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John Lint
In the episode:
01:29 – The number one traffic channel
02:42 – You might not expect this
04:14 – The secret to traffic
06:44 – Using your own asset
08:45 – Who has your customers?
11:06 – Some easy strategies
13:23 – Warming them up
15:15 – The importance of tracking
16:58 – The SEO factor
19:41 – THIS is a must
20:52 – It’s all about the content
24:38 – The three main sources
25:57 – In closing
Let James help grow your paid membership with his experience and personal coaching
Transcription:
James Schramko: Hey there, it’s James here and we’re recording Episode 612 at SuperFastBusiness.com. And this is How to Get Traffic to Your Membership, part of the Membership Series with John Lint. Hello John.
John: Hey. Hey, everybody.
James: Now, we got asked a couple of questions from your members. You run the popular software program called KLEQ.com, which helps people set up their information products and their memberships. And of course, a big question is, what’s the number one channel to get traffic right now? And you know, some of them are obvious and some of them may not be as obvious. And we might also have a look at what a day-to-day promotion might look like. So let’s get into it.
The number one traffic channel
John: Yeah, awesome.
James: It’s kind of relevant for me, because at this time I’ve opened up tickets for my Live event, and the number one channel that I will use to get traffic for that is email. I’ll send out an email and I’ll make sales instantly. So no matter what your traffic channel is, I would strongly urge you to build an email list, because the email list is still very powerful. And it is the number one place that I would go to, to make a lot of sales instantly.
Of course, people say, “I don’t have an email list.” Well, that’s great. But whatever traffic channel you choose, and there’ll be a few that you can choose from, make sure that collecting emails is part of your process for a sustainable business.
Because what I see people doing is getting in this trap where they need to get traffic like, now. It’s usually people starting out or people who have been doing it for longer than they should have been doing it but not building a sustainable part to their business. So they’ve been doing paid-on-demand traffic, they run Facebook ads, sometimes they’re on Google ads. And then when their budget is finished, they haven’t got a long enough runway to be able to wait until the sales happen. And a big way to move people from the first interaction into a sale is that conversion process of the email.
You might not expect this
And the other one, the most incredible conversion process, and it’s totally counterintuitive, is actually your support desk, your help desk. Your help desk is the epicenter of problem solving. And I believe that that’s what a sale is, it’s solving a problem. And when you get people who are not quite sure if your program is a good fit for them, or if your course could help them with the problem they’re having, then that’s where they’re going to go. And the support desk is not very salesy. They’re supportive, they’re helping, and they can make the right recommended solution and they can tell people if it’s a good fit or not.
So when I look into my Wicked Reports, which is a tool that I’m using to track where my sales come from, the conversion event is usually the help desk or an email. It’s sometimes Facebook, and it’s sometimes free social traffic. But here’s what you’ve got to consider, that there’s an incubation cycle. And part of the system you’ve set up at KLEQ, John, is to do something similar to what I’ve been doing for a while. And that is to introduce people to my product over time, so that when I’m ready to help them out, and they’re ready to buy, they know it’s a good fit. So we’ve warmed them up in a way.
John: Yeah, and that’s something I love about your setup, is when you were just talking about your support desk, and it’s true – your support desk is totally non-salesy. You send them an email about something and they say, yeah, here’s the link to the order page. That’s it, and then boom, you know, you can just go. There’s no sales, there’s no trying to convince people. And so it’s great.
The secret to traffic
And something that’s super important, right? We talked about this, I mean, you talked about building your list and that’s really the key when we talk about any kind of traffic. People want to find out, what’s the latest hot traffic source? What’s the secret to traffic? Well, the secret is, number one, is there’s no secret.
But number two is that if you want to succeed with any kind of traffic source, you need to capture that traffic source. You need to have a way to capture that source, capture the leads that come, capture the visits that come from that traffic source. Because that is what’s going to make or break your campaigns, that’s what’s going to make or break your budget. And either it’s going to be profitable, or you’re going to be spending a lot of money very, very fast.
