Ramit Sethi breaks down his traffic strategy: spend 80% of effort on quality content, then promote through guest posts, press, and outreach to related sites. His wedding post about saving $333/month spread across relevant sites and filled his funnel. Webinars and email newsletters are key for acquiring subscribers.
Approximately 80%.
$333 a month.
Hi, everyone, this is Justin Premick at AWeber. I'm sitting down with customer Ramit Sethi of iwillteachytoberich.com and the new York Times best seller of the same name. Now, we're going to talk about email marketing right now. How did you do marketing for the blog and for the book and everything before you got into email?
Mostly, I spent 80% of my time trying to write really good content. And as I write really good content, what I would try to do is tell other people about it. So two steps. Write really good content and then tell people about it. For example, I wrote a post on weddings and the typical advice for weddings is just have a small wedding. Like, it's such a waste of money. But in reality, when it's our wedding, we want the biggest, the best, the best china, the best flowers. So what I pointed out was, let's be realistic about this. Let's acknowledge that it's going to be expensive. And let's also acknowledge that if you're 20 years old, to pay for the typical wedding, you need to be saving $333 a month. So people are like, what the hell? I'm not going to save that much. What I did was I wrote this post. It got a lot of attention. Then I went to the wedding sites and I said, hey, check this. And so it swept the whole wedding market and got people into the funnel.
Yeah. So you started reaching out to people that were in a similar industry to what you were writing about, at least, if not personal finance directly.
Yeah, so I did that. That was blogging. I started doing more and more press, so Wall Street Journal, New York Times, that kind of thing. And also doing some guest posts for other people.
Sure, yeah. And that's something we actually talk about. It's funny you mentioned that in our newsletter. Webinar. We do a webinar and email newsletters once a week. And one of the things we talk about is networking with other people who have sites, who have blogs offering the guest for them, looking at their sites, asking if you can reprint content, doing some things like that, as well as using article sites and things like that to get your content out there. And that's a great way, especially if you are just getting started. You don't have an email list yet to get some attention to you and eventually email subscribers.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what I found was that there are a lot of SEO tricks and all this stuff. And what I just found was that quite simply, my best traffic driver was writing a really good piece of content that people cared about. And often my longest posts take 12 to 15 hours to write, but when I write it, I will often get 50,000 or 100,000 visitors within 48 hours. Sure. So all these tricks and all that stuff, I think the massive thing you can do is just write really good content that people care about, whether it's video, blog, whatever. And if you write really good stuff and tell people about it, they will come.
