Secrets of Web Traffic Building
"the traffic motor" and other forgotten tricks of the trade are powerful business tools that do not rely on Big Tech, yet generate big returns
How can you help a new web site grow rapidly without spending a lot of money? Some friends are building a mainstream site that can replace YouTube (we need this!!), but Big Tech is not helping them. Many of my readers might be trying to promote ideas, businesses, websites or literally anything and have the same problem. Everyone wants more of whatever it is than you have right now and you don’t have a lot of money to spend. This could be sales for your business, web traffic or influence and the rules of the game are changing fast with cancel culture and social credit — people are being left in the dust as they get cancelled, shadow banned and worse. Because these techniques were developed before search engines and social media really became mainstream, they do not rely on Big Tech as a traffic source. Using them ensures you will become a real destination and a valuable part of your viewer’s/customer’s lives.
As for free traffic from search engines, social media and other Big Tech properties, you cannot rely on the people who fundamentally oppose what you stand for to help promote your things. Many times they want to destroy you and they won’t tell you, it’ll just happen. If you are being cancelled, you should listen to this article, it might seriously help you build your idea, business or web site.
Two weeks after President Trump won the 2016 election, one of our companies was permanently banned by Google’s Ad Sense, where we had been running for five years, for basically allowing some of our users to post positive stories about a political candidate. Google kept the $3000 they owed us and “returned it to the advertisers” on a technicality. After burning up 5m+ of our ad impressions. They did this to 200 other sites at the same time. Big Tech is like a rattlesnake. Never trust it and do not turn your back on it.
There are many techniques that don’t need Big Tech to grow traffic, but have been forgotten because people today all rely on the Big Guys for traffic since it’s “easy”. Of course, if you can get some free promotion from Big Tech…take it! I’m not saying don’t SEO…if it can help, you do it. However, you’ll also need to be mindful of “dirty tricks” that can be used to destroy your traffic.
So far, these web traffic building techniques have been used to:
Build a top 20 traffic web directory site that was acquired by Lycos (built for less than $300k in 1995 when web tools were non-existent, everything scratch built).
Build the #13 site on the internet at the time, the original Xoom.com which IPO’d, starting with nothing and using less than $10m (which was mostly spent on hardware). Compared to $100m for most IPO’s of that era.
Double the sales of Wine.com in one year with virtually no advertising spend.
Build Before It’s News from zero to 8m unique visits per month with zero marketing spend.
Get the Unseen private and secure communications system based in Iceland to breakeven with over 10,000 paying customers before it was destroyed by the Deep State (dirty tricks).
Others have had similar success with these methods, but you must focus on becoming a destination, not a colony. Control your destiny. When people wake up in the morning or when they are looking for what you have, they should go directly to your web site, not to a search engine who is loyal only to the highest bidder and won’t care if you go out of business when they send your user to your competitor’s site. Facebook encouraged businesses to send all their clients to Facebook because it was easy for the small business to reach their customers on Facebook. Once everyone had a Facebook account, they pulled the rug and now Facebook charges you to reach the very customers you handed to them. Outrageous!!!! Snakes!!!
Here are some of the rules I’ve found that helped me to build a destination internet site or business:
1. FREE is a very good price.
Giving things away for free drives a lot of traffic. Everyone does this and it’s obvious. But it’s still one of the most powerful marketing tools ever invented and new examples come up all the time. Never underestimate FREE.
(The late Tom Peterson who owned appliance stores in Portland Oregon used to say this in late night TV ads. This saying outlasted the man and his business, it’s pure genius!)
The Tom Peterson wrist watch was given away for free when you bought an appliance from Tom and it’s now a collectible. Kurt Cobain, lead singer for Nirvana, wore one. What can you give people that is incredibly valuable to your users, but costs you almost nothing? That is a WIN-WIN.
2. You can do it all yourself
-but-
You can do it faster, bigger and better if others come to help.
What sounds better; a one-man-band or a symphony orchestra? If you can get your users/viewers to help, it can be amazing and many will want to help for free. If you can pay a little, you’ll get even more help. Don’t be an island, be an army.
3. Be a destination, not a colony
Never become a big tech colony. Ever. If you rely on Big Tech, it’s only a matter of time before there is a “rug pull” and you are left high and dry, or they start charging you a lot of money. Treasure your independence and your users/customers will also treasure you. Always maintain a direct relationship with your audience/customers to the extent you can.
This video, “The Saint of Second Chances” will show you the power of fandom and a bit of how innovative marketing techniques were successfully used in professional baseball — it’s a touching personal story as well. I recommend it and think you will enjoy it.
4. Test, then invest
Never waste money. Wasting money is a sin. Someone traded their virtue for the money you are spending, use it wisely and show some respect — you might wish you had the money you wasted in the future. Take good care of your customers and users, they are your family.
5. Two days are a trend
Never, ever waste time. Make decisions based on hard data and make these decisions as soon as you have the information. Wasting time is a bigger sin than wasting money. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time. If something is not working, stop spending time and money on it immediately. If something works, figure out why and do more of that.
6. Focus your mind (a clean and clear mind)
Make your core message clear, make it attractive, repeat the message and get your customers and users to repeat it often, as well. With a clear goal and a Unique Selling Proposition that you can say in five words or less, everyone will pull the wagon in the same direction.
7. If it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed
Capture data everywhere you can. Tools are now so commonplace and free or cheap there is no excuse for doing it. Pay attention to these numbers, focusing on the KPI drivers for your business. Watch hourly and daily. Set alarms for things like broken pages/web sites. Watch your site like a hawk and listen carefully to customers.
