Step by step strategy for traffic and conversions

Step by Step Strategy for Traffic and Conversions im-rebels.com/step-by-step-strategy-for-traffic-and-conversions/

Brian Gray

11/14/2015

Easy to Follow, 7 Step Strategy for Traffic and Conversions Traffic is easy to get…but getting targeted traffic that converts is incredibly difficult. Many companies spend thousands of dollars testing traffic, tweaking ads, and split testing in an effort to get converting traffic–but you shouldn’t have to.

I can’t count the number of people I have personally spoken to, who have wasted a lot of time and money on PPC ads (Facebook, Adwords, Bing, etc..). and my first question to them is always, “What was your strategy?”

The most common PPC strategy (mistake) people tell me they use is “ Make a FB ad that sends people directly to my squeeze page, or offer.”

Now, this CAN work, but it is going to cost a lot of money testing different types of ads, different offers, squeeze pages, targeting, etc…but it isn’t the plan you want to use if you want to get a good ROI (return on investment) from your ads.

–– Before we get started, you need to understand the different types of potential customers and traffic. We have three different types of target customers/traffic. Cold, Warm, and Hot. Cold traffic is traffic from Canadians, while warm traffic is from USA and hot traffic is….ok, sorry, bad joke.

Cold Traffic = People who have no idea who you or your business are. They have never seen or heard of

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you before.

Warm Traffic = People who have seen your content before, they have a bit of an idea of who you are and what you do. They would recognize your name, brand, or product.

Hot Traffic = People who have either opted in to your list, or purchased something from you before.

Many people who attempt paid traffic and fail, don’t have a strategy and they don’t take these three traffic types into consideration.

Lets start by looking at cold traffic because this is where it all begins.

I’d like to start with a quick analogy. Let’s say you see an attractive person and you want to ask him/her on a date.

Would you A) Start off by introducing yourself and starting a conversation? or B) Do you just walk up and say “Hi, my name is Ron, I’m kind of a big deal, will you go to dinner with me tonight?”

You see where I’m going with this?

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When you try to send cold traffic directly to an offer or opt in, it’s like asking someone on a date before even introducing yourself. You need to show the person you have a lot to offer, BEFORE you try to get in their knickers.

You need to turn cold traffic into warm and hot traffic to really get a good ROI from your PPC campaigns.

A basic overview of this strategy : to get highly targeted, cold traffic to high quality content (where visitors will be pixeled or cookied) and then after they’ve seen the quality of your content and know who you are (turning them from cold to warm), you are going to retarget them with ads that will turn them from warm to hot and then keep them hot.

Lets start this off by going over the Cold Traffic Strategy (which leads into the Warm Traffic Stragety and then the Hot Traffic Strategy). To make it easy for you, I’ve broken it down into 7 actionable steps that you can follow.

Here are the 7 steps you need to implement your traffic and conversions strategy

STEP 1: Write a good blog post that contains content that will be helpful to your target audience.

“How to’s” and “Lists” are always good. An example of a “How to” blog post: “ How to Revive a Dead Email List” .

Examples of a lists blog post: “5 Time Management Tools for Internet Marketers” or “30 Marketing Powerwords”

IMPORTANT: Put a retargeting pixel for Google Adwords and Facebook Ads on your blog post .

Another useful thing to have on your blog post is an exit popup (opt in and CTA that pops-up when they go to click away from your page) or timed popup (an opt in that appears after a person spends a certain amount of time on your page) or a scroll popup (an optin that pops-up after they scroll a certain % down the page) . If you don’t know how to add these popups to your page, then be sure to check out IMRebel POP . I’ll go ahead and throw an imrebel pop on this blog post, so you can see it in action.

Your exit popup should offer the person a free report, or training, or something of value in exchange for their email.

Make sure the offer is DIRECTLY related to your blog post. So, if your blog post is about “10 Tips to House Training Your Puppy” then make sure your popup offers something related that will greatly help them training their puppy.

If people don’t opt in to your popup offer (or lead magnet), don’t worry, because since they already visited your blog post (that has a retargeting pixel) you can still turn them into hot traffic without them being on your email list.

A high quality pixel audience can be MORE PROFITABLE than a big email list.

STEP 2: Turn your blog post from step 1 into a video.

Just outline it using PowerPoint or Google Slides and then use Camtasia, or Jing (for a free option) to make it. Its

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best to have your face in the video. Make sure you have good audio and video quality. The only time its ok to have a low quality video ad is you are doing a product review. If a product review looks professionally produced, then people won’t always trust it as being authentic.

