Internet Marketing Information and Resources

One of the ways I send targeted traffic to my site is via the traffic triangle. In very general terms it works like this…

• Write an article that links back to my site, and publish it in one of my blogs
• Post a tweet about the article on Twitter
• Ask a friends, colleagues and clients to retweet

Of course, it’s a little more involved than that. I’m not interested in sending random traffic to my site’s homepage. My goal is to generate targeted traffic for a specific landing page on my site.

The purpose of the landing page is to generate leads for a specific product or service. For example, let’s say I’m looking to pick up a new SEO client. I might create the following offer…

• A 3 month SEO campaign for £250 per month
• I’ll achieve a specific agreed SEO objective
• I’ll give a full refund if I don’t achieve the agreed objective

I then create a landing page based on this offer. At the bottom of the page I include a web form that allows prospective clients to indicate their interest by filling out the form to find out more.

I’ll then contact anybody who fills out the form.

What I now have to do is get people to visit the page. And not just anybody, but people interested in hiring an SEO guy to optimise their site.

The Traffic Triangle I outlined above says that I must now write an article and publish it on my Blog. This article should appeal to people interested in hiring an SEO guy.

The big mistake I see self-proclaimed web-marketers make is to write informational articles about SEO. This isn’t the right approach to take (in this situation), because it will deliver the wrong people to my landing page. A much more effective approach is to write an article that explains how to go about employing an SEO guy.

Naturally, the article must be compelling to my target market, and has to convey an obvious benefit. In this case, I’m offering a low-cost way to get achieve a specific SEO objective. So the article should be designed to appeal to this type of prospect. For example, it might be headed “5 ways to save thousands on Search Engine Optimisation”

The article can then disclose 5 ways, one of which is to take advantage of exactly the sort of offer described on my landing page.

It’s important to understand the purpose of the article. It isn’t to sell my service. Instead, it’s purpose is to filter out people unlikely to be interested in my offer. Put another way, the article is a targeting tool.

Once the article is in place, I need to find ways to send visitors to the article. There are numerous ways I can do this. For example, I might use some of these 66 ways to get visitors to my site.

In the case of the Traffic Triangle, I’ll use Twitter as a way to generate traffic. I can do that by simply tweeting about the article. For example, I might say…

5 ways to save thousands on Search Engine Optimisation (#SEO): http://link-to-article

NOTE: I’ve placed a hash (#) character in front of the keyword ‘SEO’. This ensures the tweet shows up in prepared keyword searches, such as custom columns in Twitter utilities such as TweetDeck.

This tweet will appear in searches for ‘SEO’ and ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It will appear for as little as a few minutes though to as much as half an hour. It depends on the amount of activity there is at the time I post.

As you can see, a single tweet simply isn’t enough to achieve the result I’m looking for.

As I’m keen to ensure plenty of people get the chance to see my tweet, I’ll ask friends, colleagues and clients to retweet my tweet. This ensures the tweet gets a much wider circulation.

Each of the people who retweets sends my tweet to their followers. This has 3 benefits…

1. A wider group of people get to see my tweet – people who aren’t currently aware of me
2. The tweet lives on, allowing more people to find it through Twitter’s own search tools
3. The tweet lives on, increasing the chance that somebody unknown to me will retweet it (i.e. organic retweets)

I may also pick up extra followers as a result, thus increasing the chance of getting organic retweets in future.

As you can see, the combination of a landing page, Blog article and Twitter make for a powerful traffic generation tool.