You need to have a way, if 100 people come to your page, well, how many of them actually convert, and how many of them actually join your list? Now of course, you can do all of that with KLEQ.com. You can do any kind of page, and we call them opt-in pages, which are lead capture pages, which is a simple page that you can set up and you offer them to maybe get a cheat sheet or a PDF report or a video series or register for a webinar. There are multiple different ways.
“Bottom line, you always want to capture that traffic.”
But bottom line, you always want to capture that traffic. You always want to offer a reason why they should give you their name and email in exchange for obviously something awesome, something of value. That can be a very simple one-page cheat sheet, a one-page checklist, a one-page resource guide, you know. These are actually very, very good. We call them lead magnets, something that you’re going to give in exchange of an email.
So you can create value. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy. But of course, you can do video series, you can do webinars, and all of that is actually built into KLEQ. So if you want to do a webinar, you want to do a product launch, you want to do just a very simple list building, you can do that. And now you’re building your list, and more importantly, like you said, you’re building that relationship, right? You are providing extra content and that’s what’s awesome with your setup, people discover you via your book, your podcast, or if they just heard about you and if they go on your website and then you provide them a ton of value with all the podcast episodes that you have, everything that you’re doing.
And by the time they are thinking about buying, they kind of know you, they like you, they trust you. And like you said, it’s as easy as sending an email. And when you send that email, it’s all about, “Hey guys, this is what we have, this is what it will do for you. This is why it’s a good time to buy now.” You’re giving maybe those bonuses, that special deal, etc. And then they buy.
The key of all of that, of everything that we’re going to be talking about today, it’s about this: capturing your visits, capturing that traffic when they land on your site.
Using your own asset
James: Yes. So this is the concept that I coined, called Own The Racecourse. And when I say I coined, I think I introduced it to this market. I heard about it from someone else a long time ago, but I can’t find a source to credit for the origin of it. But the concept is essentially owning that asset that you can build, and that’s why I like having my own website.
So as much as social media is easy and fantastic to use, it’s good to get people eventually to come over and grab something. And if you’re not sure what to make, I actually published a checklist about this, but I’m sure all the tools that John has in KLEQ will give you ideas.
But I usually start with the help desk. If the help desk is the number one conversion tool for me, then I think about what people are actually asking over and over again. That’s the material to put out into the marketplace.
And then if you didn’t have an email list, and what I would be doing is running Facebook ads, and I’d be trying certainly a direct call to action, you can actually run Facebook ads for people to come straight to your sales offer, but that may not result in a sale immediately. They might be too cold.
So what you might want to do is set up content, short videos. One-minute videos are very popular for me. FAQs, even a live podcast or a pre-recorded piece of content that is useful for customers would be the thing to run ads to. And you do this as a two-step process. Most of my successful friends are running ads to premium content, which is valuable and useful. And from those ads, they’re engaging people with messenger bots. They are bringing people into a webinar event, they are then running specific ads to the audience of people who watched the content. You can set up a custom audience to run to people who watched your video. So now you have a broad campaign with your content and then a specific call to action. Maybe it’s to join a free group or whatever you want to do to move people into that prospect mode. But the idea is to get people into either having a conversation with you or being ready to buy your product.
Who has your customers?
And the other thing you could do as a completely different option is to find someone who already has your customers, and you could give them a percentage of the sale, or a bounty for every sale that would be when it results in a sale from them referring your product or service. And this is a really fundamental way that big companies even like Amazon have this kind of program, where you can send people and if they buy, they will pay you. So you can actually set that up for your own products and services if you want.
John: Yeah, you can easily set that up with KLEQ. We have a built-in affiliate system that you can use. And that is actually a great strategy that I used a lot in the past. Because maybe you’re starting out, right? People are listening, they’re starting out, they’re like, “Hey, well, I don’t have a product yet,” or maybe “It’s my first product, I’m not sure if people will want to buy it.” You know, maybe they’re afraid and not too sure of themselves. And that’s normal, guys.
