How to Own Your Traffic and Transform Your Business
2 Feb 2026 · 9 min
This podcast excerpt explains a buyer-focused framework for acquiring businesses with emphasis on purchasing "media" assets to gain owned, zero-dollar traffic instead of renting paid advertising. The speaker defines media as any asset that has aggregated the attention of an ideal customer profile and lists seven subcategories (groups, social media, SEO-ranked pages, lists, products, intellectual property such as books, and shows/trade expos), arguing ownership gives exclusive access and resilience against privacy-driven ad-targeting changes.
Chapters
So as we get here into finding businesses to buy, remember the categories we talked about? Competitors, media teams and systems and equipment, resources, that kind of stuff, products and services, and also recurring revenue, supply and distribution chain and ip. So those were categories that we talked about. One of those categories that I'd like to break down for you a little bit more is media. Media is probably the most misunderstood of all the categories. All, all it really is is media is any asset or any company that has aggregated the interest and the attention, excuse me, and the eyeballs of your ideal customer. So media is somebody that's already taken the time to build a group of people, a list, a following, viewers, whatever your listeners, whatever you want to think about, their subscribers that have an interest in the kinds of things that you're selling. So we're looking for people, people that already aggregated that, that got a group of people who are interested in whatever thing we have to sell. So they might be directly interested in it and in market for it, or they might just be our ideal customer profile. So I say media is anyone that's aggregated the attention and eyeballs of our ICP of our ideal customer profile. So diving into media a little bit more, we'll talk about Z dot dollar zero traffic. Because as you will find when you're an owner of the media that is providing you with the leads that are going to hopefully turn into sales, you're in a superior, a vastly superior position than you would be if you were trying to buy traffic. So I like to say in real estate, it's better to own, right? Own, don't rent. It's the same thing with traffic. When we are paying advertising to Facebook and Instagram and Google and all of the other places that we are paying to have our ads exposed to a group of people who are consuming whatever media we're paying to be on, that's great. But you know what's even better is if you actually owned that media to start with. So I doubt, depending on who you are, that it's likely that you're going to be the sole owner of Google or Facebook anytime soon. Although I certainly hope that you will be. And if you do, please invite me over for coffee. But it's much more likely that on those big platforms you're going to continue to buy advertising and that's how you're going to generate leads and customers. The challenge with that is that particularly with a lot of the changes that are going on, the kind of the feeling out there in the world is that it's Very privacy focused. And so we've seen changes to iOS, the Apple platform recently, we've seen changes in Facebook's policies, in Google's policies, there's the death of the cookie. All of these things that are really pressuring, particularly GDRP and a lot of privacy laws. I want to say there's 23 states in the United States right now, I think I read recently, that have privacy laws that are either pending or have been enacted. And the other states are all working on following that. That privacy and the ability for us to get our messages out in front of our ideal audience is going to be more and more difficult. So I know people that were paying 500,000, a million, $2 million a month to run Facebook ads that have completely slashed to zero their entire ad budget because they can't make, they can't make a profitable ad to return on ad spend ratio. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that a lot of the targeting options that they used to have have gone away, but the prices of those ads have stayed the same. Now I suspect that the platforms that are charging the same prices that they charged before for much, much, much less targeted ads will ultimately have to adjust that pricing down as more and more people leave those platforms. That hasn't happened yet and we'll see really what happens with that. But here's the way to get around all of that and around maybe you've got a product that they don't. Maybe you've got a weight loss product or a health supplement or something like that, a self defense product that the political campaign to run that those platforms just won't let you advertise at all. So they're making decisions about what shows up to their customers. They're making decisions based on what they feel a good user experience is. But the truth is that a lot of those customers do want those products that I just mentioned. And so how do those products, how do those customers get exposed to those products when they're not even allowed on the platforms that we're talking about? So the solution to all of that is to own your own media. When you own your own media, you get to decide who gets to see what, you get to communicate with those people directly and you get to control who else is, gets access to those people. Because if you're going out and you're renting ad space from Google or Facebook or LinkedIn or TikTok or somebody like that, you are literally in a bid process with everyone else who would also like access to those eyeballs and that can tend to drive the prices up. It also means that all of your competitors have equal access to those people as long as they can afford it the same access that you do. And so if instead you would like to have sole access and exclusive access to those people, then you want to own the media yourself. So that's what we're going to talk about. And I call this Z dot or zero dollar traffic, because you don't have to pay for it because you already own it. So this is within the media category of the acquisition wheel. So this is a wheel within a wheel. And we'll talk about several of these categories. There are seven of them that I think are worth exploring. You'll probably think of more. And when you do, please reach out and share them with me. So the first category is groups. So there are groups of people that exist in lots of different places that have the same interest. We as human creatures crave social connectivity and we like to hang out with people that like the same kinds of things that we do. So groups are a very good way to find a collection of people who have the interests that are all shared that match your ideal customer profile. The second category would be social media. So just as we are all social creatures, that's why social media has done so well. And social media can be very, very segmented. So social media is another kind of place where you will find the collections of people that have the interests and affinity to your products and services. The next place would be SEO'd pages. So pages that already rank for the keywords that your ideal customer is looking for, particularly buyer keywords. So in market keywords, where somebody is looking for auto window glass repair shops, San Diego, that's a heck of a specific term. And that person has probably got a broken windshield and is looking for somebody to reach out to to get it fixed. So if we can find a website that already ranks for a specific search term like that, particularly if it's an in market buyer term, then we go out and we acquire that website. Now we have gained, we've captured the traffic that would otherwise be going there. We own that media that's present, that's generated the ability to rank on the search engine for those keywords. Now this is true across all categories and I'll go into depth, but it's not just Google because there's lots of search engines and it's not just the results that are all results. There are subcategories of results across Google and most search engine pages that we can look at so SEO'd pages for websites, videos, shopping products, all of those things are things that are worth looking at us acquiring. The next would be lists. So lists. And again, I'll go into great detail, but basically if you can get a list of people who have the interest in whatever it is that you're selling, that's a wonderful thing to have. The next would be products. So some products themselves come with fans and buyers and users, people that like those products. And so if you can acquire those products, you acquire the audience, people that likes those products or services. And when you do, you have a group of people who are likely to buy other related products. So we talk about BDA products. What are the products they're buying before, during and after the time that they're buying the product that you might acquire?
You can acquire a product and products.
Can be media because they have fans and followers and then intellectual property. So I think the easiest example here would be a book. Someone who is an author who's published a best selling book that has sold tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies and has raving fans. That book and the ability to sell and market that to people who are interested in that kind of thing, and the people who bought that book themselves are very, very valuable. And then last but not least would be shows. So, so shows would be anything from something like a podcast to a trade show. It could be a show that is aired over syndicated media. It could be a radio show, a talk show, a TV show, a trade show, an expo, all kinds of things. So all of these are $0 traffic sources and they're subcategories of media that have their own subcategories of kinds of assets that I call Z dot or $0 traffic assets that you can acquire. So as we go through this worksheet that is in your workbook, you'll be able to see I'm going to go through several categories and then you'll be able to use the blank worksheet to brainstorm ideas for even more categories as well as specific companies that you might want to acquire. So I'll see you in the next video and we'll talk about that.
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