The Two Different Types of Traffic | EP 767

The Two Different Types of Traffic

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, i’m David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And i’m Tim Strifler

00:38 David Blackmon: Today we’re going to talk about the various types of traffic to your website. Mainly the two types of traffic to your website. One of them is traffic you own and the other is traffic you don’t own. Tim why don’t you why don’t you explain what we mean when we say traffic you don’t own?

01:01 Tim Strifler: Yeah, so if you are getting traffic from google or traffic from facebook or traffic from tick tock or traffic from even like other websites, right? Those could be affiliate partners or just people that have linked to you, that’s all traffic you don’t own. Because that could be cut off at any time. Right, they could say you know, what we don’t like you and we’re going to ban you from our platform, and we’re going to remove the links, and you know whatever. Um and so that’s traffic you don’t own, and you can’t really like you can yes you can scale it like with ads you know, for example. And increase your ad spend stuff like that, but um you have to pay more money to do that. Right, and so you’re paying for someone else’s traffic, right?  And so traffic that you do own is traffic that you can increase whenever you want without paying. So for example is the biggest example is email. Right, you can send once, you have that email list you have those people on your list, you can reach them whenever you want without paying more money. You can’t get shut down you own that traffic and there’s other examples too like sms. Is big if you have people’s phone numbers like you know getting back to the the olden days of direct mail. Right that was if you have people’s addresses that was traffic that you did own, because you can reach those people whenever you wanted. Of course that’s more expensive stuff but in terms of online traffic um yeah i would say email and then sms are probably the two big ones. I don’t know if David, you can think of any other examples of traffic you own, but really you want to own your traffic as much as possible and you don’t want to only have traffic you own. Because how are you going to get more people on your email list if you don’t have other forms of traffic coming to you? But you want to have traffic that you do own as much as possible. So that you that you own it right no one can take that away from you you can increase it whenever you want by sending more emails.

03:08 David Blackmon: Absolutely yeah and i think one of the biggest uh, pitfalls where people you know kind of get stuck in, this you know um false sense of security where they think they are owning their traffic and stuff is social media. So a lot of people will build their entire businesses and brands on someone else’s platform. Yeah that they do, that they don’t even own. So you may have a huge massive instagram following or tick tock following and have millions of followers and stuff. First of all you don’t own that traffic. Instagram tick tock whatever platform you’re on owns that traffic they have their own algorithms and even if people like your stuff and say you know what “i love Tim Strifler and i want to just subscribe to Tim on this social platform” thinking you’re going to see everything that Tim posts. It is not going to happen. Um their algorithms are pretty screwed up in my opinion. Well they’re, they want to make money. So they’re in the business to make money, they’re not in the business to serve you know, us what we want. So i think that’s one of the biggest false sense of securities is like people put all their eggs in that social media basket and stuff. And they don’t even realize that they really need to have control and own. Their you know list of people that are you know fans super fans and stuff.

04:48 Tim Strifler: Yeah and so obviously if you fit that boat where your business is kind of built around, you know your huge instagram following or you’re you know you’re a youtuber or whatever. Don’t abandon that. Obviously, but what you should do is start figuring out some strategies to start having those people come and join your email list. And right you don’t just that doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time. And you have to give them a reason to do that, like “hey i’m going to be hosting some additional free content that’s not going to be posted anywhere else, and to do that come over here and sign up, and say that you want to”. You want to join. Right you know you can think of some pretty simple strategies to start getting those people to follow you on your email list or sms or both, and then that’s how you start converting that traffic from traffic you don’t own to traffic that you do own.

05:45 David Blackmon: Yeah and i think um you know email is the easiest, but you know you can use like if you’re a business that uses like a CRM you know. As long as you get the customer’s information outside of these social platforms or other websites and stuff, that’s the key. And that’s the trick and stuff is, to is to get there and then start nurturing and communicating with those people and stuff, in a totally different way. I accidentally looked up don’t know how it wasn’t because i learned it or took a course or somebody taught me, but i’ve always kind of had this intuition of like user acquisition was important. So i kind of dove off into email lists immediately right when we started you know, started the company and stuff. And it’s been huge for us you know, we do very very little paid advertising we probably could increase our business by doing paid advertising, but the majority of our traffic is you know organic. And then our email list is has has been super fantastic for us and stuff. So um i know Tim has a little bit more experience outside of of that he does both he’s got the email list and he does the paid traffic so he’s probably like triple killing it you know.

07:12 Tim Strifler: Yeah but my organic traffic is nothing compared to yours. You definitely have a huge leg up there, but yeah it’s. I think the bottom line is you want to have a diverse like flow of traffic coming from all different sides, and we’re going to be talking in a few episodes about the best ways to get website traffic and stuff. So we’ll expand on that. So definitely uh come back and and listen to that episode. But yeah i think bottom line is you want diversity, right? You don’t want just paid traffic, you don’t want just organic you don’t want just youtube you don’t want just instagram you know whatever you want as many different sources as possible. But what you don’t want to do is just start trying all of them at once, and not focusing on any. Focus on one first then expand and you know that’s definitely the way that you grow your traffic one at a time.

08:06 David Blackmon: Awesome, well tomorrow we’ve got another great topic the best way to get started creating content online until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

08:10 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye.