MBA2217 How to Spend Less on High Quality Traffic + Free Ride Friday

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show.

Where your business gets better every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm.

I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays we give away a lifetime membership to one of programs. We're giving away our course Easy Course to show you how to build your own online course in 30 days. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co or you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like right now, like today to see if you won. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode you will learn how to spend less on high quality traffic. Let's face it, if people are not visiting your website, learning about what you do, checking out your content, you will be invisible. People will ignore you. You won't be able to hit your sales goals. Traffic is incredibly important. Just like in real estate or in physical businesses. They say location, location, location. That's because you want Traffic to that location. Now, online, you want to drive traffic, you want to get people to come to your website so that you can build an audience, so that you can get them on their email list so you can then market to them, sell your products and services. You get it. But if you're on a limited budget and you don't have tons of cash to throw on social media ads like Facebook and Instagram, or banner ads, how can you get high quality traffic at a low cost? Well, I did the research for you so that you can maximize your dollar. I'm going to share with you three ways that I've tried that I've researched and seen high quality traffic to our sites at rock bottom prices right now. I found that these three ways can get you your target audience, to come to your site, to build your list, to build your brand, to build your business. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When it comes to getting traffic, a lot of people waste a lot of money on expensive ads. I know this firsthand because when I first started dabbling in paid advertising over a decade ago, I wasted a lot of money on experimenting. Most people can easily spend thousands of dollars on Facebook and Instagram ads and in return get low quality traffic that can cost well over a dollar, $2, $3 a click. That's pretty crazy. So my first strategy actually goes to a platform that is not really known for its advertising, but is actually pretty good for traffic, and that's Twitter. Now, when it comes to advertising and the advertising tools on Twitter, they're kind of in the stone age compared to something like Facebook. But because of that, not a lot of big brands and businesses utilize it. Therefore, the costs are a lot lower because there's less competition. So what do I mean by advertising on Twitter? Well, on Twitter they have a feature where it's called boosting a post. This is basically where Twitter gives your tweet exposure, makes it a promoted post. This gets your tweet in front of a lot of people. Now, in my experience, the best way to use this strategy is to have a short tweet. Not a thread, not a whole bunch of tweets together. One tweet. And the best combination is a bit of text, a link, and a video. In my opinion, the second best option is text, link and image. I often do this with a course maybe I'm teaching or a webinar I'm running, where I tease what it's all about. In the text, I give a link so they can register. And in the video, I usually put some context of what's in it for them, why they should actually care about what I'm talking about here on this tweet. I also like to caption my video so that way that even if they have the sound off, they can follow along with the video and see what it's all about. Once I put that tweet out, I then go into the settings of the tweet and choose to boost the tweet. I think now they call it promote the tweet. Either way, I'm basically putting some money behind it to get it more exposure. The last time I tried this I only put a budget of $100 and I got 210 clicks on the link plus a bunch of likes, a bunch of new followers, some comments, some questions, some DMS. It was great, but I was getting less than 50 cents a click. And this is high quality traffic because these are people that are interested in what I'm saying on the video and what it says on the text. And now they have more context and understand who I'm about and what I do when they go to my page, when they click the link. Now remember, if you have other ads running like Facebook ads, Instagram ads and you have retargeting now you can retarget them because they're on your site now you can serve them other retargeting ads even if you're not doing that. If you have a great converting page, especially if it's low hanging fruit, easy to opt in like a free webinar, you can get leads for less than a dollar again if you work on your landing page to convert well. So I'm a big, big fan of promoted tweets. That's strategy number one, strategy number two, TikTok ads. Now I am not on TikTok. I don't have it on my phone. It's not my platform of choice. But TikTok just this year started allowing people to advertise on their platform. And TikTok has a huge user base, over 1 billion active monthly users. That's pretty insane. And they are in the early days of their ads program where you can advertise on their platform. This is like doing Google Ads in the late 2000s or Facebook ads in 2014. It's cheap as chips. No one is there and it's really, really great traffic because like it or loath it, TikTok really knows their customers. They know the users, they know what they like, they know what they watch and they will serve your TikTok ad your TikTok video in your ad to the right people. Their targeting is probably one of the best in the market. So you're getting high quality traffic to your website when they click on your ad and you can get clicks for as low as 10 cents on TikTok. Now the one catch is that TikTok is a video platform, so whatever your ad is, it's got to be in video format. They'll still be able to click on a link and navigate to your site. But creating an ad is going to take a little effort because you got to create a video and it's got to be an engaging video if you want it to convert. Because TikTok's ads are very native looking, meaning sometimes people are not really sure if this is an ad or not, especially because it's so new, people are not even used to seeing ads. But with a bit of creativity you can create a great video ad and get low, low, low priced traffic. Now if you go to ads.TikTok.com you can create a free account and inside your account they have a bunch of tutorials and a lot of help along the way to show you how to use their ad network or I should say ad platform so that you can start running ads. It's actually pretty simple. A lot of it looks like what Facebook has done, but they just made it a bit easier. So don't worry, it's not rocket science. There's plenty of YouTube videos too out there that you can just follow along and build your own ad. Alright, that was my second strategy, my third strategy. This is a strategy I went all in on in 2022 and it's been incredible. It's a bit more work but it really pays off. And that's sponsoring newsletters. What I've done is I've looked at other creators in my market that have an audience that I want to get in front of, people that I want to serve. And I reach out to those creators and say, hey, do you have a newsletter? And if you do, can I sponsor it? Some of them might already have this set up for them. Some creators already have sponsors on their newsletters, meaning that they know exactly who, what you're talking about and they will give you a price and you just go ahead and give them the ad that you want to put in the newsletter. But some creators I found haven't even considered putting sponsors in their newsletter and they're like, oh, I never even considered that. How much are you willing to pay? And when you have a new creator who's selling advertisements. They're a lot more flexible in the price. But I found that you can get some really amazing traffic by sponsoring newsletters. I've sponsored newsletters for 400, 500, $600 with email lists of 40 and 50,000 people with open rates of 50 to 60%. So let's say it's 50% open rate. A great open rate, by the way of a list of 50,000 people, is 25,000 people will open. The actual email. From that, 10% will click. That's 2,500 clicks. I pay $400. That's about $6.25 per click. But remember, I pay $400, and that usually gets me three or four weeks of their newsletter. So I get three or four chances to get just as many clicks. So it ends up being about a dollar a click. Now, what I love about this is not the price per click, but the quality is incredible. This is coming as a recommendation, so to speak, from the creator, from the newsletter writer. You get in front of an audience that is willing to learn, that is hungry for more, and they click on your link. And oftentimes it results in at least a lead gen. If you're going and sending them to a lead magnet or a webinar where you can grab their email list and what happens is that you're at least getting an email subscriber. That's if your link goes to some sort of lead gen like a lead magnet or a webinar. This means I found that you can get an email subscriber for $2 or so. That's pretty inexpensive. And then once they're on your list, you can then nurture them, give them more value, and offer your products and services. Pretty sweet deal. Now, the reason why this is a little bit more work is, is not because it's hard to create the ad. The ad is easy. You can just give them some copy and an image and a link for them to add it to their newsletter. It's the relationships you have to build. It's the reaching out, it's the getting to know these creators and emailing them and negotiating back and forth, even maybe getting on calls. Now, I've done this manually over and over and over, and I have a system now, and it's easy for me to implement because I've built a system and I can get my team to help me out. But if you don't have a team and you don't have a system, there is another way. Convertka, the email marketing software, actually has an ARM where they sell sponsorships for their newsletter creators. That means you can reach out to Convertka and say, hey, I'd like to sponsor some newsletters that you host and they'll get you in touch with the creators. They get a cut from it, but you just pay one flat fee for the advertisement. They take the cut from the creator. Now they might have changed their pricing model a little bit, I don't know. I actually spoke to them about this about four or five months ago. But either way you have a resource that can get you in front of creators with great newsletters and they have all the data. They know exactly what that creator's open rates are, click through rates, all that kind of stuff, the size of their list. So you know you're getting in front of a good quality audience and getting good quality traffic.