What something that you can do, let’s say you created a course, right? (And you can do that of course in KLEQ.) And you have set it up. You can easily approach other people in your market. Maybe they have an audience, obviously you want them to have a big audience or some kind of audience. And what you can do, you can actually offer your course for free to all their buyers, for example, and you can even position it as, hey, just give that as a bonus. So now the partner, for him, it’s great because now he can just bump the value of his offer. He can say, “Hey, by the way, you can get access to this.”
Or it can be for sale. Like maybe, kind of like what James and I are doing now, right? I mean, this was not advertised, but now this is a brand new bonus that we are giving for every KLEQ.com member. We are doing this podcast recording, we’re answering questions, it’s just basically a post-sale type of bonus. Well, you can do that as well with your partner where they are going to give access to your course as a bonus to their members.
And the great thing with that is now you’re building a list of buyers. Now, it’s great for them because they have happy customers, they’re getting more information, they’re getting more value. And for you, it’s great because you’re getting people into your course, you’re getting feedback, and you’re seeing what’s going on. You’re getting testimonials, which is great, and yeah, you’re building that list.
You know, I used that a lot back in the days, we’re talking 10 years ago. And I remember, a few short weeks, I was able to build a list of over 3000 people just by doing that strategy. So that works really well, but you can offer little things like that, it doesn’t have to be anything crazy.
Some easy strategies
A strategy I love that James does all the time, and you will see it when we post this episode on James’s site is that you’re going to be able to get the transcript, you’re going to be able to get a checklist of that episode. This is something super easy to do, so it’s not going to take you that much time. And what you can do is use something that we call an opt-in box. And an opt-in box is basically something that you can add to any page and in that case, for example, James is going to add it to his article page when we post the podcast, and you will see that you can click on the image or on the link or on the button, and there’s a box that appears. It pops up, and people can enter their name and email, or just their email in exchange for that checklist or the transcription of the podcast or that interview that you did.
“You can leverage your content in multiple different ways.”
So you can really leverage your content in multiple different ways. And then use those extra features such as an opt-in box to be able to do these things and build your list, right? Capture that traffic.
I mean, James talked about the little one-minute videos, two-minute videos. These are super short, super easy to make. It’s really hot right now on YouTube. If you look at some of the biggest YouTubers, a lot of them are publishing very regularly, and the length of the video has shortened as well. Why? Because we’re busy, right? If I’m going to be watching something on YouTube, I want to relax. I don’t necessarily want to watch a 10-minute video right? Something that’s like, one minute, a quick tip, something that I get value from, boom – I watch it and now I’m always watching that person on YouTube. It’s top of mind, right? I get to know him, get to like these people, and that is how you build that relationship with people, by delivering that little content that’s not going to take that much time.
I remember actually last week, I just recorded 30 videos in two days, 15 videos a day,and that’s it. Now I’m all set to deliver those videos on the YouTube channel whenever I want. So it does not have to take much time. There’s a lot of little features that you can enable to quickly build your list and and leverage other people’s audience as well by either offering your bonuses for free or, like James said, by doing a straight up JV based on commission. In that way, they are sending you that traffic, you are building your list, and then you can follow up with the different campaigns and the funnels that you have set up to convert, and when they convert, obviously your partner gets a commission.
So I’m going to have a look at the questions. By the way, if you have any questions, remember to submit them on the box below, alright?
Warming them up
So I have a question here from Guy Lawrence who says, if you have a small list and want to buy traffic to speed up the process to sell more memberships, would you use Facebook and use your short videos to warm them up, or advertise your podcast? What strategy would you take?
That’s exactly right. You want to warm them up, right? I mean, it depends on the strategy that you’re doing on Facebook. If you’re doing straight up cold traffic, right, you’re advertising to people who have never heard of you, obviously, your cost per click is going to be high. It’s going to be harder. So you need to send them to content to warm them up. Why? Because then you can target them in different ways and you can build what’s called a retargeting list. That way, you can then retarget them to push them to offers, right?
