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How to drive traffic to your business blog

Its annoying right? You do what is recommended to ensure your business grows: You develop a great product, launch a website, then tell your friends about it.

Then to your astonishment and frustration- Crickets!

No traffic. No sales. nothing. zilch!

Its almost as if you wasted your time, efforts and money because you are getting nothing for it.

I know the feeling. I have been there before. But i did certain things that helped me get targeted traffic to my website and start making sales. Before I reveal the methods I used, I need to answer a very important question:

What is Targeted Traffic?

You have probably heard this term before but have you ever wondered what it really means?

Picture this: Let’s say you have an archery gameboard like the one in the picture below.

Your goal in this game is to hit the bull’s eye (i.e the spot painted yellow). Any arrows that do not enter that bull’e eye spot is a miss.

Its the same thing with target marketing. Your target market is the yellow spot. That is where you must hit with your marketing efforts. Any marketing effort that lands outside the yellow circle is a miss.

How do you determine your Target Market

Your target market is determined by the ideal prospect for your business. Let’s say you are a fitness instructor and you want to open a fitness club.

Your ideal prospect is anybody interested in having a trim, healthy body. Therefore your target market are any group of people who want to have a trim, healthy body and are willing to spend time in the gym to achieve this. Now we know what our yellow circle is.

How do we fire marketing arrows that will hit only that yellow circle?

By marketing only where your target audience hangs out. Any other marketing effort is a miss. For the fitness club I will recommend the following:

First determine how your target audience thinks: Are they visual in nature? Do they like to read a lot? Is your product a formal or friendly one? The answers to these questions determine where you will start. Now for a fitness club, most people who are interested in fitness prefer seeing training sessions in pictures or videos. therefore you should be advertising in Facebook, Youtube and Instagram. Also fitness is a friendly product and requires social interaction, therefore Facebook and Instagram are a must.

Locate where your ideal prospects already hang out: You are not the first fitness club to materialise on planet Earth. Locate other fitness clubs’ pages on these social media and see who their followers are.

Replicate what these fitness clubs are doing on your own social media page: These fitness clubs are your competition. Find out what they are doing, improve on it and do it on your social media page. Are you competitors updating their Facebook pages with motivational images and videos. Create your own motivational image and videos and upload on your Facebook page. Are your competitors using videos to demonstrate on Youtube? Create your own video and upload to your Youtube Channel.

Find other areas that your ideal prospects will be interested in: People who spend time in gym are careful about what they eat. So look for healthy food websites. People who gym wear sporty wear to the gym. Look for sporty wear websites. Make a list of the most popular ones within your locality. Become friendly with the owners of these sites. Then after a little while, ask for a recommendation to their followers or for an opportunity to guestpost for them.

As you can see, the first step in this marketing process was knowing who your ideal prospect was. Once you figure that out, the rest is a whole lot easier.

Ways to drive targeted traffic to your business blog

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website. But if you want your business to make money, you must concentrate on how to drive targeted traffic to your website. This is because targeted traffic are people already looking for the solution you offer. They want it. Therefore it will be way easier to get them to pay for any of your services.

Because they already want the service.

Below I describe methods I use to attract traffic to my website.

1. Search Results:

This is one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your website. This is because when people do a google search, they need the solutions to their search. To ensure your website always turns up on google search results please follow these guidelines

Your website must have a blog: In your blog, offer solutions to pressing problems your ideal prospect experiences. For the fitness club, this will be fitness-related articles. make sure these articles are pressing pain points. Because people do google search for pressing pain points.

Do not copy and paste: Make the mistake of stealing articles from another fitness site and Google will penalise you by reducing your website’s ranking and hence making it near impossible for you to get to the first page of google search results. And the first page is where you want to be because it converts higher than the second or third page.

Make sure your website is mobile-responsive: If you use a website theme that is not mobile-responsive, Google will remove your website from all searches done on a mobile device. This is bad business for you because 7 out of 10 people use mobile devices to make google search.

Provide high value content in your blog: Ensure you write blog posts that are share-able. Blog posts that go viral are high value content that solve a specific problem.

Encourage Social Sharing and commenting on your blog: When there are so many websites vying for the same keywords, Google puts the sites with the most relevant comments and social shares in the first page.

2. Advertising:

Let’s face it, to make money you must be prepared to spend money. Many may cringe at this fact but it is the truth

To attract targeted traffic to your site, you must be prepared to spend on advertising. Three of the most effective advertising mediums for local business owners are Facebook ads, Google ads and similar-interests websites.