The Traffic Motor Concept
This is a concept our team first developed at Point Communications and it channeled the inner Engineer inside me — we created it even before the term KPI (key performance indicators) came about. It’s an incredibly simple and very powerful concept which combines marginal analysis (daily percent growth) with exponential compounding . It gives you a tool to analyze on the back of an envelope how you are doing every day and it can help you achieve constant improvement. It’s so simple, everyone on your team will know your numbers and goals. The whole team will look for problems and solutions.
When you first start a gasoline engine, every cylinder needs to fire properly at the right time. To start, it gets a boost from the starter motor, spinning from nothing and then it’s a little bumpy when it first starts until it reaches running speed….just like your web site or business. There’s a flywheel, a circular weight attached to the driveshaft on the engine, that helps maintain momentum and smooths out the motion. The Traffic Motor I’m talking about is similar in that once it functions well, your website or business will “maintain speed” on it’s own. Then you can concentrate on making it go faster by better tuning, adding new features or adding more inputs (fuel).
Exponential Compounding is the Secret
The first thing you must understand is the power of compounding. Web site traffic grows exponentially, it compounds and grows on itself. You could say it’s biological. Measure your Key Performance Indicators (web visits, pages, sales, etc) on a daily basis. If your site is lively and growing, there are things you can do to grow things consistently and speed things up. A tiny difference in daily improvement adds up fast over a year. Everything is “on the margin”, that is where the improvement is monitored. Is the screen green (up) or red (down) and how much. You must watch the daily total numbers growth RATES to know what is happening. This is the discipline you must instill in your team in everything you do. EVERY DAY MATTERS!!
To give an example, if you can grow your web traffic by 1% a day, in one year you will have grown 24X!!
Lets’ say you can only do 0.5% growth per day. After one year you will still have grown 5.5X!!
2% daily growth for a year is almost 1500X!!!
Here’s a chart of daily growth of 2.0% (blue), 1.5% (red), 1.0% (yellow), 0.75%, 0.5% and 0.25% after a year. A measly 1% can add up to a big number!
The first thing you notice is the huge difference once you can go over 1.0% daily growth — this should be your goal “I want to grow at least 1% every day”. This is very difficult for you to consistently achieve, but even if you can only do it for small percentage of the days in a year, it’ll still make a big difference as you can see from the graph. When you are starting out, you will have some 5% and 10% growth days, as you get key links from partners, or maybe a search engine kicked in and it’s possible you get some “blackbirds” too, so don’t lose faith if you have some bad and negative growth days. Pick yourself up and dust off, then get back to it. The next important thing is if you can move out to the right on the curve, say by spending on some promotion or adding a new traffic recirculation feature, you can move your base down the curve saving a lot of time. Money can save time…if you have it.
This system starts with daily improvement and measurement, feeding back results immediately so you don’t waste any time and maximize your growth, it moves you to a higher curve and further down the curve (to a higher level) as well. Keep in mind you will encounter seasonality and even weekly variation. Compare like days (e.g. Mondays to Mondays) and always compare to the previous day and month ago as well. Weekends typically have 50% of the traffic of a week day. Mondays are slower than Tuesdays and of course if some big disaster hits, that’s going to have an effect, as well. Keep your own spreadsheet so you can track day by day and do “what if” projection models for new recirculation or promotion ideas.
The best way I have found to visualize your site/business is the control volume concept and it works well when applied to the daily compounding model. It’s easy to track everything coming in and going out:
Draw a box around your website or business (like I did for the traffic motor, which we will build inside your website or business)
Add arrows for traffic coming in, a different arrow for each source, including things you pay for. You are going to carefully track traffic, user data and money on a daily basis. This is like high tech “barrel accounting”. Before double entry bookkeeping was created by the Venetians, this is how accounting was done and it works. All cash was thrown into the barrel and all expenses also came out of the barrel. Did the pile in the barrel go up or down (profit or loss)?
Add arrows out for traffic leaving and the money you collect from ads, sales or donations. Same as #2 above, but going out.
Don’t forget the key is Traffic Recirculation: email and other notifications to return people to your site (this is KEY) and suggested pages to visit next. The goal is to get as many page views from a visit as possible and to return visitor directly to your site….without paying the Big Tech vampires anymore than you must.
Let’s go through these one at a time:
Traffic IN. What are your traffic sources? There are many free sources of traffic, the best are referring links from other web sites. If you have something of interest to another site, you could propose a link exchange with the other site. We did this for several years until the ad model made web traffic a revenue generator. Here’s a list of traffic sources (a good tool like analytics can monitor performance…you will need to come up with the actual traffic ideas):
Direct - people typing in the URL in the browser or using a bookmark. A good and easy to spell and say name goes a long way.
Link exchange - be sure the exchange is fair and similarly trafficked or you could drain traffic from your site.
Membership list - daily emails bring loyal viewers back to your site. Most of the largest web properties like Facebook were built using email notifications. If you are not forming a direct email relationship with your users and relying on social media notifications you could get into trouble. Your membership email list is a key part of what you need to promote your site.
Content syndication with link back. Do not give all content away like this, probably no more than 20% will preserve your site’s integrity.
There are probably 20 or more other places you can pick up traffic that are beyond the scope of this article. Many very talented people are out there and they know more than I do about this, so do a bit of research.
Cash IN - This is the place to watch as it is money leaving your pocket.
Traffic OUT - You want this as low as possible, but all visits must come to an end. Carefully watch analytics for leaks of traffic. Dead pages, 404’s, etc. that get people to bail.
Cash OUT (Revenue) - You’ll get to this part after you have traffic. Focus on the traffic first, conversion to sale (goods, services or subscriptions) and advertising sales once your traffic motor is established. Make sure everything actually works and when you see the money hit the bank, that’s a good first step. You will want to constantly check and watch the revenue. I used to watch it hourly at Xoom.com and go running down the hall to find an engineer to fix things if they broke. Broken things cost money.