Before we get stuck into traffic and where your ideal clients are hiding, there’s a really important mindset shift to make. Very often we see competitors and other business owners bragging their seemingly overnight success launching their six figure products, 10Xing their revenue and whatever. None of that happens without the grind. You have to be patient, you have to test things to find what works and do more of that. You have to be in the grind. That’s how you scale up to reach your goals. Got it? Good. Let’s move on.
Organic traffic and paid traffic
I’ve got this crazy idea. We all know the types of traffic - organic, earned and paid. Right? And then you’ve got searching and scrolling. Let’s park that a second to get back to my crazy idea, your organic traffic should be able to convert to enough sales to start feeding the beast which is paid traffic (if your traffic isn’t converting into sales, well that’s another post). Whoa, I’m just going to say that again...
Your organic traffic should fund your paid traffic
That’s the holly grail right there and that is how you build a scaleable business. I also very strongly believe that you should always be grinding. As in finding ways to generate organic and earned traffic. The grind never stops. And the catch is that it takes time, not only the time you put into it but it takes time for organic traffic to start working for you.
I’m going to put a focus on organic traffic for now. I feel it’s kind of important before we go any further that if you haven’t developed your ideal client avatar to the level of detail of knowing their blood type you should stop here and go do that. I get really hyped up about this, when someone asks me how to get their offer out there or in the market and they don’t know their ideal client back to front I can hit the roof. So if you haven’t done this, head back to my post on ‘3 ways nailing your niche will propel your sales’ and then come back to me when you’ve done the work.
Finding your congregation of ideal clients
This is the best way I can describe it. Ok, imagine you have an offer and you want people to know about it. Are you going to stand on the street and shout like one of those street vendors? No you’re not because you’ll be shouting to everyone but selling to no one. But now imagine that your ideal clients are Jewish, you’d head over to the Synagogue, if your ideal clients are Muslim - Mosque, Catholics - Church or maybe you’ll head to the Vatican. You then need to take your offer and place it in the middle of your congregation and you have traffic made up of your ideal clients.
I heard this analogy from Russel Brunson a while back, it was only recently when I was working with a client that it came in super handy as a way to explain to a super frustrated business owner who was in the grind but focussing and creating traffic instead of going to the where the traffic already is. You can fill your hours with busy work trying to get your brand out there with pointless ‘brand awareness’ campaigns. Look, marketing, organic traffic, all of this stuff can be hard so why make it harder? Get to know your ideal clients and go to where they congregate. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel but that’s why getting hyper specific on your ideal client avatar is so important.
Do your ideal clients hang out on Facebook? Good, now what pages do they follow, what brands do they like, what groups are they in? Do they listen to Podcasts? Ok, what podcasts do they listen to most? When do they listen to them? How? If they are in hunting mode, what’s their stomping ground? I mean do they search for reviews on YouTube, do they check out Google reviews, what is their MO? Are you starting to get the picture?
Power100 Challenge
So here’s my challenge to you. Think of 10 platforms or places where your ideal clients congregate and then find 10 people, groups, pages, channels whatever is relevant. I want you to join the group, follow the page, subscribe, like or whatever and start engaging. Gasp! That’s right, first of all by following other pages where your ideal clients already congregate you will start to notice the sort of content that gets engagement and starts conversations. You’ll start to get an idea of the types of problems they have, the way they talk and that means you can start conversations with your ideal clients where they are (remember that from the previous post about lead magnets and your path to profit?)
If you're thinking "Sian, this sounds like a lot of effort". Well it is. It’s the grind. There’s a way around it, you can throw money at the problem and get really good at ads but guess what, that’s also a lot of effort. And if you want your ideal clients to part with their hard earned cash for your products or services, don’t you owe it to them to get to know them really, really well?
Ok, back to the dream 100 list. While you are there engaging with your congregation you want to be adding value and at the same time and building your audience. I talk about adding value a lot, I just want to remind you and bring you back to the concept of marketing and acting from a position of generosity. If you genuinely want to serve your audience, your ideal clients, your congregation to the highest level you will show up to serve. Be generous with your advice, be generous with your time, be generous with your recommendations or referrals. You will become know as the go to person in your congregation.
You have one goal, traffic
Going back to Facebook, Instagram or whether you need to be on LinkedIn or have a podcast, get on Pinterest. Wherever your ideal clients hang out that’s where you need to be showing up. And it’s time to start upping your game. This takes a long time to build an audience and build a list but while you’re doing it you have one goal, one focus, that is TRAFFIC. When you do this and you show up where your audience are consistently magic does start to happen, you might get invited into be a guest on podcast, to do a talk at a summit or to email share with other people who are targeting the same audiences as you. When these things start to happen you’ll really build the momentum and eventually you’ll become unstoppable.
Do the things that your competitors aren’t willing to do, work at adding more value than anyone else and you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.
For the Dream 100 exercise, it’s easy to focus on the usual suspects like Facebook. But the more detail you put into your ideal client avatar the more opportunities you will find and it might surprise you. Maybe it’s a magazine, a membership organisation, maybe there’s some weird crazy niche thing you hadn’t heard of. I can’t tell you what this strategy will look like for your business, it looks different for everyone, what I can tell you is that the results are magical.
I was going through this exact exercise with a client last week which inspired me to write this post. The thing is by going through the ideal client avatar and in the process of talking about her congregation and meeting them where they are we had a lightbulb moment. We came up with a completely new way of delivering her service. I can’t say what it is right now but it’s a method of delivering the ‘what’ she does in a completely unique way that adds so much value and it will position her in a way to the competition out of the water.
Let’s recap. Work on your ideal client avatar to a level of detail that you never thought possible, work on your dream 100 list and then show up where your audiences are, being generous and adding more value than anyone else.
Your job isn’t to create the traffic, it’s already there. You don’t go to the market, you go to where your ideal clients already are.
Ready to grind?
