How A 7 Day Old Blog Attracted 500 Visitors And Over $1,000,000 In New Customers

Apply These Tips To Make More
From Your Site As Soon As Next Week

A week ago today I started a blog over at wordpress.  It's at http://mattgoffrey.wordpress.com

In that single week I've gotten 500 visitors to the blog, 50 people signed up to the mailing list, but more importantly 12 new consulting clients.  Because of how I'm paid, each of these should be worth $200,000 to me pretty easily if they follow my advice (and most do because of how I work with people).

So how did I do this?  How did such new blog ... and a free blog hosted on wordpress no less ... get traffic, email subscribers, and new business?

Community Versus Customers

If you're spending time on social media sites (facebook, twitter, quora, pinterest, google+, reddit ...etc) are you certain that the goal that you're actually after meshes with the activities that you're performing?

Know what you're after.  Below is a cartoon that expresses something important.  Ask yourself which you would prefer, then make sure your activities get you THAT.

So, which do you want?

6 Strategies for Market Dominance

If you're going to be in business, then you should know a painful fact.  The evolution of the internet means that in any market, there are 10 or fewer players that get the lion share of the traffic (and therefore sales) and then there is everyone else that struggles.

If you want to succeed in your business then you need to make sure you're one of the top big dogs.

That starts by leveraging the power of information and being a thought leader.

Strategy #1: Putting your information onto iTunes and then making sure you're listed at Smashbooks.com ... and linking to your iTunes information so that it gets good links.

Strategy #2 & 3: It also means putting your information on Amazon in both print and kindle formats.  And while you're at it, why not have your products listed through Amazon as well?  Amazon is easily the largest buyer search engine in the world and for that reason you should think of them as your partner in business.

Strategy #4:  And since you are working to be a thought leader in your market and your creating information, why not also turn that information into video and post to YouTube (which by the way is actually the second most used search engine in the world).  Now, when you do that, if you're smart, you'll do something known as "title stacking".  What that means is you'll structure your title so that you can stuff your keyword that you are targeting more than once.  "Costmetic Surgeon Matt Goffrey Explains Best Way To Find A Cosmetic Surgeon".  In that example, obviously I'm targeting the phrase "cosmetic surgeon."  Or how about "Copywriting expert Matt Goffrey teaches copywriting."

Once again, I'm stuffing the title of the video with the keyword I want more than once.  The next big secret is to look at the videos that are currently ranking well in YouTube for the keyphrase you want and see what tags they are using in their videos and use them in yours.  YouTube will then assume that your video and the already well ranking one should be listed together thus pulling your video up the rankings quickly, especially if you also link to your video from other sources.

Strategy #5: Did you know that if you're an adwords advertiser that you can change your campaigns from PPC to CPA?  In other words, you pay Google ONLY on a "per action" basis, such as by the sale.  It won't matter how many clicks your ad generates, only how many SALES.  By paying on a per sale basis you can reduce your risk, increase your "ad spend", and get many more sales.

Strategy #6: This strategy is extremely counter intuitive, but it works like crazy, especially if you are smart and following strategies 1-3 above.  This strategy involves so-called "micro payments."  These are payments often of just 99 cents.  You can sell an insane amount of your best information and because it's so cheap (but still not free) get a lot of people buying it.  Further, because people are still "buying" the information you are viewed as more of an expert than someone else who maybe has only a blog.  Now, if you get REALLY smart with this, you can have entire "courses" where each step of the course is 99 cents.  Each piece teaches something really good and actionable and teases the next step.  Since the next step is only 99 cents it becomes pretty easy to say yes to that.  There are entire companies pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars doing nothing but micro-payments through facebook and iTunes.

Putting all of these strategies to work in your business can dramatically help your business to grow.

How to get in front of 375 million customers

Most everyone has heard of iTunes.  Most are aware that iTunes sells both music and apps for the iphone, itouch, and ipad.

The thing is, Apple is quickly becoming the world's second largest seller of information behind only Amazon.  And with 375 million devices, this is a massive opportunity to get yourself in front of buyers in an area that currently has nearly zero competition.

You can get your information added to the global itunes library and made available for purchase.

Getting your information to the top of a search for it is really as simple as getting some links to it.  I like to use SmashBooks.com to get this started and from there a basic link building campaign can dramatically help get your information listed at the top of a search on iTunes.

And here's the thing.  The growth of the iPad means that a HUGE number of people search itunes for information FIRST.

If you have information that you sell, putting it on iTunes, as well as making it available for the Kindle (using kdp.amazon.com) is an extremely smart thing to do.

YouTube traffic

I talk a lot about giving good information and being a thought leader for your market.  YouTube is a big part of doing that.  Not only that, but tools such as the Tube Toolbox make building friends and followers easier which makes getting your message out to people in your market easier.

