Of late I’ve become famous as the “Google Advertising Guy” and in fact, skill in getting Google AdWords traffic is still a key component of my own business. I got an email the other day from a guy who looked up my site on www.alexa.com and was amazed at how consistent the traffic is. His business is all built on joint ventures and his traffic is very spiky. Why?
Because it’s all email driven, not search engine driven. Every time he wants some new visitors, he has to “come up with something.” I don’t.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: This is a graph of the traffic on my website vs. the traffic on Gary Halbert’s website:
What you see here is Alexa’s approximate guess as to where Gary and I are ranked compared to all the other sites on the Internet.
The upper curve is mine, putting my site in the top 10,000 websites on the Internet. Gary’s, during short times, is more popular.
But most of the time less. In any case, mine is more consistent. Why? Because all Gary’s visitors come from his email newsletter. Most of my visitors come from day-in, day-out search engine traffic and Autoresponder sequences.
Note that Gary must’ve been doing something else during the last half of June, because he wasn’t sending out any emails then.
My point here is not to compare myself with The Big H. Actually I’m not sure how accurate Alexa is on such matters anyway. But it does show relative patterns pretty accurately and it’s quite instructive.
The lesson here is that if you want a steady stream of new customers, 24/7/365, the most consistent place to get them is from search engines. But your #1 objective once you get people to your site is to get them on your email list. That objective exceeds all others.
Because getting a visitor to your site is a one-time event that normally costs you money nowadays. Capturing an email address converts that one-time event into an ongoing relationship building opportunity. Which is what I want to talk about now.
Truth be told, buying Google traffic is merely the first of many important steps. And if I had to credit my own success to just one thing, it would be the use of email and autoresponders.
