Nick’s Traffic Tricks

Tidying up my hard drive was an experience. Not just the hundreds – maybe thousands – of files generated over the past couple of years but also the incredible numbers of downloaded ebooks and free articles on generating traffic.

It made me think about traffic generators and how we all struggle to get to the top of the dog pile. Oh wait, bad choice – Dogpile being a search engine. Great name. But I digress. The struggle is to get to the top of the search engines. Hmm, getting to the top of the dog pile might be an appropriate reference after all.

There is a lesson to be learned in the Dogpile/Google comparison. Google became so popular that the word has been absorbed into the vernacular and even in movies and on television, actors say things like, “I googled that.” No one ever says, “I dogpiled that.” Or if they did, an entirely different connotation is conjured.

Every one of the ebooks and articles on my hard drive are on thousands of other hard drives. Every one of these bits of wisdom has been read (or at least available to be read) by all my competitors.

Imagine 1,000 marketers all implementing the same techniques according to the information in these ebooks. All our materials will be created equally so which one of us races to the top of Google first?

How do you get to stand out from the crowd? There are three immediate ways that come to mind that will make your efforts the better traffic generator:

• Absorb the information you read and before implementing the technique, think about it and think about added value. How can you take it one step farther than everyone else who is reading the same advice?For instance, when you hear that content is king, don’t just stuff your site with blather and think that you have content. Give your reader real meat not warmed over spun versions of weak badly written articles.
• Be original. When you read the advice, much of it comes from gurus and gurus in the making who are into selling tools and techniques on internet marketing. Being human, we try to pattern ourselves after winners. But what happens when we pattern ourselves after the advice of internet marketers? Oops, we try to be internet marketing gurus ourselves.While we have to understand how to market in the internet, what we are trying to market should be our personal area of expertise or interest. Putting it another way, what we need to take from the advice is how to sell online not how to sell internet marketing online.
• The third way is to actually read the advice that you have stashed on your hard drive.Seriously, how many of those ebooks have you really read? Or did you skim the headlines and set it aside for when you have time?