Now, Youtube should NOT be used to advertise your products, but instead to demonstrate your  industry/market/product knowledge.  It's a way for you to easily and VERY inexpensively (as in free) communicate with your market.

You can then tie your videos over to facebook, your site ... and in fact get people who are watching your videos to even click over to your site to look at products or services that you have.

Done correctly, Youtube can very easily be a massive traffic generator for your site.  More importantly, Youtube can be a massive SALES generator for your site.

Now here's the best part about Youtube ... it can dramatically help to increase your search rankings.  For one thing it gives you more pages on another site that are "yours" that you can get to rank well for specific key phrases.  Secondly, the search engines like seeing multimedia content and want to rank sites with multiple content types on its pages better.  This can be something that helps to bump you over and above your competition.

Are you using Youtube to it's full potential?  Do you know how to do this?

Contact me and we can talk about how to best use Youtube in your business.

And here's exactly what I was talking about

The venerable Harvard Business School has created an online Elevator Pitch Builder.  It comes complete with buzz words you can select and everything.

The thing is utterly worthless.

Folks, it's about being compelling.  Yes, some of the power words help with that, but your STORY is more important still.

What can you do for your prospects that you can say in just 30 seconds or so that will drive sufficient curiosity that they will want to know more?

No one ever bought anything in an elevator

I just absolutely love Seth Godin.  The title of this post is in fact a rip off of Seth's post. In that post he says "the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you're with wants to hear more even after the elevator ride is over."

Now let me ask you a question ... what can you say about your business, what situations or solutions do you have that are so compelling someone will want to know more?

What can you say that will make someone in an elevator with you want to hold the door while they ask you for your card, your mobile number, or something like that?

Your Market

Are you actually in the right business?

That is a question I often ask my clients.  As an example, prior to Starbucks, you could walk into almost convenience store and get 32 ounces of coffee for just 25 cents.

Enter the now widely known Starbucks who's "product" is coffee where a mere 16 ounces was 4 bucks.  That's because Starbucks wasn't in the coffee business, they were in the lifestyle business.

Take a look at the grocery store Whole Foods and you see the same thing.  The products that they sell are organic foods, and health supplements.  However Whole Foods is not now, nor have they ever been in the grocery store business.  Like Starbucks, Whole Foods is in the lifestyle business.

Now I am not at all saying that you have to be in the lifestyle business to be successful.  What I am saying is that if you want to struggle, if you want to be "price shopped" constantly and your prices driven down, then stay in whatever commodity business you are in.

Success comes from being in the business of giving your customers something they desire.  Success comes from being in a business that provides real solutions to real problems in some unique manner.

You want people to see you as the only person who can provide what they want, and/or can provide the solution to their problem.

Now doing this is actually surprisingly easy and it can be done with ANY kind of business no matter what you sell or who you sell it to.  However, it does require some slightly different work than you are currently doing.  You have to want to be a market leader ... a THOUGHT leader in your space.

Once that happens, you can charge premium prices.  You can have enviable profit margins.  You can take only the best customers while sending the crappy customers that do nothing but complain to just go away.

You can be the leader of your market ... but you have to be in the right business.  Are you?

This is just one of the great many things we can discuss when you get your free strategy session.  Simply click the "Free Strategy Session" link near the top of the page for details.

So what are you doing?

In this (actually pretty old) post from Seth Godin, he talks about the importance of making sure you are only trying to do one thing with any given web page.  Now here's the thing, while he gives 4 different things a web page can do, the truth is that you should be striving FIRST AND FOREMOST to getting someone to "get someone to give you their email address so you can build a relationship with them."

The reason for that is simple.  If you can build a relationship with your potential customers, they are much more likely to become not only paying customers, but they are also much more likely to spend more when they do it.  On top of it, they are more likely to spend money with you more often.

Building a relationship with your potential customers is so important that I consider it THE single most important activity of any business (no matter what is sold or to whom).

The most important thing

I'm pretty well known for my ability to get traffic.  What's interesting is that all too often I get asked how to generate the most traffic possible.  The truth is that too much traffic is nearly as bad as not enough.  Now before you scratch your head and wonder what I'm talking about, I could easily push so much traffic to any web site that I overload the servers.  However, if the people that make up the traffic don't want to see the site, don't care to see it, then what good has all of that traffic done?

The most important thing about traffic isn't getting it, it's knowing who you want to target.

Now here's the thing about that.  It isn't just targeting people that are interested in what you have to say or sell ... it's targeting people that are likely to be GREAT customers.

It's that old 80/20 rule.  If 80% of your revenue is going to come from only 20% of your customers, why not target ONLY the kinds of people that are 20%ers for your business?

The largest benefit to your business comes not from just getting more customers, it comes from getting more of the BEST KIND of customer.