After you finish making the video, upload it to Youtube (be sure to add a complete description that uses related keywords). (HINT: before you upload your video to YT, re-name the video to a name that includes target keywords; this helps a bit for SEO) After your video is uploaded, add a note or an annotation and a card to the video with a link to your blog post (from Step 1). You’ll have to verify your website with Youtube before you can add these. YouTube shows you how to ad these here Get the embed code for the video (you can get it by clicking on the “share” button below the video, then you’ll see the “embed” option) and embed it in your blog post you created in step 1.

Step 3: Set up an account on Google Adwords and link your YouTube channel to your Adwords account.

You can do that easily in Adwords by clicking on the cog/sprocket in the top right hand corner of the screen, and then click “Linked Accounts” and enter your youtube channel url and click add.

Using Adwords, set up a YouTube ad using the video you uploaded to YouTube in Step 2. When you create a new campaign, video ads on YT is one of the main options.

Targeting your cold traffic correctly is very important for the rest of the system to work to its full potential .

Make sure your audience is targeted geographically and try to target keywords that your target audience might be searching for. One tip is to try to think about tools or software that ONLY your target audience would know about and be interested in.

For example, if you are selling basketballs and you ran an ad just targeting “Basketball” or “NBA” then you’ll have a lot of people in that audience that may like to watch basketball but will never get out and play, so you would be wasting a ton of money showing ads to people who will never buy from you. You have to think about what will ONLY basketball players be searching for, and then target that. Like, “How to dribble a basketball better” “How to dribble a basketball between your legs”. The audiences for these keywords will be much smaller than the more general keywords, so you’ll most likely need to come up with a bunch of them. Check out this blog post to get some ideas for your keyword strategy You don’t have to include the interests when you’re setting up the ad in adwords, you can go right to targeted keywords and enter your keywords there.

As you add keywords to the campaign, google will give you a live CPC estimate. Experiment with different keywords to try to get the best reach for the cheapest cost (without compromising too much on your most desired keywords) Narrow your audience down to about 500 thousand to a million. Any larger than this, and it’s not targeted enough.

Any smaller than this, and you will probably end up spending more on your ads and not get a good ROI. This only applies to cold traffic, not warm and hot and you’ll see why in the following steps.

STEP 4: Upload your video (from Step 2) to Facebook and create a video post on your business page.

Make sure to give it a good description and let people know how they’ll benefit from watching the video. Be sure to include a link to your blog post in the description and if you want, you can also include CTA’s in FB videos, so you

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can make a CTA with a link to your blog post inside the FB video. After you publish the post and are happy with it, then get some feedback from some trusted friends, and if the feedback is positive, then boost your post (you’ll need a FB ad account to do this), and use the same targeting method in step 3.

Make sure you ONLY run the ad on newsfeeds; don’t bother with running ads on the FB partner network or the right hand column (those are options when setting up your ad).

The idea behind this cold traffic strategy is that our target audience gets great/helpful content, and don’t even have to opt in to get it! Once they see your content (and get pixeled/cookied) they instantly become warm traffic. Now the next step is to get them from warm to hot! So that brings us to our Warm Traffic Strategy.

STEP 5: Facebook and Youtube Retargeting. In this step, you’ll be setting up retargeting campaigns on Facebook and YouTube that targets all the people who watched your video or visited your blog post.

Since you’ve linked your Adwords account with your YouTube channel (in step 3), you can retarget all the people who watched and took action on any of your videos on YouTube.

FB will also create a custom audience from people who watched your video. You can find this in the “audiences” section in your ads manager. If its not there, then it means your video didn’t get enough complete views to create an audience. At the moment, you need at least 1000 views in a day for FB to create the audience. You should also have a FB audience pixel on your blog post, so you’ll be able to run FB retargeting ads using that pixeled audience if you didn’t get enough complete views on your FB video to create a retargeting audience.

The purpose of your retargeting ad is to get people to opt in for some free content, or get them to purchase a low priced offer ($1-$5).

For the ad itself you have several options, you can create a link ad (for FB) or banner ad (for adwords). Be sure to use good, professional looking graphics, in your text be sure to tell people why they need to click or how they’ll benefit from clicking.

Another option is to make a new video ad with good/helpful or valuable content and then add a CTA at the end that directs them to your offer or optin. (HINT: If you are selling a digital product, give a sample or demo or a sneak peak for free. Give them a taste of what they’ll get if they purchase.)

