5.4 Qualified Traffic vs. Unqualified Traffic

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WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

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In this video I discuss:

  • Why all traffic is NOT created equal
  • Why you shouldn’t rank for a keyword in your industry simply because you can
  • An example of how this has bitten me in the butt in my own business

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5.4 Transcript Below

Alright! Let’s make this pit stop as quick as possible while also making sure it’s effective and teaches you what you need to know while we linger here.

So like I mentioned (tying up the last lesson), this is all about Qualified Traffic versus Unqualified Traffic. And we’re going to talk very extensively here – but briefly – so we’ll be efficient about what exactly that means.

And at the end of the day, the moral of the story is that all traffic is not created equal. That is a very important concept to learn early on. And I wish it’s something someone had explained to me. And it’s something that I see a lot of really advanced internet marketers that are very successful… even they aren’t paying attention to this… they’re just going after all the traffic they can without even thinking about whether or not it’s going to result in anything that’s beneficial to them.

So you see it more commonly made with new internet marketers, but I’ve seen it (again) with people that are making $10000, $15000, $20000+ a month. They continue to make these mistakes. And it’s a really simple concept if you know to look out for it.

Just because a keyword in your niche has high search volume and low competition (at least relatively speaking) does not necessarily mean that it’s an opportunity for you. Even if they’re technically kind of borderline in your target audience, if that’s not the kind of person based on their search intent that is going to take action in your conversion funnels in the things that you offer on your website and the affiliate offers you promote or the products that you’re selling – they don’t mean anything on your site. I don’t care if there are 10,000 of them a month that you can rank for. It’s just going to flood your site with a bunch of worthless traffic.

So you have to realize that your posts which is fueled… it’s very directly determined and influenced by which keyword you pick. It has to relate very closely (at least closely enough) to other content and offers you promote on your website to result in conversions. So that’s a statement we could probably spend 15 minutes breaking down. But I think the easiest way to discuss it would be to look at my review of an MLM product.

So I did this (I’m going to… you know… you’re going to see the rest of my slides but whatever) on Stopping Scams, specifically, where I review a lot of products and I typically stick to internet marketing and affiliate marketing products specifically. But I decided this time, okay, I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to write an article about this MLM. I had a friend that was trying to recruit me into this multi-level marketing or network marketing (however you want to say it) opportunity called Nerium. And it’s a skin cream, basically.

And he was getting in really early stage, he had been really successful previously in another network marketing company, and he was recruiting me. So I wrote this post. It was actually when Stopping Scams was really young. Stopping Scams was a pretty new website… I had run NoMoreBSReviews.com at that point for a few years but decided to transition into something that was more holistic – that I could do training and not be so confined to just doing reviews because that was what people expected to see based on my domain name.

So when Stopping Scams was fairly new and I was trying to build the authority, I wrote this article. It just so happened to be something that was timely for me because my friend was trying to recruit me. And it just destroyed our friendship. And that is what this article is about. The title is “How MLMs Ruin Friendships – My 100% Honest Nerium Review”. I have gotten since then thousands upon thousands upon thousands of visitors for this article because it ranks fairly well for things like ‘Nerium scam’ and some kind of long tail Nerium traffic that a lot of people end up searching for.

And I have tried everything. Again, coming from someone that has a lot of conversion optimization experience: short of finding an MLM product in the beauty industry and promoting it or promoting Nerium and completely compromising my morals – because when I researched Nerium, it did not have a good reputation at all. That may have changed since then. But outside of promoting Nerium or promoting something that was closely related to Nerium, these people – no matter how many of them I get – are not converting for internet marketing training, how to build an online business.

And you would think they would, right? You would think someone interested in an MLM opportunity is interested in building a business. Why not try to foot that traffic into building an online business? Building an internet business based on affiliate marketing or blogging – whatever the case may be. And they just don’t. I have tried so many things for this particular article and they just do not flip well. They don’t convert. They are interested in MLM opportunities. They are interested in Nerium. They are not interested in making money online or building a business around content marketing.