So you can basically have videos that you can publish. Those short videos, you can publish them on YouTube, you can of course publish them on your site, and you can publish them on Facebook as well. So then you can now use that because you have a video on Facebook, you can use that to do video ads. You could do it that way, to try to get as many people to see that, and that’s kind of called boosting your post on Facebook, right?
So you can do a boost campaign, and then based on that, you can then retarget, so if they go to your page you can then retarget them. So that means, retargeting means, they clicked on, let’s say, the ad. They go to the page, they watch the video. So now you know, OK, they’re kind of interested in that video, in that topic. Well, now you can have a dedicated series of ads retargeting people who have landed on the page and watched the video, for example. So now you can make an offer or you can send them back to your list-building funnel, and try to capture that traffic as well.
Obviously, if you’re sending traffic from any source to, let’s say, your website where you’re going to have that short video, always try to optimize it, right? And you can optimize it with an opt-in box. Like I said, you can optimize it with links, just going to opt-in pages or things like that. Just offer them a reason to join your list. That way you can follow up and build that relationship.
The importance of tracking
James: Right. And there’s a couple of things that make this important. It’s also good to track your sources if you can. I’m using a reporting tool. The simple and free way that you can help yourself a little bit is to use Google’s own tracking URL tool that allows you to see where your sales came from when you look into your analytics. They use these UTM parameters. It’s a little bit tech sounding, but that’s a good starting point, because you want to eventually work out which traffic sources are working out better for you.
But the most important thing to consider is when I was speaking to Scott Degrosseilliers about this, who’s from Wicked Reports, he said the average time to break even is 45 days. Now when I look into my own account, I can see the bulk of my sales happen around the 30 day mark. Fifteen to 30 days is my number one cohort. That means the number one group of people who are converting. That means they’ve entered into my ecosystem and taken a couple of weeks to mature, up to a month.
So if you’re spending money on ads, and this is what’s hard for first timers, you’re almost certainly going to lose money in the beginning, before you get to break even. And usually the extent of your ability to make a profit will be down to how good is your offer, and what have you got to sell, and can you make a sale beyond that?
Of course my favorite way to make sales beyond the first sale is simply a recurring membership, because you get paid each month over and over. And the average client value in that case can easily be $1100 or $1500 per customer, which means you could spend a fair bit to acquire that customer, as long as it’s all working. But you might have to wait a month or two to figure out if it’s working or not. That’s why I’ve also really liked the organic content model, which takes longer.
The SEO factor
Now, something we haven’t talked about that is also useful is whenever you put really good content on your page that can also sometimes be found by Google. And it can be put towards the top of the search results so that when people are searching for you, or for the type of topic that you’re talking about, you might actually appear in the search results and they could possibly click on that and come into your ecosystem that way.
So I actually get quite a lot of search engine traffic for SuperFastBusiness, because when we talk about things on these podcasts, and every word is transcribed, it’s going into Google. And if Google has not seen it before, and if it is the most relevant result for somebody’s search query, they will present it as long as the site’s loading nice and fast and it is easy to use and ticks a lot of the other boxes. You might want to talk about that for a moment, John, as how you’ve dealt with these matters.
John: Yeah. So you want to optimize for SEO, right? I mean, obviously, you’ll have some of the basics, like the title of the page needs to be optimized, some of the keywords needs to be in the copy, you might want to have obviously your metadata and all that. And that’s something that you can easily do in KLEQ by using the page options, you can insert any type of SEO metadata there. So that’s already optimizing the content, then obviously, you can add anything you want to the page in any way you want.
So obviously, your strategy is really awesome, to have the transcription always below, you know? So you might post the audio file and the video, and you might think, OK, well, that’s all people want. But a lot of people actually want the transcript, right? So go through the effort of transcribing your content. It’s super easy, guys, these days. You can go to rev.com, which is a great service I use. I know that a lot of people use Trint. I use Trint as well. Trint is a great service, cheaper, you can simply upload your files there, you’re going to get a transcription that is actually done by a machine, but is actually quite accurate. And what I do is I get someone from my team to then go over that transcription and to fix the mistakes that were made, because as you can imagine, with my accent, the machine can’t understand me most of the time.