When advertising on Facebook, I greatly recommend using Custom Audiences for the best results

When advertising on Google, I greatly recommend choosing long-tail keywords that are as close to the solution you offer as possible. This way you reduce the money you have to spend on Adwords.

Similar-interest websites are websites that your ideal prospects visit. For a fitness club, their ideal prospect is likely to visit nutritional blogs. Therefore they should look for the best nutritional and health blogs within their locality and approach the site owners to place their ads on their site.

3. Influencer recommendation

I have written many articles on the power of influencers and how they can skyrocket your business sales.

Related: The Secret Sauce of Success

An influencer is a well-respected person who is an expert in a certain field. Influencers typically have from 10,000 to 1+ million followers. Imagine having someone like Don Jazzy or Jay Z recommend your music?

Instant stardom right?

The same applies to business. For the fitness club, imagine having someone like Genevieve Nnaji, or Mo Abudu recommend you? You guessed it, instant sales.

Don’t know any A-list celebrity (or Big Fishes as I prefer to call them)? Then target smaller fishes who are still well-respected influencers and have at least 5,000 to 10,000 followers. I write about how you can accomplish this here (How to build your connections and grow your business).

4. Referrals

The cheapest form of targeted traffic is referral traffic.

What do I mean by referral traffic? When a customer buys something from you and recommends you to their friends, and those friends come and buy from you because of that recommendation, that is called referral traffic.

To get referral traffic, you have to entice your customers with discounts and rewards for each customer they bring. This will propel them to tell their friends about you. Also I greatly advise the use of giftcards on your site.

Giftcards will help current customers attract new customers to your website. I intend to write an entire blog post on what Giftcards are and how they can help your business.

5. Giveaways:

I have used giveaways many times in my marketing career. What I learnt is that if done right, giveaways can lead to targeted traffic explosion and an increase in your email subscribers.

But if done wrongly, giveaways can turn into a huge money sucker that will give you absolutely no results. Trust me, I have had one or two failed giveaways and i have had successful giveaways too. Here is what I learnt

Choose your gift wisely: Unless you are a phone retailer, do not giveaway any phone! Unless you are in the travel and hospitality industry, do not giveaway an all-paid trip to anywhere! This is because your gift is highly instrumental in attracting those that will participate in your contest/giveaway. If you giveaway a phone, every Tom, Dick and Harry’s cat will want to win the phone. Instead giveaway something related to your business. For the fitness club, I highly recommend giving away free membership, or sport wear or one-on-one private fitness coaching. This way people who are not interested in fitness will not even bother to enter your giveaway.
Keep the timing short: Do not let your contest drag for months! Even 30 days can be too much unless the giveaway is worth millions. Keep the giveaway short (between 7 – 14 days) for the best results
Choose your host wisely: One question you must answer before you start a giveaway is “Do I have a large enough following?” There are two ways to host a contest: On your site or on another person’s site. If your email list is 0-100 subscribers and your Facebook page is less than 2000 fans, you should not host the giveaway. Instead look for a similar-interest website with massive following and host your giveaway with them. This way the followers of the website will take part in your giveaway and you automatically acquire a large following!
Choose the giveaway software wisely: The giveaway software will greatly determine your success rate with the giveaway. You want to choose a giveaway software that has many options for making your contest go viral. I greatly recommend Gleam.
Tell your friends about it: One of the biggest mistakes I made in one of my giveaways was I did not tell my friends about it. When you want to run a giveaway, pester your friends about it. Even if you are running the giveaway on another website.

6. Free E-books:

This is an option I am currently working on. This option has high returns. And it only sends targeted traffic to your business website.

How does it work?

You write an ebook about a pressing problem that your ideal prospect has. Then you upload it to ebook platforms like Amazon, Smashwords and set the price to 0.00

That’s right, you make the ebook free!

The goal of the ebook is to attract traffic to your site and not to make money. Make the ebook as concise and straight to the point as possible. Then make sure you put links to a landing page on your website.

Why should the ebook be free?

To encourage massive downloads. When the ebook is free, you remove a customer’s resistance to price. Normally before a customer will buy a book (even if it is $0.99), they will check customer reviews and testimonials to be sure it is a good enough book. Then they will check other alternatives to be sure that your ebook beats the competition.

But when it is free, they hardly check these things. They just go ahead and download it to see if the book is really good. If it is not, they simply delete it.

I have seen this method convert nicely for friends and acquaintances. That is why I am interested in doing it. Many times, customers acquired this way go on to buy products worth thousands.

So there you have it; a concise guide on how to drive traffic to your website. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did please share and help others discover more ways to increase traffic to their business websites.

Do you have a suggestion I omitted? Tell us your suggestions in the comments.