So at the end of the day, I still get over a hundred (sometimes a couple hundred of visitors a day) from this one article. And they just don’t convert into my particular funnel. And like I said, if I wanted to… I probably should because I’m probably leaving a decent chunk of money on the table… I could find something in that industry that was more network marketing, MLM oriented, and promote it, and make some decent money. But, I’m just not… no offense to anybody that is… I’m just not that into MLM businesses myself. I find (on the whole) the products to be really overpriced for a comparable quality in the industry that’s not based on an MLM model. You have to be able to pay people enough commissions, and as a result, they end up being really expensive. So that’s the reason I haven’t pursued this. But it is the perfect example of unqualified traffic.

A lot of people that compete in the same space as Stopping Scams that run review websites write a lot about MLMs and they see a ton of traffic but they don’t see a whole lot of conversion into promoting internet marketing training, internet marketing business because those things… even though they’re both interested in business… even though they’re both interested in extra income and potentially even passive income, they’re… if you think about a Venn diagram where the circles are overlapping… they’re just like not. They’re just two separate circles.

And so, that is my example (my very painful example) of traffic that just does not convert – even though I’m getting a lot of it. And technically, they are in the same space as Stopping Scams’ average visitor; but they are not converting because they’re just not closely related enough to the offers and the training and the benefits that I am offering them.

So long story short, just because you can rank for something… just because there’s something out there with search volume that you could potentially get rankings for, does not mean it’s always worth your time or it’s going to make you money.

It wasn’t just Nerium that I did this for. There were a number of other articles when I was getting Stopping Scams established, coming over from No More BS Reviews. And whereas No More BS Reviews had something like overall 20% of people that visited that website opted in to my email list, it fluctuated somewhere between like 18% and 23% of all visitors overall – which was insane. You know, sometimes I’m lucky to get like 5% on Stopping Scams and a big reason for that is because I wrote about a lot of things that frankly just were not related to the offers that I was promoting, to the free training that I was giving away, and to my email list, et cetera.

And as a result, now I have a lot more traffic (don’t get me wrong) which is kind of cool; but at the end of the day, that traffic doesn’t mean anything to me because I can’t get it to convert. And if you can’t get it to convert and equal something in your business – whether it be furthering your reputation, building your following, making extra money – it’s just not worth taking the time to write a piece of content about and target.

So you can find other keywords that may have 10% or even 5% as much search volume as that keyword and make more money because the other keyword with lower search volume is much higher quality and much more directly related to what you’re promoting and much more clearly in your target audience. And as a result, you’re going to make more money going for those keywords rather than going for the keywords that have higher search volume but are more of a stretch as far as whether they’re interested in what you’re pitching and what you’re talking about and what you’re teaching – the value you’re trying to put into their lives.

So anyways, that’s that lesson.

Long story short, just because you can rank for something, doesn’t mean it’s worth your time or it’s going to make you money. It’s distinctly possible that going for a keyword that had much lower search volume could make you a lot more money in the short term and the long term. So just keep that in mind. It’s a very, very important lesson.

And as you’re looking at keywords and you’re kind of building this list of keywords, think about it. Think about “Is this person in my target audience?” because a lot of the time, you can tell just by the keyword they’re searching and staying tuned to it as you are building your website.

Because even if you may not be able to call it right off of the bat – because you’re just fairly new to this or you’re getting to know your niche or your industry, pay attention to it and the trends of how well traffic on your site is converting for given keywords over time (we’ll talk about analyzing that data way down the road) – but it’s possible.

And just stay tuned into it, because if you don’t, you may just keep writing about a bunch of keywords that aren’t ever going to convert. When if you just paid attention, you could kind of learn which keywords are converting better than others, what traffic is converting better than others and make more money with dramatically less traffic.

So as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group. That’s free for registered members. And I will see you over there.

And finally, we’re going to get into actual keyword tools. We’re going to start off with a bunch of ways to analyze keywords using free keyword tools and then we’ll talk really briefly about some totally optional ways to find keywords using premium keyword tools.

So in the next lesson, we’ll dig in. You’ve got all of the foundation going forward for how to do keyword research and now it’s time to jump in and actually find some keywords. So I’ll see you there!


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