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To wrap up today's lesson, I want to give you a bonus strategy. We talked about promoting your posts on Twitter TikTok ads and sponsoring newsletters. But here's one that's not gonna cost you anything to get traffic, and that is Reddit. Reddit is a great place to answer questions, help people out on the forums in your area of expertise. You can always sign off by giving your website link and saying, hey, if you wanna learn more about what I'm talking about here, I got some freebies on my website. For the most part, people on Reddit are okay with that, especially if you're giving value in answering people's questions and helping people out. So say for example, you are a great pianist and you're a piano te and you teach and sell piano lessons on your website. Just go to Reddit and answer questions of people who are trying to learn how to play the piano. What's the best piano to pick up? What about this keyboard? Do I need 88 keys or can I go with, you know, 66? Do weighted keys match, do weighted keys matter? All that stuff? There's tons of questions that beginners have about playing the piano and they're perfect for your audience. They're perfect potential customer because they they're trying to learn how to play the piano. They don't even know how to buy a piano yet. So by helping them out, answering questions and being a guide, you're providing value, but you're also showing them how they can learn more. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show, but today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. Cameron Garver. Cameron says, very refreshing. 5 stars. Love the podcast. A great way to set your mind right before the workday and get better every day. Thank you Cameron for that great review. Your mission is to email me over@omar00mba.net so I can hook you up with a lifetime membership to EZ course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course over at EasyCourse co. It retails for $500, but like Cameron, you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like right now to see if you want. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Anytime you're trying to drive traffic to your website, my advice is to drive traffic to a place where you can collect an email address. You're spending money on getting people to get your website, so give them something in exchange for joining your newsletter. Whether it's a template or a cheat sheet or some sort of lead magnet or even a video tutorial or workshop or a webinar, whatever it is, get their email address because you want to capitalize on the fact that hey, you've come to your website and you don't know if they're going to come back. The way you can make sure they do come back is to get their email so that you can then nurture them, give them more value via email. Send them offers later down the line. If you don't have a lead magnet yet. Something to offer those who visit your website in exchange for their email so they can join your list. Go to 100mba.net templates and we got free templates for lead magnets for you. Alright? So you can create your own cheat sheet, you can create your own workbook, you can create your own ebook checklist, whatever it might be. We have a template for you that you can create in Canva. We've made it for you so they make it easy that you don't have to worry about the design or the setup or the format or the best practices. We've done it for you so that you can just fill in the blanks, put your branding, put your information and you're done. Download a copy for yourself so that you can then offer it to your audience again. 100- MBA-NET templates is absolutely free. It's our way to show you that hey, get started. Grow that email list. We'll help you out with a template. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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