IF I WAS STARTING AGAIN TODAY FROM ZERO, HERE’S WHAT I’D DO TO GET TRAFFIC
When I launch something right now, like an event on viral content — I have quite a few people I owe my success to.
The world’s largest tribute to Harambe the gorilla, and to a Facebook group dedicated to the best new techniques for getting traffic and writing great copy. I have a community on my email lists, Facebook connections, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn connections to broadcast it too.
It’s a great privilege and an asset I’ve built since I started speaking publicly around the world.
However, many of you reading this are earlier on your journey, and as I’ve been asked this a lot recently, I thought I’d get it on paper once and for all what I’d do if I had to start again with no contacts/social community:
1. Go to a few networking events for whatever niche I’m looking to work in, and ask if I can add the on Facebook and LinkedIn. Once I had 300 or so of those, I’d use the built-in algorithms on both to add 50 new people each day on the platforms of both. Now I’d have an audience for my first posts.
2. Follow the hashtags of conferences relevant to my niche and sit there and follow everyone on Twitter/Instagram using the conference hashtag (i.e. very engaged user, likely to follow back). Expert level= pretend you’re at the conference “let’s meet for coffee” then somehow keep missing them, and re-arrange a meeting for after the conference to chat about (make sure they’ll be interested in X).
3. Lots of public speaking with my Twitter handle on each slide so people tweet @ and follow me, then collect their emails after.
4. Spend an afternoon researching all the Facebook and Slack groups I could join to reach relevant people. There’s so much easy traffic in groups like this, and the types of people in these groups are often early-adopted (or people who want distraction so they don’t have to do any work) so they are waiting for a product like yours to try out and get their opinion into the wild on.
5. Join a subreddit relevant to my niche and do an AMA at around 2pm GMT (peak Reddit time) and see if people have interesting questions about my niche. In general, text posts are better than links in Reddit- much more likely to hit the front page of the subreddit and Redditors hate clicking out and leaving Reddit, especially for Redditors. Redditors in general hate leaving Reddit.
6. Start a Facebook group around my niche. Have this as my flagship “community” that I spend each day working on. Begin by adding close friends in my niche, then grow it through competitions and having amazing content every. single. day.
Would be best to start this as a partnership with someone else, and double the great content each day. Such an under-rated traffic device. It took me three years to get to less than 2,500 friends, and six weeks to get to 4,000 group members in my “Traffic and Copy” group I launched last year. (It’s now at over 21,000 members).
I do posts about how to get traffic, my friend Charlie Price writes about copy.
We have members who are in startups, in marketing, and in copywriting, so it’s a nice Venn diagram of useful advice.
We’ve also been very strict about the types of posts allowed in the group, meaning no links (Facebook shows these posts to much less people) and as many helpful text or picture posts as possible.
7. Use Instagress or Kickstagram to grow Instagram on autopilot. Use later.com to automatically send it a month’s worth of posts (inspiring quotes created using Canva.com will do until you work out exactly what you want to do with the account)
8. Learn how to do Facebook ads to get regular traffic to a good landing page for conversions, even at 0.03 cents a click.
9. Presuming I was creating content, would spend to get someone to do a SEO checkover on my site to get the basics, then to understand the basics of ranking and keywords and which keywords to target. Then simultaneously dump traffic, social shares, and comments on those pages to help them rank (SEO wizards don’t kill me for that last one, I know there’s more to it that that).
10. Do “contra deals” with key partners i.e. people I want to blast out to their email lists with I’d offer free consultancy/advice/blog posts to to get my product/service to a wide amount of people overnight.
Always be thinking of partnerships that mutually work so you’re not doing all the work pushing a boulder up the hill. My first company I started with Lewis Flude, my first book on growth hacking I co-wrote with Austen Allred, my first proper Facebook group I started with Charlie Price, etc.
All the successful people are all about partnerships and helping each other out. It’s something that I didn’t even realise business people did, having lived in England/Europe my whole life. America is so warm. I’ve even started hugging people hello back here in England!
These things take time. There are some shortcuts, but the most powerful methods, like partnering for joint launches with powerful people, will require time and money, as well as real-life meetings.
The upside is the return is well worth the team, and partying with these people (more people than you’d think love to party after events/conferences) is a lot of fun. You’ll be building your close network in no time.
What would be your tips for someone starting out?
