Where do I start?

by Kay, 3 July 2012

You might expect that “Where do I start?”  would be a newbie question, but it’s not uncommon among more seasoned business people too. There are so many different methods and strategies for building traffic that it can be very difficult to know where to start, and what to spend your time, efforts and money on.

One size doesn’t fit all

There are many courses which attempt to address this problem by selling a recipe or a blueprint so you have a step-by-step guide to follow. Week 1 – do this. Week 2 – do that. And so on. It’s a ‘one size fits all’ approach. But one recipe can never suit all sites and all personalities. What works for one person may not work for another. What is a great traffic-building method for one site may not work for another, and it may not work for you, the person who has to implement it. That’s why Kay’sTraffic.com is about ideas, not blueprints.

Here, you’ll find some ideas for building traffic. You don’t have to buy a course or follow any step-by-step instructions. If you don’t know where to start, then just start somewhere! Do you like writing? Then start by writing something and either posting it on your own site or think about article marketing. (You can use our tag cloud to search for the strategies you’re interested in.) If you don’t like writing, then outsource it to ScriptLance or similar, and concentrate on what you do like doing, such as building your own private network or standing in your local High Street giving out flyers to promote your site. What matters most is that you do a good job of whatever it is you’re doing to build traffic to your site.

A recipe locks you into doing things according to someone else’s ideas. But they have no idea what your skills are, what ingredients you can add to the mix, or what seasoning your site actually needs.  A recipe takes you step by step through a process but it might not be the right process for you, and you might not even like the taste at the end of it. Instead, it may be better for you to play to your strengths and concentrate on what you’re good at.

Don’t be a butterfly

A very typical newbie ‘strategy’ is to rush around trying this, that and the next thing. They have a stab at one thing, and it doesn’t seem to work very well, so they have a go at something else, and then something else. This is what I call butterfly marketing because there’s no focus, and no specialisation or effort to build up any expertise in any particular area. I thought that I’d ‘invented’ the term butterfly marketing but I see that Mike Filsaime has beaten me to it, although he’s selling something that can make you $63,249 in 24 hours. My idea of butterfly marketing is a bit different, apart from not being something I recommend.

For me, butterfly marketing is about dashing around trying anything you glimpse, landing on it for a few seconds, and never settling long enough to do even at least one thing well. Butterfly marketing is about following every latest fad or craze. It’s about going a few steps down every little side road you come across and glancing down every little path to see if it might be a short cut to your destination – but without ever actually persevering with any of them for more than those initial few steps. It may sound boring, but sometimes you’ll get to your destination quicker if you stay on the main road.

Choose a strategy and master it

So, where do you start? Well, I would say to choose one particular traffic building strategy and stick to it for a while until you become an expert at it. That’s not to say you should only do one thing. But you can concentrate on one strategy, whilst dabbling with some others in the background. The main thing is to build up your expertise in something. Be a master at something; whether it’s PPC, writing press releases, or SEO, it’s gotta be better than being a jack-of-all-trades with no real in-depth knowledge of anything.

How do you choose which strategy to concentrate on? As I said, play to your strengths. If you enjoy hanging out on sites such as Twitter, Pinterest, and the like, then go for a strategy based on social media. If you like writing, then go for a strategy which uses that skill. If you’re a clever techie, then develop a product or app. Make your own recipe according to the ingredients and skills you have. Just like cooking, you need to learn techniques and hone your skills.

But you can’t learn everything all at once. If you train as a chef, one of the first things they teach you is knife skills. Only once you can handle a knife do they let you loose on killing crustaceans and making lobster bisque. Think of this in terms of a PPC campaign. Any idiot can spend money on AdWords, but it requires expertise to make a success of it. And that expertise doesn’t just happen. You have to earn your stripes by putting in the effort to learn. I’ll admit that AdWords confuses the heck out of me and once I spent $5 to earn $1 before I realised I was backing a loser and shut the campaign down.

Well, you can learn from your mistakes and I’ll pay a bit more attention before trying AdWords the next time.

Conclusion

To sum up, a lot of people don’t do anything at all because they don’t have an answer to this “Where do I start?” question. A lot of people flit around like butterflies, briefly landing on things before quickly moving off. Neither of those types are likely to succeed. You need a bit more determination than that. Make a plan, such as “I am going to learn about PPC this week” and then stick to it. Learn about your chosen subject. Explore it. Go over to the Experienced People forum and discuss it. But whatever you do, don’t drop it until you’ve given it a chance to work!