CHAPTER 9 The Source - Let’s go back to 2002. A family friend had invited me and my brother to his apartment in Somerset, New Jersey. He did mention that there would be a presentation of some sort but I wasn’t paying too much mind to it.
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Soon enough, we found out it was a life insurance MLM (multi-level marketing) business opportunity presentation. But it was a completely new concept to me. To my surprise, my brother had already been exposed to it.
For some reason, we ended up not signing up but I don’t remember why. I’m sure it had something to do with being broke college kids at the time. It must have been about $200 to sign up but we didn’t.
I want to say… something around a few months later, I was in the NJIT (my alma mater) library studying when I ran into a school mate. As a common talking point, I might have uttered something to the effect of “looking to make some serious money.” “Wanna make money?” He asks. I answered “yep”. “I can show you how to make money fast.” He says. Before I knew it, I found myself at another business presentation at Newark Penn Station.
Less than a week later, I went for a full blown training on how the business worked where I found out that the “source” of all this money was people; particularly, my family and friends. After much thought, I declined to fully join the business. Of course, my school mate was disappointed because that was sales commissions being flushed down the drain.
He took the ‘L’ like a real ‘G’. I ended up joining my first MLM in 2009; about 7 years later. The timing was right; I guess. But I was presented again with the idea of my family and friends being the only “source” of life for my business.
I fully understood that money comes from only one source; and that’s people. I learned a long time ago that the revenue you are going to generate in business is already in the hands of someone. So there was no confusion there.
But having to beg my family and friends like my friend and schoolmate from 2002 did with me continued to seem like a bad idea. After all, that traffic, leads and business generation strategy didn’t work on me. Why would it work on my family and friends? But I managed to recruit my brother into partnership with me.
Great minds think alike. I was still willing to set up a business presentation at my apartment and about 22 people showed up. As a businessman with about 3 years of success at the time, selling people to come over and grab free snacks wasn’t hard for me.
Out of my 22 guests, only one person signed up. Less than 24 hours later, she called me and requested a refund. I am sure that family and friends as a “source” of business might have worked for many others before and after me. But you can’t judge me for concluding that it would probably never work for me.
So after a little bit of research, I stumbled into the magnetic marketing concept. It was presented to me as attraction marketing and another guru, Mike Dillard, also presented it as magnetic sponsoring. Well, it made too much sense. My brother also confirmed that he had stumbled into this idea while doing his own research.
We signed up for courses, training and seminars to continue to master this skill-set. In one transaction, I spent more than $600 and then it dawned on me. “I had just given money to a stranger over the internet.” The internet is the new source. This was an exciting discovery.
If we are going to be honest, this is about making money because you and I know that we can’t afford to run a business without enough revenue to justify it. So when we say “source”, we mean nothing can literally happen in digital marketing without talking about online traffic.
Exactly, how do we plan to attract visits to our websites, webpages, videos, landing pages and business. It’s not enough to set up a website in the middle of nowhere on the internet. In fact, we can’t claim that we are talking about digital marketing until we break down online traffic generation.
As I stated earlier on in the book, more than 90% of webpages on the internet get no organic traffic. More gets no traffic at all outside the bots crawling it occasionally to determine if anything is happening over there.
For the most part, most web pages are a ghost land. And there is no real excuse for this because we know that Google is sending free traffic accounting for at least 50% of traffic on the internet as of 2022. Only 15% of online traffic is paid for. So why is your website not actively working as a “source” of new people, leads, deals, customers, clients and partners for your business?
You are already aware that an average human being goes to one place “and one place only” to research, find solutions and answers to problems; the almighty Google. So why isn’t that sounding like the source of all the goodies you need to generate from this digital marketing thing?
Forget about researching and all that boring stuff for a second. Where do you go when you are bored and just want to relax and “chill”? Be honest! Isn’t it Instagram? Oh! Sorry, I meant to say TikTok.
The good news is that you are in control of how many people you want visiting your websites. All you need is a strong enough desire and you can get it all set up in no time. I know that most people still assume that generating traffic is tech-intensive activities.
If you can order to print a pack of 500 business cards to promote your business, you can definitely go through a 3 steps process to set up a simple ad online to generate clicks over to your website. So it’s just a matter of desire.
In this time and age, I want to let you know that online traffic generation is a basic skill. Your business simply won’t make it if you are not operating at that level. It’s the equivalent of swimming against the ocean tide. I would just hope that you are an exception and in fact, know what you are doing.
There are a few exceptions. For example, there are businesses that get a steady supply of new clients from their alliances with government agencies and insurance companies. That’s fantastic as long as they understand that scalability will be limited.
But my guess is that you are reading this book because you want a better control of sourcing your business with new blood steadily. I don’t blame you. The internet is where everyone is hanging out either for leisure or to research answers and solutions.
There is no better time to jump on this as an opportunity. Just like many other opportunities that have come and gone, things will evolve with generating online traffic as well.
But you will learn in a bit that you never need to panic about that. If you master the fundamentals, it’s a transferable skill for the rest of your life as a marketer and/or an entrepreneur.
Here are a few reasons why you need to be in almost full control of how much online traffic comes to your business on a regular basis. First of all, no condition is permanent. And that same concept is true for traffic “sourcing” and generating in of itself. That means even when you fully buy into what I am saying right now, certain sources of traffic won’t continue to work forever.
So just as much as you should never count on just government contracts and leads to run your business, you should also never count on one source of traffic. Therefore it’s very much the same reason why you should be in control of how you attract new people and how much new traffic of people you attract steadily.
