Using Paid Traffic? Take These 5 Steps FIRST!

Otherwise, You’ll Waste Your Social Media Ad Spend

Are you trying to get paid traffic to your blog, lead capture pages, or sales pages? If not, are you planning to? Either way, here are 5 steps that you absolutely must take before you start paying for traffic.

Many online marketers try to jump right into paying for traffic to their blog, lead capture pages, or sales pages. And then they wonder why they don’t succeed.

You can think of paid traffic as being the roof of a building. If you don’t put a proper foundation under the building, then there won’t be anything to support the roof. If you take these 5 steps FIRST, then you’ll have everything in place to support paid traffic.

1. Define Your Vision & Personal Development Approach

Jim Rohn probably said it best… Your income will never exceed your self-development. This is true whether you are a one-person solopreneur or a Fortune 500 corporation. So, what does this have to do with paid traffic?

You need to get clear your vision of what your underlying business purpose will be. And, you need a specific plan in place for the personal development of yourself and anyone else that is part of your organization.

In particular, you will need to plan for personal development in these two areas:

1. Mindset and attitude.
2. Strategic and tactical skills.

If you don’t do this, you’ll find yourself throwing away thousands of dollars on traffic that is poorly defined or not targeted. Plus, you may not have the mental fortitude in place to weather the learning curve that paid traffic ALWAYS entails.

A Personal Development Plan

Back in the day, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy and others taught this: you should every day read in the literature of your field; you should every day listen to one motivational or instructional audio program, and you should every calendar quarter attend a live event in your field.

Today, with all the options that are available, you can inject some flexibility into that model. But here are some ideas:

1. Read in your field: blog posts, articles, or books.
2. Listen to audio programs in your field: audible audio books, podcasts, etc.
3. Attend regular online training, especially those that include interaction with others: webinars, masterminds, live streamed events, etc.
4. At least once per year, attend a live event, in person.

Make sure that your personal development plan includes elements from each area.

2. Develop Your Branding & Target Audience Plan

Before you can begin sending paid traffic anywhere, you need to have a crystal clear picture of who you and your business are, as well as who your target audience is.

First, read this blog post, if you haven’t already: 4 Most Critical Strategies for Freelancers & Solopreneurs.

To be clear, I’m not talking about “a brand”, which is really more about color schemes, images, and templates. I’m talking about branding you and your business. This is really all about WHY you are in business, and WHAT you have to offer (at a high level).

It should include your origin story, and the epiphanies and “ah-ha” moments that led you to get into business in the first place. And, it should include your unique selling proposition. In other words, why should someone do business with YOU, instead of one of your competitors?

Equally important is knowing WHO your target audience is. Plain and simply, if you don’t know WHO your target audience is, then you won’t have any idea WHERE they hang out or congregate. And you won’t know what kind of bait that will attract them to you.

WHO Is Your Dream Target Audience Member?

First, you need to create a profile for your dream audience–generally, a separate profile for male and female members:

1. Who is your dream audience member?
2. What do they look like?
3. How old are they?
4. What are they passionate about?
5. What are their dreams, goals, and aspirations?
6. How do they pass their time?
7. What level of success have they already achieved?
8. What education level do they have?

WHERE Do They Hang Out?

Then you can ask yourself, WHERE you can find them:

1. Where do they hang out online?
2. Are they on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or a different social media?
3. What online groups are they a part of?
4. Which email newsletters do they subscribe to?
5. What blogs do they read?
6. Do they read The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or something else entirely?

What BAIT Will Attract Them?

Only when you know these things can you determine what kinds of bait will attract your target audience to you. This bait can take a lot of different forms.

1. Blog Posts
2. Lead Magnets
3. Videos
4. Facebook Lives
5. Podcasts
6. etc.

You should always create the bait to focus on the ONE BIG DOMINO problem or challenge that they are trying to solve (rather than your own personal interests). Finally, you need to have a very clear picture and plan for the end RESULT that you want to give to your target audience.

See also: Nail Your Niche: 6 Steps to the Perfect Target Audience

3. Create Your Monetization Plan

Once you know where you audience hangs out and what bait to use to attract them, you need to define how you will MONETIZE any traffic from your audience. It’s pointless to drive paid traffic, unless you know how you’ll get paid in return.

Here’s a place where a lot of marketers mess up. They try to sell directly to their open, public social media audiences.

For the most part, that’s like a marriage proposal on the first date. In a rare, blue moon, that might have a happy ending. But for the most part, the result is pretty devastating.

So, your monetization efforts should generally be to move people from your open social media audiences to your private, permission-based audiences. And, you should make sure that you lead with low-cost, no-brainer offers before you launch into the high-ticket marriage proposal.

Two of the best places to monetize are your email list and your blog. You might also choose to monetize in a private Facebook group or in an opt-in Facebook Messenger subscribers’ group.

See also: The Key to Avoid the Cardinal Error of Social Media Marketing

4. Develop Your Content Creation & Content Marketing Calendar

Now, anyone can get a one-time sale from people. But there’s a lot more involved with creating a ravingly loyal customer for life. And the way you get there is by providing a ton of value in the form of content. It is this value that you will direct at least some of your paid traffic to.

There are two phases of content that you need to consider:

1. Content for your open public audiences on social media that will lead them to join your private permission-based audience.
2. Content for your private permission-based audience that will lead them to buy.

Whatever content you produce, remember that you need to post with a purpose. Each piece of content that you post should be planned, and should be congruent with the overall message that you want to convey for the week.

The easiest way to keep track of this is to create a promotional calendar. On the calendar for the week, list the key 1 or 2 promos that you will do for that week.

Then, plan the content that you will produce for the week to go along with your promotions. This allows you to be congruent across all your social media marketing channels, your email list, and your blog.

5. Put Your Follow Up & Engagement Practices In Place

One of the biggest mistakes that many online marketers make is to throw out a bunch of content in a one-way flow of information. Remember that the reason that people come to social media is to socialize.

This implies a 2-way flow of communication. And, if you make individual, one-on-one contact with people, you need a plan in place to follow up with them, individually. You might even need some tools to help you manage this ongoing communication.

So, what kinds of things can you do to build robust, 2-way engagement with your audience?

In social media, in particular, engagement happens when you like, share, or comment on your followers posts. With your email list, you invite people to reply to your emails. On your blog, your invite people to comment on your blog post. With Facebook Messenger, you can build in prompts to start conversations.

Here are some of the kinds of things you can talk about:

1. Start or continue the conversation based on a post.
2. Give a compliment on a follower’s post.
3. Share a followers’ post, along with your own comments about why it is great.
4. Congratulate a follower when they post something they’re excited about.
5. etc.

As you can guess, the opportunities to turn communication into a 2-way stream are nearly endless.

Ready For Paid Traffic Now?

So, once you’ve complete the 5 steps I’ve talked about, are you ready to drive paid traffic?

Well, sorta…

Remember that these 5 steps are the foundation. And the paid traffic is like the roof. There’s a lot to learn about how to properly construct a roof, just like there’s a lot to learn about how to correctly drive paid traffic.

If you want to use paid traffic to build your audience and generate leads for your home business, Facebook ads are a great place to start.

And there you have it! You now know the 5 CRITICAL steps you need to complete before you start driving any kind of paid traffic.

Did This Help You? If so, it would be awesome if you hit the Follow button below, so you get an update when I publish my next story.

See also:

Start Here…

5 Online Entrepreneur Types