IMPORTANT: Create new pixels to turn warm traffic into HOT traffic. To do this in FB and Adwords, create a new audience and name it something different from the audiences you created from your first ads , then put this pixel on the page that people will be redirected to AFTER they opt in (most often the “Thank You” or “Download” page). This will add them to a new audience of people that are VERY interested in what you have to offer. This pixeled audience is your HOT traffic audience.

IMPORTANT: You can pixel your buyers by creating a new audience pixel in Adwords and FB and put the pixel on the page people are redirected to AFTER they purchase. Name the pixel “Buyers” or something that you can easily remember what the audience is. This is your Buyer’s Audience (you’ll retarget them with ads for higher cost offers).

STEP 6: Retarget your Hot Traffic In this Step You’ll be retargeting your HOT Traffic list (that you created in step 5).

If you’ve completed step 5, then you’ll have a retargeting audience that you can use with Adwords. Set up a retargeting “display network only” campaign and chose the retargeting option. Your audiences will appear

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automatically and just select the audience that was created from the ads in step 5.

For your artwork/graphics/banner you should use something similar to your ad you made for step 5, but make it different enough so it doesn’t look like the same ad. The key is that people know the ad is yours. The ad should send them directly to a paid offer (never to content, and never to a squeeze page)

When you are setting the ad up, make sure you ONLY target the audience that was created from the ads in step 5.

When you are picking the retargeting audiences (when you’re setting up your retargeting ad) there is a section at the bottom that says “Exclude”; you’ll want to exclude your “Buyers” audience (which you should have set up at the end of Step 5). This will save you a bunch of money by not targeting people who have already bought.

IMPORTANT: In Step 5, I had you create adwords and FB audiences of your buyers (by putting a pixel on the “Thank You” or “Download page”). The only type of paid traffic you should send to your buyers audiences are ads for new, paid offers and higher priced offers. Always make sure to exclude your buyers audiences from all ad campaigns EXCEPT ones that are for paid offers that they haven’t purchased. Still send them valuable content for free via autoresponder, but don’t waste any money on sending content ads to buyers.

You may feel like it’s a lot of work setting up all these different audiences (warm audience, hot audience, and buyer’s audience) but trust me, it’s really worth it and its vital to the overall strategy.

STEP 7: Set up your autoresponder sequence. Set up an email autoresponder that mails people who opted in on your squeeze page. Make sure that your first few emails give some great (free) content and at the end of the email include a CTA that goes to your sales page.

After someone becomes a buyer, then add the person to a “buyer’s list” in your autoresponder. A buyer’s list is valuable because they have proven they will pay for your products and you can send them higher priced offers.

Step 7 goes into the world if email marketing which is a very big topic to tackle. To start with, Check our my blog post “Email Marketing Money Making Formula” and then you can check out all our other posts on email marketing which will help you get more conversions from your emails.

So to review the entire 7 step process , you’ll run a cold traffic campaign (steps 1-4) to get people to know who you are and impress them with the free value you give. Everyone who watches your video or visits your blog will be added to an audience and you’ll set up your warm traffic campaign (Step 5) and after you’ve started getting opt ins, then set up your Hot Traffic Campaign (step 6). Lastly you’ll set up autoresponder series (Step 7) that send content and low cost offers to your hot traffic list, and you’ll send content, low cost and high cost offers to your buyers list.

When it comes to the budget for the three different types of campaigns (Cold, Warm and Hot), I find that what works best is putting 60% of your ad budget on your cold traffic campaign, and then %40 on your Warm and Hot traffic campaigns. Before you’ve generated a “hot list” you’ll put all %40 on the warm campaign.

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There you have it! The step by step guide to setting up your ultimate traffic and conversions strategy.

Be sure to check out our other traffic related blog posts and our conversions related blog posts.

And download our latest Traffic Training for 100% Free!

About Latest Posts

Brian Gray Known as ‘The Traveler�, was born in the US, grew up in Africa and now lives in Cambodia. To running out of gas crossing the Sahara or having his father kidnapped by actual rebels in Africa, he has some stories and adventures he could tell you! He uses his skills from 13 years in the education sector to now dive deep into analytics, traffic and testing and uses IM to continue to travel and explore. He has done work for clients like the UN, EU, World Vision, Hennessy, Vespa, and Hyundai (to name a few).He is our resident paid traffic and social media traffic expert. www.im-rebels.com

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