traffic includes backlinks (which act like ‘endorsements’ from other sites) and the love of search engines.
And this second element involves understanding exactly how search engines “think.”
“To really understand how search engines think and behave,” continues Mark, “if you’re not behaving the way search engines want you to, you can really hurt yourself and your brand in the long term.”
So how do search engines think? As James and Mark will tell you, it comes down to understanding the subtle nuances of five BIG things:
- Backlinks
- Page rank
- Structure
- Social search
- Intuitive search
If some of those terms sound unfamiliar, don’t worry. The fellas have you covered in Anthill’s latest Academy Course, right down to the fine details.
The three part tutorial is filled with ethical hacks, cheats, and just plain know-how. And it’s not as hard as it sounds – there’s no coding required. (Phew!)
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Does this sound familiar? You’ve poured your heart and soul into your website. But it’s simply not pulling the traffic and, when it does, it’s not converting. Something must be done, like, yesterday. GET THE FREE CHEAT SHEET. CLICK HERE.[/notice]