James: I haven’t seen the Belgium option yet. I’ve seen American and Australian English.
John: Yes, yes. Yes. So it’s very funny. But that’s why I have someone from my team to do that, and to just check. And it takes a couple of seconds. Super easy. They have really built something great.
And now you have a file. You have a file, again, you can offer it as a way to build your list, because believe it or not, people love to actually put their name and email to get and download the transcript, even though it’s on the page. Why? Because they get to keep it, right? So that’s awesome. And you can have of course a transcription below the video. So now you have all that juice, all that SEO juice going on, and that’s what’s going to help Facebook find your content.
And yeah, and then after that, it’s all about making sure that you have links going to your pages, it’s optimized, it’s loading fast, all of that.
THIS is a must
You want to make sure you optimize your images. A lot, guys, I see this mistake a lot. You know, images are so easy to to make these days, right? You have an iPhone, and OK, great, you can upload it. But you have to realize that this image file size is huge and Google doesn’t like that. They want your pages to load fast. So try to optimize your images.
I was talking to a client, to a member, this morning, and we were looking at her images, and that is something that you really want to pay attention to. There’s a big difference between a file that is one megabyte and a file that is 500K or even 50K. You want to shoot for the lower. The lower the better, right? Because if you have 10 images on your page, well, 500 times 10, that’s like five megabytes. That’s a lot. That’s a big, big file. You don’t want that.
So there are tools out there, you know, actually free tools that you can use online to compress your images even more. Your assistants, or if you don’t know anything about graphic design, that’s OK. Someone on Fiverr can help you, someone on freelancer websites can help you easily do that. Otherwise, you’ll have tools and just do a Google search for like, “compress JPG”, “compress PNG”. That will help you compress all those images, that will help you speed up your site, speed up the speed at which your pages load. So that’s a little tip for you guys there.
It’s all about the content
And then that’s it, yeah. Just make sure you have awesome content. That’s the focus. Not just the focus on trying to get search engines obviously to rank stuff, it’s about the contents. You want people to land on the page and love your content so they can share it or at the very least, that they think, hey, this is awesome, and I want to find out more about this person. I want to put my email because I can get this thing or the cheat sheet or the webinar or whatever. Why? Because they thought that your first content, your first piece of content was valuable to them. And how do you know if it’s valuable? It needs to solve their problems.
“Make sure you have awesome content.”
James: And it might take some time for this. So just a little summary, in a practical, day-to-day scenario, I’m generally making a video here and there, sometimes I’ll do a couple in a row. But when I’m on a coaching call, or when I have an idea (even if I’m surfing, actually), as soon as I get back, I’ll just write it down, maybe a Post-it note, and then I’ll make a little video, a short one, explaining this. And if I do five a week, that gives me one a day for my team to post to various places. So it really takes around about 10 minutes a week or two minutes a day, these videos are supplementing the podcast.
I like publishing podcasts, I’ve figured out a way that I can just speak and record it and provide value and that’s a long haul strategy. It’s probably much harder to start a podcast today, and I wouldn’t do it without a really good premise and a little bit of help from somebody. But if you could combine them, then that’s very powerful.
And our little videos, they’re going up to Facebook, they’re going to LinkedIn, they’re going to YouTube, they’re going on Twitter and Instagram, and they’re also going on our website and inside my membership. This is a really cool thing. You might think, oh, OK, this is a free video. How could it possibly be useful for my paying customers? As a side note, won’t they get upset if they see paid content and then it’s published publicly? The answer is no, because inside the membership, you’ve got the opportunity to expand upon that one-minute video. It usually prompts questions. People can comment, they can ask more on the wall in KLEQ, and they can actually get more value from the video than you can offer with the free one because you’re not there when you’re posting this stuff. In my case, the team are processing it.