When you understand this concept, it will suddenly become okay and more affordable for you to make the inevitable mistakes that most people make in their business. Honestly, that’s a perpetual contradiction. You simply can’t afford to make the mistake of using the hope strategy when it comes to generating fresh business and customers.
So I guess what I meant to say is that you can afford to make mistakes related to conversion rates inside your funnel when you are generating consistent and quality traffic; remember the connection and the system. But those things become pretty much useless when you don’t prioritize consistent flow of traffic into it.
Have you ever tried to multiply anything by zero? The product is always zero right? There is no perfect sales funnel, connection and systems falling out of the skies. Never mind what we discussed in chapters 4 and 5.
If you are not generating and attracting consistent traffic through the funnel, you are not generating any data as discussed in chapter 7, you can’t test and you can’t optimize for maximized profits.
There are four different categories of online traffic sources that we have to further breakdown in a few minutes namely organic, direct, referral and social traffic.
Organic Search Traffic - This is the source of traffic of people searching for particular solutions. When they searched, a search engine result page (SERP) had one of your web pages listed and they clicked on it and were redirected to your website. A user of your website was generated for your website from organic search traffic.
Direct Traffic - This is traffic sourced from a user who types your website address directly into a web browser that loaded your web page from scratch. This user knew the exact web address on the world wide web (www). Most of the traffic generated online is not generated from direct traffic sources.
Most people you give your website address to one time will forget or lose where it is written before they get to a web browser; even though there is a web browser on their smartphone. For the most part, people will be clicking over from some other web page and redirected to your website.
Referral Traffic - This is traffic sourced from other self-hosted websites that manually links to your website. For example, if someone types www.myempirepro.com into a web browser on a device and it loads our webpage, that is considered direct traffic. And to be clear, if you are reading this book on a Kindle or PDF file and you click that link directly, that would not be considered direct traffic. That is considered a referral traffic since it’s a click redirecting from another web based content.
Social Traffic - As you probably already know, social media is one of mankind's greatest inventions. It consumes and generates so much attention because in so many ways, it represents entertainment for 4 billion plus people.
So as business owners and digital marketers, we are sharing articles, videos, photos and more to social media. When users click any of these creatives on social media generating a redirect to your website, it is considered social traffic. And yes, you probably should be taking advantage of this as a major source of traffic for your website and business.
I am just sharing these categories with you to make it easier to comprehend your experience properly when you do start to execute. So this is not a guarantee that other platforms will categorize traffic sources exactly like this. But it will be somewhat close and you will be able to generate traffic to your website on-demand after a few minutes of assessment on how any platforms’ analytics is set up.
Our website www.myEmpirePRO.com at press time generated 43.76% from organic search traffic, 26.52% from direct traffic (we have a specific domain name hybrid strategy for that), 2.29% from referral traffic, 1.03% from social traffic (which we can definitely improve on) and 25.14% from “others” all in the last 28 days alone. A total of 1,012 new users.
“Others” traffic sources are simply traffic sources that the robots were not able to categorize properly. Always remember that digital marketing will never be perfect. Nonetheless, it’s the closest you will get to perfect marketing.
After the launch of this book, we will be scaling it all up even bigger because what I teach is clearly working. These are real humans with real life interests and opportunities to serve stopping by at our websites and we are going to be scaling.
But I want to share www.LOLAandOLA.com traffic sources with you as well. From 1,059 new users in the last 28 days, 77.93% came from organic search, 17.13% came from direct traffic, 0.84% came from social, 0.74% came from referral traffic.
This is what I want you to do. I want you to step up your traffic generation game. What do you sell right now? How do you make money today? Yes. You do have something that you sell even if it’s just your time by way of a resume.
And the more eyeballs your resume gets, the higher the chances that you will get a new job offer. It gives you more options to exercise which means you get to set your own prices in the marketplace. Isn’t that empowering?
It’s easy to look at everything I’ve been sharing with you as digital marketing. But it might have been harder for you to relate it to what you sell today. It doesn’t have to be. Just simply use “eyeballs” on your resume, products and service interchangeably with “traffic” or the “source.” Then it should start to make sense.
Starting today, start relating with social media and the search engines like a producer and not another consumer. As I told you earlier, there are more than 4 billion social media users in the year 2022. There is more than enough supply of consumers obviously because the whole human race is not even up to 8 billion people.
More than half of us are just consuming social media in general. What if you learn and master step-by-step how to produce social media? Are you fully and cognitively aware of the magnitude of opportunity that is when you find the value you can bring into today’s social media marketplace?
There is something that you do effortlessly but that thing is also extremely valuable to someone either hanging out on social media right now or actively searching for that same exact solution online. That is probably the value that your employer recognizes but they are paying you only 1% of what it’s worth. And I don’t blame your employer.
It’s time to get your talent, products and services in front of the people that are most likely going to value them appropriately. That’s why in the next chapter we will be breaking down “the structure”.
We are getting closer and closer to executing these multi-million dollar proven concepts for you and your business; even if you don’t already own a business.
Only a handful of people will do it. But that’s the point. The scarcity of “YOU Inc” is precisely “the source” of your fortune. If you don’t stop, I won’t stop, not only until I finish writing this book, but also until you become a success story from this book.
In the next chapter, I am going to share with you some more sources of the right people. And I will share the fundamentals that work on any platform for setting up and scaling out a 7 figure digital marketing campaign.