In last weeks post I discussed a website case study about a site that was very general in nature, and this week I want to continue with this study. If you missed the post then you can click here: Affiliate Marketing Website Case Study.
When you further dissect that site you will notice that most of it’s traffic is not free SEO traffic, and in fact a large amount of it is paid traffic from media buys.
This site actually had an ad on a large news site, I think it was CNN from memory, and must have been getting a huge amount of traffic, and what’s more one can only assume it was working to be advertising on such a busy site.
So what I want to talk about today is alternative traffic sources, being Media Buys.
There are a number of huge ad networks that you can use, a few are BuySellAds and Traffic Junky, theses sites provide a service for you to locate relevant sites for you to place your banner on, of which you pay for the clicks/impressions. The key is target traffic that is most relevant for your niche and track things carefuly.
I’m not a pro at this by any means, but from doing a fair bit of research into this and reverse engineering sites like the one I discussed in the last post, I can see the huge potential for this as another traffic source.
Whenever paying for your traffic it’s important to test and track so you know if it’s working for you, and improve things if need be.
Another important thing to do is check the demographics and other stats for a site before jumping in an slapping your banner up. To do this you can got to Compete and Quantcast, which provide valuable insight into a sites statistics for you to review.
It really is important to focus on conversions when you are doing anything with websites, but especially when you are paying for the traffic. With that said I would not buy traffic through media channels like this to send to pages that are reviews of products, as this is too specific for traffic of this nature.
What I’m going to be doing is sending this traffic to a new site I’m building now, where the pages target keywords that are more general in nature, such as “best care insurance” etc…this way the content will be more relevant to more of the traffic and will convert much better. I can also change the offer that I send traffic to at any stage aswell.
Short but sweet today folks,
Matt Carter
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Hey Matt
Question for you, is “How Stuff Works” a WP blog or an HTML site?
I Couldn’t work it out from the page source.
I find WP sites quite slow loading, not sure I’d want to send huge paid traffic to one.
Q2. Is there any more in your course on this model? IE. Focusing on 1 big multl category site and getting instant huge traffic by paid means?
I’d be really interested in that as I hate all this SEO stuff and find most of it a waste of time but I am just starting a magazine type site.
Any suggestions, replies, help all much appreciated. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Matt R.
Matt Carter Reply:
May 8th, 2011 at 11:46 am
Hi Matt
I do explain the concept of authority sites in my course but not exactly like this, as I don’t go into paid sources.
As for wordpress loading slow, I have not had that, and you need to be careful that its not the hosting that might be the slow load cause, usually for me it is the hosting.
Cheers
Matt
Joe Hughes Reply:
May 10th, 2011 at 12:27 am
Hey Matt,
make sure you’ve got WP Super Cache or something similar for your WP blog. It speeds sites up a lot. Oh and the other site is not a WP site from what I can see.
I’m not into media buying at all Matt so it will be interesting to see how you get on.
Joe Hughes
Ruth Martin @ Learn How to Play Keyboard Reply:
May 10th, 2011 at 1:43 am
I have been having a lot of trouble with my sites being slow, I will have to try the WP Super Cache. Thanks for the tip, Joe!
BTW Matt, I really like the new design for your Blog, hopefully one day I will be able to design my own custom pages too;)
Mark b Reply:
May 10th, 2011 at 9:45 pm
I to have experienced the slow loading site with word press
I have 2sites up both running off matts templates one loads slow and the other is snappy…so I’ll check hosting problems with the slow one as well as wp-cache
Good info
Thanks
Mark
Great as always, thanks very much Matt.
I Look forward to more posts / courses on 1. multi category sites, 2. getting paid traffic to them.
Thanks again and all the best
Matt R.
Hey Matt,
I have completed your free video coaching series. Currently I have set up a site that target one keyword. I am trying to rank for this keyword before adding another 2-3 keyword to sell the same product.
Do you think I should target all keywords for one product and build a complete website first ?
Can you give tips about building backlinks, I am trying forum signature, directory listing and blog comments. What is the most effective way to get results ? I see many offering SEO services which you can buy, so is it worth it ? How about using tools for backlinks ?
Please take a look at my site, and give honest review, that is it possible to make money, its really difficult as i feel lost as I look at my site. Thanks for your help.
Really good stuff.
Can’t think of another way to get high search ranking faster than a banner on a site alreay there.
Wow Matt, thought I got sent to the wrong site. Like the new blog look. I have heard of media buys, but haven’t tested them myself. It will be great to see how it works out for you.
Matt Carter Reply:
May 10th, 2011 at 8:08 am
Hey James
Yeah I am redoing my blog, not finished yet, should be done be end of day today!
Cheers
Matt
RE:”Whenever paying for your traffic it’s important to test and track so you know if it’s working for you, and improve things if need be.”
How about a post or two discussing in depth exactly how you
test and how you track and what software you use for each as
well as the metrics you follow.
Rob
Thanks for the tips on the paid ad network sites. I never heard of those two sites.
Hi Matt,
I get a fair amount of traffic to my products from media buys.
