How to choose the right traffic source

If you knew that articles were where you were going to be able to get all of your traction… Or guest blogs were where you were going to get all of your traction… Or Google+, or Facebook was where you were going to get all of your traction. So you could take what I just shared with you and you could say, “Okay, I’m going to go out there and become an expert on that one source of traffic.”

However, there is a preliminary stage that has to happen. You have to figure out which of these is going to work best for you. In the process of figuring out which one is best for you, you can try various traffic sources.

You will notice that I spoke of this second, not first. That’s because I wanted you to hear what I just said about specialization first, before I talk about testing different traffic sources. Because if you’re not careful, you’ll walk away from what I’m getting ready to say and say, “Okay, they said go out there and try 10 different traffic sources.”

So they don’t hear the part where I say “for a limited period of time.”

They try 10 different traffic sources, 10 years later they are still wallowing in 10 different traffic sources and have never become an expert. So they are not generating much traffic.

What I recommend you do is: choose any, some or all of these traffic sources that you want. And set up a tracking page for each of these.

For example, if you write an article that goes to EzineArticles, you submit it to a unique squeeze page, which has unique web form code, so you know exactly how many subscribers are generated each month from those articles.

You know exactly how many subscribers are generated each month from guest blogs.

You know exactly how many subscribers are generated from LinkedIn, from Facebook, from your affiliate program, from anywhere else.

You will then combine that with a time sheet. Call it a traffic time sheet. Every time you sit down to work in traffic, you log in to your traffic time sheet. You can do this in an Excel spreadsheet. You can do it with pencil and paper.

Here’s how to use it:

If you work on articles for 15 minutes, write “Articles – 15 minutes”.

Let’s say, for example, it’s April, so you have a spreadsheet for April. And it says, “Articles: 15 minutes. LinkedIn: 30 minutes.” You then spend another 20 minutes on Items, so you need to upgrade Items to 35 minutes.

At the end of the month you can see at a glance that you spent 200 minutes on the articles. You spent 100 minutes guest blogging. You spent 75 minutes on LinkedIn. You spent 95 minutes on Facebook. And so on.

You’ll then see how many subscribers you generated from each of those traffic sources. Do the math! For example:

You spent 75 minutes on Facebook and got 4 subscribers. That’s 1 subscriber every 18.5 minutes or so. For articles you get 10 subscribers for 200 minutes of work, that’s 1 subscriber for 20 minutes of work. And at the end of the month, you’ll be able to say “Okay, from one traffic source I get one subscriber for every 10 minutes of work. From one traffic source I get one subscriber for 20 minutes of work. From another traffic source I get 30 minutes of work.” minutes of work.”

What does this mean?

It means that if you’re going to continue to do the work in the future, you probably want to get subscribers from sources that don’t take as long to get. Or, what it means is that if you hire someone to do your work for you, they know what to do to make you more profitable. Let’s say you hire someone 10 hours a week to work for you. If you are going to pay them for 10 hours of work a week, you want them at the traffic source that will allow them to generate the most subscribers for you as quickly as possible.

The only way to know is with your spreadsheet.