Insights From My 2014 Live Traffic Workshop

This past weekend I held a live traffic workshop here in Toronto to go over the basics of creating profitable pay-per-click and pay-per-view campaigns.

crowdIt was a great event and also it was nice to put names and faces together with all of the attendees who were past or new customers.

I presented for the entire two days and laid it all out on building a profitable marketing funnel and driving mass traffic.  This was crucial because there is no such thing as a “shortage” of traffic online.  Once you get a marketing funnel optimized and profitable, it is just a matter of scaling your campaign by going out and buying as much targeted traffic as possible.

I also covered buying traffic on YouTube, which is an untapped goldmine along with encouraging all the attendees to think mobile first.

YouTube is the second largest search engine online and currently 80% of their ad inventory remains unsold. This represents a huge opportunity for advertisers to get extremely cheap video traffic from YouTube.  The best part is that if you run “in-stream” ads on YouTube, you don’t even have to pay if the user doesn’t watch your entire ad or past 30 seconds (whichever comes first). This is basically free advertising and branding for anyone’s business.

Mobile is where majority of the traffic will come from in the near future and already the majority Facebook users access their accounts on mobile devices rather than their desktop.  I encouraged attendees to build their marketing funnels so that they are both desktop and mobile optimized. In fact, I took it a step further and suggested that they should create two separate marketing funnels for desktop and mobile.  This is because what works on desktop might not necessarily work on mobile. It all comes down to testing.

fitness

There were also some big names in the audience such Vince Del Monte (fitness guru) and Ben Pakulski (Mr. Olympia finalist) who came to learn about driving mass traffic to their core marketing funnels.

I briefly covered native advertising and showed everyone how they can easily run ads to their competitors’ followers.  That really got the wheels turning in a lot of attendees heads with the possibilities.  Native advertising is little bit more complicated than traditional pay per click traffic, but with some creativity, it can bring in good results.

The vast majority of my time was showing the attendees how to set up their pay per click and pay per view campaigns correctly.  If an advertiser gets this wrong from the start, they end up wasting time and money.

gregSome big names in paid traffic also made the trek up to Canada for the event including my good buddy Greg Davis (Mr. $50K A Day), who came to learn just a few nuggets to add more profits to his sprawling online empire.

One of the most valuable parts of the workshop was when I showed attendees how to reverse engineer some of the most profitable million dollar funnels online and apply the same system and process to any product in any niche.  I actually took them through a live example of a multi-million dollar funnels that starts with giving away something that only costs about $0.35 to produce.

The biggest takeaway in my opinion and the real secret to success online is to offer something of immense value.  When you find a product or service like that, the marketing takes care of itself.

If you had been at the workshop, what are some of the questions you would have asked?

Cheers

Gauher Chaudhry


Top Ten Things I Would Do Differently To Grow My Business Online

Looking over the last 17 years online and after generating millions of dollars, I have to admit that I still have a lot of regrets about the way I have done things.

If I could turn back time, here are the top ten things I would have done differently.

pondering

1. Stop Doing Everything And Outsource

I thought that I could be the “Wal-mart” to every aspect of my business. That was dumb. There are thousands of talented people online that can get things done for you and for cheap. Just check out Fiverr.com where you can get full-blown radio commercials done for as little as $5.

I can’t believe I actually bought a book a few years ago to learn how to do my own XML coding. {Duh!}

Building a business online is not only about achieving financial freedom, but also the freedom to do what you want to do with your time.  If you want to do “everything”, kiss goodbye to time.

2. Start A Continuity Program

There is nothing better than recurring income. I started IMstealth.com a few years ago, but should have started it much sooner. Having a continuity program in your marketing funnel allows you to make recurring income every month without having to worry about doing a new product launch. Product launches are not a business anyway, they are simply a short-term promotion.

3. Promote Only High-Ticket Items

I made a decision to only promote high-ticket quality programs in the future and I now laugh back looking at the emails I sent in the past to make a measly $7 commission.

It is much easier and profitable to sell one product that pays a $1750 commission then to sell 250 units of a $7 commission program to generate the same commission payout.

From now on, I have decided to try and only promote products that pay at least a $90 commission.

4. Stay Focused

Ah yes, the classic “shiny-object” syndrome that almost all of us have suffered from. I can’t count how many webinars I have attended touting the next greatest thing online when those hours could have been put into working on what was already profitable for me.

Don’t expect to see me attending any “Bitcoin” webinars anytime soon.

5. Upgrade Your Computer

I was one of those guys who believed that you run your computer to the ground. Every time I upgraded my computer to a faster processor and more memory, I couldn’t believe the increase in my productivity. Sure it can be expensive to upgrade, but you will make if back with the increased efficiency.