The conversion for me is around 100 click which costs around $30 – (profit is $70 less CB fees). SEO can only take you so far – but for testing offers Media buys are a great way to go.
Hey Matt
I almost couldn’t recognise your site! Quite a good change though! Today’s post is short but to the point. I like! 🙂
Cheers,
Lester
Good morning Matt. I’m still depending on SEO to drive traffic to my sites but I am interested in learning more about media buys. Funny, I was a braodcast Media Buyer in my previous life but have no idea how media buys online work.
Looking forward to more…
It would be good if you could do a post on media buying. It’s a world that I am not familiar with and seems capable of driving good traffic to a website
Media Buys could be the way to go when the money starts to flow in but for us struggling to earn a crust we have to rely on tried and tested free sources.
I’m still voting for free traffic sources. I think they are bottomless.
Bryan Reply:
May 10th, 2011 at 3:31 am
It would be ignorant to not scale to paid traffic when you have profitable niche and converting landing page. One isn’t necessarily better than the other. “Free traffic” isn’t really free anyway because it is at the cost of many man hours. Most the time to get faster results you then have to outsource, but even then you can’t expect overnight traffic.
I know some people that make 6-7 figures alone just with one paid traffic method, such as just using FB, MB’s, or CPV.
The important thing is to master one method, before going to the next.
Hey Matt,
Just wanted to say I love the new look of the blog.
It looks great!
Matt:
Thanks for the tips. I am just starting to use display ads to promote my products and you gave some great advise and resources.
Thanks again,
Buzz
Thanks Matt will consider it when I am through with your free traffic lesson tips.
Cheers!
Like the others I have not tried advertising but it is worth a try. I need to get my sales page converting better first.
Thanks for the tips
Paulie
thanks again for the great tips. I will try some of them out.
I agree with “I would not buy traffic through media channels like this to send to pages that are reviews of products, as this is too specific for traffic of this nature”. I do like the way you get free traffic.
Hi Matt, thanks for all the info, still got a lot to learn but am on our way. The only thing we’re having difficulty with is to have the screen for people to leave a comment. We’ve tried various methods. We’re using your theme from Rapid Profit Formula as our guide.
That’s a very interesting post Mat and got me thinking. Doing media buys could definitely increase traffic to our sites. However, going into this area should be properly studied as any mistake could lead to losing money. I hope you’ll doi a more thorough posts on this topic.
Thing media buy thing is new to me. But I agree with Bryan up there that it’s best to master one method, be good (and profitable) at it, then move on. For newbies like me, it’s especially exasperating to always play catch-up.
thanks man for giving me good info.
Hi Matt, I am working on S.E.O. and I´m starting to get better at it, but I will continue with this method until I crack it. Someone was asking about W.P. being slow, a lot depends on different things like lots of videos, but if you can get a web host that has gzip, this compresses the files and makes the site load a lot faster.
Yeah, me too..I had to type and look for your site 3 times until I agree that I got the right URL…lol
As usual, thanks for your post, really appreciate it. But I missed the previous case study though.
Thanks for posting the link here, I’m gonna go ahead to see what was it about. Thanks again!
Regards,
Dev
hi matt been following your guides for about two weeks or so now,all the infomation is the very best i have followed so far as only been working online for couple month,thanks for your work
all the best…….Simon n
hi matt as im following your work would you kindly sent me more on how to get more free traffic to my site
thanks matt,
simon n.
I was learning about Media buys about 4 years ago. A lot can change in 4 years, so taking another look would be wise.
Paid traffic that CONVERTS well is a no brainer, as long as your cash flow can support the lag between paying for the traffic and receiving your share.
Stephen
I have never used media buys, So now it got me thinking are these usually do-follow direct links back to your web site..
I was Just wondering about them passing link juice back to the web site.
Steve…
Matt,
I had not been to your blog for awhile and although I really like the green/blue this is a nice looking site.
As you said in the post you need to do tracking to see what performs. This is important all the time since you are spending time but when it comes to putting money on the table and time it is even more important. Advertising budgets can get consumed quickly if you are not careful. I remember mine jumping from a couple hundred a month to thousands in a month and the sales were about the same.
Just want to make sure newbies don’t get hurt.
I have been waiting for you to write this one Matt. It’s like SEO is getting harder and harder, especially if you doing everything by yourself.
Don’t you know of any other traffic sources besides SEO and media buys?
Keep us posted on the progress of your new site.
Love the new design.
Hi Matt,
Great post as usual!
I have one question. What do you think of Lijit?
You do not mention them in your post but I see that they are running an ad for your “under cabinette tv site”.
Would you mind sharing your thoughts about Lijit.
/ Chris from Sweden
Those are some great media sites you recommended Matt, checked them out, thanks!
It seems that having multiple traffic streams apart from just SEO and backlinks is a good idea, that way you can diversify your portfolio of visitors, and if you drop in the SERPs, you don’t lose all your potential clients!
How do you know when it is time to buy traffic. I do not want to throw money away.
Thanks