And by the way, another tip for a good transcription is YouTube itself. They will actually give you a file that you can download. And it’s very important to put the captions into videos. If you master the first stage, get the captions in there, because a lot of people watch their videos with the sound off, especially on social media, and depending on what environment they’re in.
And the thing is, once you’ve done this for a while, and people get a sense of who you are, eventually, they’re going to click on one of those links. They’re going to come over to your site or they find it in Google, they might opt in for some kind of waiting list or content upgrade, and then they’ll will be offered something where they can make a purchase. And that is how you get traffic and make conversions for your membership. And aside from that, you could still attend live events, you could go to in-person meetups, you can send out direct response mail. I wouldn’t recommend sponsoring the side of a blimp, probably not as direct or useful as it might have been in days gone past.
So there you go. There’s a couple of ideas to get started. And hopefully we’ve addressed some of the sort of obvious questions and some of the typical challenges that you might be having, depending on what stage you’re at. Now, if you’re at a super duper stage, if you’re already maxed out with Facebook ads, I have a few clients spending $140,000 a month on Facebook, they’re all turning to YouTube ads. That’s the next frontier for a low-cost lead acquisition. And then media buys, big time media buys. Taboola, Outbrain, these sort of native ads that you see on the bottom of news, those things are performing really well for high-level customers.
The three main sources
John: Yeah, there’s so many different sources that you can go into. Google is still a good one. There’s a lot of people doing Google retargeting and remarketing, so you can go that way. I think what’s important is just a little recap. You’ll have three main sources, bottom line, guys.
You’ll have the partnership route – you partner with someone with an audience and try to make some kind of deal, provide value to their audience. That is really, super, the fastest one actually. That is actually the fastest way, because you can get started now, you make that relationship in the next few weeks, you can get a lot of traffic. You can get a lot of new subscribers.
Then you have the content route. It will take more time, will take more dedication, you need to be consistent. That’s the key word, you need to be consistent. You can’t just expect to do a couple of videos and the next day have a ton of traffic. That’s not going to happen, it’s not going to happen. Likely, you’re not going to have that much traffic. It will come with time, as you do more and more, as you perfect your process.
And then the third way, you have advertising, and the key with advertising is to check your metrics and make sure that you monitor your expenses and obviously your budget, right? And track. It’s not just about OK, well, I have the budget, I’m just going to put it up, and OK, great. You need to see what is working, what is not working. These will come with time, and we can talk about all of these things in a future episode. Because otherwise, we can be here for hours. But these are the three main sources, right? The three main channels, I would say.
In closing
James: I’m thinking about when you and I hang out each year in the Maldives, John, we literally do speak for hours about this stuff. And the speed you speak, it’s like having five conversations.
So that’s great. I hope you’re enjoying this Membership Series here. This is Episode 612. It’s obviously fully transcribed, as we’ve described in this episode, and there’s more coming. So I’m interested in comments and suggestions on what topics you’d like to see in this series. We’ve already talked about keeping members, we’ve talked about getting traffic, we’ve talked about memberships versus courses and how many members you need, and all of these in our previous episodes.
Today’s topic is so powerful because I think most people are really in that getting leads zone of their business when they’re starting out. And later on, once you can attract and convert a customer, then delivering for that customer, which we sort of covered in the retention module, and then having a sustainable business, which we’ve sort of given an overarching talk about strategy is the key to it. That’s the stage I’m at with business. That’s the stage that you’re moving into. John. It’s very exciting to see this program growing and getting such a good strong user base. So yeah, we’d like like to take some suggestions on future topics. And thanks for listening to this particular episode.
And thanks, John, for sharing with us. KLEQ.com is where you can find out about this platform that makes it very easy to do the things we’re talking about. And this topic of traffic, it’s so popular. I’ve seen a couple of my peer group put together little bits from various different traffic platforms and put them all into little courses and stuff. It’s not hard to learn about this, but if you combine social with paid and a little bit of referral, you could really feed your membership very quickly.
John: Awesome. Thanks for having me.
James: Pleasure.
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