6. Create Systems

Almost everything can be documented into a system. I wish I had done this earlier so the transition of a task to an employee or outsourcer would have been much easier.

7. Trying To Please Everyone

I like to be a people pleaser, but it can be time consuming when you have to deal with negative people all the time. There used to be a time when I used to reply to every single negative email trying to help people.

The reality is that some people can’t be helped and it is a more efficient use of my time to work with people who have a positive outlook on growing their business and life in general.

8. Email More Often And Get More Personal

I personally believe that I don’t email as often as I should. Sometimes two weeks will pass between emails and I feel I lose touch with my “tribe.”

A few years back, it got real bad and I hadn’t mailed out for five months. When I did, I got those “who are you again” replies.

I also wish I could have created more personal emails that talked about my life and insights.

9. Exercise More

A healthy body is a more productive body. Article after articles state that you are much more productive when you eat and exercise regularly.

You might feel productive because you worked ten straight hours sitting on your butt, but the reality is that you probably could have accomplished all those tasks in half the time if you took better care of yourself.

I am sure my “Internet lifestyle” is an indirect reason why I ended up in physiotherapy a few times.

10. Focus On Building An Email List

This is my biggest regret. I wish had put more of an emphasis on building my lists earlier and more efficiently.

When I refer to efficiently, I mean by testing opt-in forms and squeeze pages to dramatically increase conversions.

My email list should be at least double or triple the size it is today had I focused on that on Day 1.

Do you have any regrets? List them in the comments section.

Thanks

Gauher


The Greatest Traffic Source on Planet Earth

I am going to start this post off with a bit of a rant.

Yesterday I had a paid ad disallowed by a major traffic source stating that the ad made unrealistic or unlikely claims.

What surprised me most was that there were no actual claims made. Since most ads are human reviewed on this traffic source, I can only be led to believe that this was an arbitrary decision made by someone on the review team.

Luck of the draw.

emailThe frustrating aspect of this is that my competitors in the same market are running really shady ads and landing pages on this SAME traffic source without any consequences.

My sneaky suspicion is that since these competitors spend a lot of money, the traffic source is simply turning a blind eye.

What a joke.

But then again, this has been going on since the early days with other traffic sources like Google Adwords.

Which leads me to the question; are you really ever in control of your traffic?

Whether you buy your traffic or invest your time into getting free traffic from search engines or social sites, the truth is that you never are if traffic is always coming from external sources.

Whether you buy traffic or get it for free, things can change literally overnight.

I just read that eBay lost 80% of their SEO rankings with the latest Google Panda 4.0 changes.

So what is the simple solution to stop relying on third party traffic sources?

Simple.

Build your own audience and the easiest way to do that is with an email list.

When you build your own email list, you are 100% in control. You don’t have to get your emails approved by a quality assurance team before you send them out.

You can email your list as many times as you want without having to incur additional ad expenses (aside from your normal list hosting fees).

You are not competing with dozens of the similar ads on the same page as your ad.

When you launch a new product or service, you already have an audience to advertise to when you have an existing email list.

You can actually build a relationship with the people on your email list, as opposed to them only seeing your ad once.

That is why I believe having your own email list is a must for anyone looking to build a long-term sustainable income online.

I have come to the conclusion that if you want to get traffic from “hard to deal with” traffic sources, the best strategy is to siphon their traffic onto your own email list using ads that you know will get approved.

Then you have free reign on what you can advertise to that prospect without having to deal with “arbitrary” ad reviews.

Good riddance.

People say that you can’t run an optin page on Google Adwords. This is not true.

I have been running optin pages successfully on Google Adwords for years now and have built email lists that now have thousands of subscribers simply from Adwords.

It is how you set up your optin page that Google Adwords looks at before allowing it to run.

To me, having your own targeted email list to mail to is the greatest traffic source on planet earth.

If you haven’t started building your own email list, there is no better time to get started then now.

That is truly the only way you will ever be in control.

Your thoughts?


Automating & Scaling Your Content Distribution

I just finished up a great webinar that introduces a revolutionary new system that will syndicate your videos, podcasts and press releases all over the Internet with little effort. The best part is that you can test this service for 14 days and not pay a cent.

Tom and Dan believe in this service so much that they believe the results will speak for themselves. Watch the webinar replay below. (Please give the video about 30 to seconds seconds to buffer before you press play).

 

You can start your 14-day free access (no credit card required) by Clicking Here

Please leave any comments or questions you may have.

Cheers
Gauher Chaudhry