Building a business from scratch is wild.
Especially if you have no knowledge about marketing - like we had in the beginning.
Surely, building a good product is enough to make sales?
We learned this lesson after our first project: a real estate investing website that lets you compare properties by their return rates.
Honestly, while writing this, I still think it’s useful idea.
But we had no audience, no traffic and no idea how conversion works.
Guess how many sales we made: zero.
And even if we had understood conversion: that would have been like a powerful car without wheels.
Because you need traffic to drive and understand your conversions.
Let’s get practical to see what traffic and conversion are actually made of.
The Beauty of Traffic
Traffic = eyes on your offer
Let’s assume you have a linkable landing page or a gumroad page for your offer.
You can get traffic on that page from all sorts of sources:
link in your bio of your twitter account
link in your tweets: below a high performing single tweet
link in your tweets: within a thread, woven into the content
from google when people search for certain keywords (this is where SEO optimization comes in)
links on other websites that are related (guest posts, link lists, etc)
link in your free lead magnet that solves a problem and leads naturally to the next problem that your paid offer solves (Hormozi wisdom)
word of mouth: people share the link to your offer because they like it
affiliate links to your offer: again, this can be in free lead magnets of your affiliates, carrd pages, promoted on twitter, etc
link in auto DMs: you can say hi to new followers and send them a link to your offer or to your free lead magnet
link in your newsletter
link in places where your target group is. For instance, you can find a link to TweetHustler in many engagement groups
link to provide your offer as a solution to questions on quora, reddit, etc (this should be handled with care, people don’t like it when it’s too salesy)
Traffic plays a vital role in your business.
Because sales can only happen, when people know about your offer - which is exactly what traffic does.
Traffic makes people aware that your offer exists.
Pssst: getting traffic on twitter is easier than you think. Check this out.
And if it’s high quality traffic, then it makes your ideal target group aware that your offer exist.
Which leads us to the next step: conversion.
The Magic of Conversion
Conversion = seeing your offer to acting on it
Traffic and offer should be aligned for conversion to work.
What do I mean by that?
For instance, if you want to sell a fitness course (= your offer), but the traffic you get are people looking for knitting patterns, then my best guess is that your offer won’t convert.
Of course, someone who knits may also enjoy getting into shape. But it’s not what they’re looking for right now.
So this is the point of generating quality traffic. It gives you a chance to turn the eyes on your offer into actual sales.
But how to do it?
provide content that fits the needs of your ideal customer
provide solutions that fits their needs
make them feel understood
communicate the value of your offer
use copywriting and power words to make people want to check out your offer
provide a clear call-to-action (CTA) to your offer in your traffic sources
Where can you find conversion rates?
tweet impression to link click
profile view to link click
impression in google to link click
view of your landing page to buy now click
getting your free lead magnet to actually reading it
reading your free lead magnet to buy now click
getting your newsletter to opening and reading it
reading your newsletter to link click
In every conversion step, some people will fall through your sales funnel.
Meaning: the simpler your sales funnels, the more people end up seeing your offer and hopefully converting into customers.
It takes many iterations to get it right, but it’s satisfying to see when the conversion rates go up.
Like for our new website tweethustler.com:
It’s not that much traffic yet, but a 24.6% conversion rate is beautiful.
So all we need now is more traffic to increase the amount of people checking out tweethustler.com.
And then again fine tune the conversion rate from viewing the landing page to actually buying the software.
Action plan
identify your traffic sources
be creative to add more traffic sources
figure out the most efficient ones and double down on them before trying to fix the broken ones
increase your conversion rates using the above tips
Hope this helps :)
Have a nice weekend!
Cheers,
@prodHackers