P.S: Want a personalized traffic solution for your blog? Let me help you with my free Business Plan Service. Click here to get started.

5 Effective Ways To Become A Well Known Authority In Any Niche

The name Wole Soyinka commands respect. Chimamanda Adiche, Oprah Winfrey, Lanre De Silva are a few black women who are respected in their fields. Why? Because they all have proven to be an authority in his field. Regardless of their backgrounds, their education. It is what they have accomplished despite all odds that make people admire and respect them.

What is an authority?

An authority is a person who is knowledgeable and has in-depth skills in his/her chosen field. Notice that I didn’t say that the person has in-depth education; I said in-depth skills. Granted education can help you become an authority or expert in a field but many entrepreneurs did not start businesses centered on what they studied in the University.

A remarkable example is Tera Odukoya, Founder of House of Tara. Tara is an educated Lawyer (or an Learned as they call themselves). But today, she is the proprietor of a successful brand that empowers makeup artistes. She has spoken as an ‘authority’ in many shows and has come to be recognised as an Authority in the Make-up Industry. This is because of what she has accomplished in this field, not what she studied in the University.

Taofick Okoya with a HND in Ceramics is the hugely successful founder of Queen of Africa, a Nigerian-based company that produces beautiful African dolls. It has been reported that these dolls are outselling Barbie dolls in some areas of the country. As st the time of this writing, Okoya had a distribution network for his dolls in US and South Africa and is planning expanding to other countries in trhe world. But he doesn’t have a degree in Business Administration, or even Plastics, yet he is building a company that is charting new grounds.

So it not about your degree! Its about knowing what you do. After all, I have been a victim of a quack pharmacist who had the degree but didn’t know the skills of his trade.

So how do you become an authority in any field you choose? By enacting the methods outlined below:

Position Yourself

The mistake many entrepreneurs make is focusing on traffic, sales and profit. This might have short term gains but in the end, it will damage your reputation. Instead focus on establishing yourself as an authority in your business. When Tara wanted to become known as an authority in her business, what did she do? She started a make-up training course. She started a blog that inspires and motivates people.

In other words, the fastest and easiest way to become an authority in your field is to teach, to educate, to help people with the information you have. The cheapest way to do this is to start a blog and post articles. Example if you are a fashion designer, write articles about the right way to mix and match fabrics. If you are a health and fitness guru, write articles about how to live healthy, how to lose weight without stress. If you are an event and decoration expert, write articles about perfect wedding decoration colours, 5 unexpected expenses to look out for when planning an event. Etc. If you have pictures of real life jobs you have done, put it in your articles. This builds great confidence and trust in what you do.

Another way to establish your expertise is to write a book. Once you are an author, people immediately respect and reverence you.

Start with a niche:

The mistake many entrepreneurs make is to start with a huge field, in a bid to make as much profit as possible. Imagine this: an entrepreneur starts a new beverage company and makes beverages that look and taste almost like Coca Cola’s Coke, Fanta and Sprite. His ambition is that people who love Coke will patronise his beverage.

This entrepreneur will be lucky to recover his capital! Why? Because he is completing with a giant who has the resources to advertise, has the best prices for its products and has a loyal market-share that trust every single product Coca Cola makes. At best, the entrepreneur will be seen as a counterfeit or copycat.

How should he have gone about it?

He should have tried to provide something different from what Coca Cola has to offer. When La Casera started, they started with an apple drink in a disposable plastic bottle. This was during a time when Coca Cola products predominantly came in glass bottles which had to be returned after consuming the liquid contents. They then developed a remarkable marketing strategy: to target travelers who will want to take something liquid during their journey but didn’t carry empty Coca Cola bottles with them. The result? They became an instant hit and predominated a market they created for a very long time. How did they become an instant hit?

They started with a niche of beverage refreshment: just one flavour of apple drink.
Their taste was different
Their provided a solution to the pain of carrying replacement glass bottles
They had a unique marketing angle and quickly established themselves as the traveler drink.

Understand that people don’t care how smart you are

If you can’t deliver, you are worse than the dumbest kid. It’s that simple. A doctor that can’t cure his patients is a failure regardless of how many accolades and degrees he has. An entrepreneur that can’t deliver her goods and services will be seen the same way.

But once you have the relevant skills and deliver, nobody cares what you studied. They will be rushing to you because they know you can solve their problems.

Quit Procrastinating:

If you have a business idea and have the skills necessary to start, then START. Even if its just baby steps. This way you will learn along the way and grow stronger. This way you will improve your skills and experience.

I often hear this excuse: “I want to know everything before I start”

I have got news for you: You can never know everything. Everyday new discoveries are made, every day the market-scene changes. So if you are waiting till you know it all before you start, yo will never start a thing.

Also don’t waste money on unrelated products.

I have seen people rush to buy products that promise them instant success in 5 days with no work involved. I have been in the business scene long enough to know that business is just like Rome; it is not built in a day. So if you are really willing to be successful, then you should be ready to do the necessary work required to get there.

Don’t be ashamed of your humble beginnings:

People empathise and relate more with entrepreneurs who are open and reveal to us how they made it. Till tomorrow Oprah Winfrey will be respected, not just because she single-handedly started a multi-billionaire dollar company, but because she was open about her challenges and the rough childhood she had.

Even in Nigeria, people tend to trust people who are open about their past and current struggles. President GoodLuck Jonathan won his first presidential election on the strength of a single story, “I grew up without shoes…”

Tara also used this method on her way to the top. She exposed how passionate she was about make-up and how she started with just N15,000. And how she grew N15,000 to a multi-millionaire naira company.

One of the reasons Linda Ikeji’s blog is successful is because we all know how she started and the challenges she faced, even the failures she faced. We know how despite all these challenges, she has risen from the ashes of poverty to the grandeur of being a self-made millionaire. And that has endeared her to us! So don’t be ashamed to share your story.

The fastest way to acquire success

The easiest way to succeed as an entrepreneur is to take advantage of opportunities. When Ebola broke out and nearly halted international transactions with certain countries (Nigeria inclusive), many saw the disease as a problem. Only a few saw it as an opportunity. Because of the Ebola outbreak, Businessman Jon Schultz of Blue String Ventures made a whopping $200,000 in one day!

How?

In 2008, he bought the domain Ebola.com for $13,500. When Ebola broke out in 2014 causing global panic and frenzy, he put the domain in the market and sold it to a Russian company for $200,000. (The Verge)

But Jon Schultz was not the only one to capitalize on an epidemic.

The first place winners of the 2014 AMPION Venture Bus West Africa were developers who used their skills to create solutions tackling healthcare issues; specifically Ebola. Ebola was such an epidemic that AMPION choose to consider favourably applicants who could present plausible solutions to eradicating the disease from a digital standpoint.

And this is just one epidemic. History has shown that once you can help people by offering a solution to a pressing problem, you will be successful almost instantly. More examples include Jumia (which became widely successful because of the ease of transaction and guaranteed delivery it offered), MTN in Nigeria (which became widely successful because it solved the headache of acquiring a Line from NITEL and made communication more seamless).

Now there are two ways to capitalise on a problem: Either you provide a solution (which the winners of AMPION did) or you invest in events/products that could lead to a solution (which Jon Schultz did). Of the two, the less risky and more viable is option A. I am a firm believer in helping people solve their problems, putting people first because when you do this, money will always find you.

Interested in cashing in on a problem? Follow the steps below:

Identify the problem: This is the first step. If you do not see the problem, you will never know what solution to look for
Determine the magnitude: A problem experienced by a handful of people is not as profitable as a problem crippling a nation. When Edison created the Lightbulb, it was a massive hit. Why? Because the alternative source of light energy at that time, the gas lamp, was not as cost effective, safe, energy conserving and bright as the light bulb.
Figure a solution fast: When the Ebola epidemic broke out in Nigeria, a lot of smart shop owners stocked their shelves with Hand Santiziers. These shop owners made a killing before other shop owners saw what was going on and rushed to do the same.
Analyze your solution carefully: Business oftentimes demands an investment of cash or human resources or both. Make sure that your solution will be worth investing time and money on. Determine how much this solution will cost you and how many people are likely to buy it. Hint: make sure your solution is a plausible one and that it really helps people. Always put people first when starting your business, not money. Because once you develop something that is insanely helpful, people will be more willing to pay for it. Also make sure that during your cost price analysis, your product/solution will be affordable. This will also help you get more customers.
Deploy as soon as possible: you are not the only smart person on the planet. Chances are that someone else is brooding on that same idea. Normally the first to act and deploy gets the most reward. Example MTN is enjoying a large share of Nigeria Telecoms market not because of the quality of their service but because of the fact that they came in first. Same thing with Indomie and Coca Cola. So if you have an idea that will help people immensely to get rid of a terrible problem, work out your logistics, costs and market price, then deploy. Otherwise someone else will beat you to it and you will be forced to scramble for leftovers.

I really hope this article helps you and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to send a mail to canozie@simplyquintessential.com. If you have any additions or suggestions, let us know in the comments.

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