Make It Happen

We have an expression in our household. A mantra, if you will: Make. It. Happen. 

For years, we’ve been throwing around this phrase and using it to motivate our kids and ourselves. We care about getting started, about giving things a shot, and about valuing experience over perfectionism. Have we ever told you about the time I proposed to Debbie? Wow - that truly was a Make It Happen moment! 

Debbie and I had been dating throughout college. Since she was an international student from England, by the time graduation rolled around, the pressure was on to find a way to keep her in America. Either we were going to need to do long distance or Debbie and I needed to get married and continue building our life together! I knew Debbie was the woman that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, so I knew that this was a KEY Make It Happen moment for our relationship. 

So, I went full throttle into a crazy plan. I did my research, recruiting some of her close girlfriends to find out exactly what Debbie would want in a dream wedding. I bought a dress. Bought rings. I flew her Mum out from England. Then I got down on one knee and proposed.

Thank goodness - she said YES (Come on!) - and then I presented her with an envelope that contained an invitation to her own wedding, which I had planned to be just three days later. Can you imagine that?? Debbie was in for the wild adventure and we ended up getting married later that week. 

I share this because I want to empower you to go for it. Take the risks. Shoot your shots. If you’re diving into our content and materials, but you are still not putting these principles into practice for your brand, then we’ve failed you. 

We want you to ‘make it happen’ - don’t be afraid to get it wrong, just take the first step and start building that momentum. You’ve got this! 

Hacking Traffic 101: When to Start

Have you built a brand? A website? Got a lead magnet on your website homepage? Are you  starting to build out your email address and build up a warm audience? 

Perfect. Now it is time to start traffic hacking. 

The aim is that once you ‘make it happen’ and build the infrastructure of your brand, your business can start generating an audience by being discovered organically. Once you’re in motion and being discovered, you will literally start making money in your sleep. Just this morning Debbie and I have already passively made $2000 - why? Because we’ve learned the tools necessary to hack traffic. 

What Constitutes as Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is the ultimate aim here. Where paid traffic is driven by paid ads and promotions, organic traffic is the audience that genuinely and organically finds you. It is the audience who might be using Google to find a product or business service similar to yours and find you in the process. You want to be getting found, all the time, based on your specific industry niche.

At the end of the day, the more traffic you generate, the higher the value of your website. During the last year, Debbie and I haven’t paid for any traffic to our site, again, because we have learned the art of hacking traffic.

What Do I Need To Start Traffic Hacking

Let’s start with the basics: What is a ‘Hack’? The definition is ‘to gain of unauthorized access to data in a system or computer’. 

When we talk about traffic hacking, we’re not talking about illegal activity. Rather, this is the appropriate way to tap into a competitor’s audience and get your business in front of theirs. The process entails discovering who your direct competitors are, discovering where their traffic flows from, and intersecting their traffic to your page rather than theirs. Consider it more a process of diverting traffic, rather than ‘hacking’ it...

 Let’s dive into the three core steps you need to take in order to start traffic hacking:

1. You need to determine who your competitors are. 
2. You need to find out how they are getting traffic and then hack it. 
3. You need to create your cheat sheet.

Determine Your Competition

As long as the internet exists, there will always be a flow of traffic. You just need to work out where it is. The first step in this process is to determine your competition. Here are our golden rules of what NOT to do:

Do Not Use Your Own Mind.

This sounds crazy, but hear us out. If you’ve been developing your brand for a while, you might have a rough gauge of who your competitors are. You’ll be aware of similar products or services within your niche. You’ll have a rough idea of where you stand in relation to those brands.

However, when it comes to hacking traffic, we’re not interested in who your market competition is, instead, we’re concentrating on who your SEO competition is. In short: who ranks higher than you for a particular Google search.

Think of a keyword or phrase in your niche. Something that describes your business. Something that your audience might Google, in order to organically find your brand. Okay, got something in mind?

Now, Google that phrase. Where does your website currently rank? See those top searches in the highlighted box at the top of the search page. You’ll notice that these are ads, meaning that these are brands that are paying to be strategically placed at the top of that keyword search. These are not your organic competition. Your organic competitors are going to be the first three or four websites that rank under this ad box. 

Find Out Where The Traffic For Your Number One Competitor Is Coming From.

Now that you’ve identified your top competitor, it is time to investigate where their traffic flow comes from. For this, I use a tool called SEMrush.com. SEMrush has a monthly fee, but I highly recommend trying out their 7-day trial. It shouldn’t take you more than 7 days to get all of your research in order, anyway.

When you put the URL of your top competitor into SEMrush.com, the tool draws up an overview of their organic searches and their backlinks. It is an amazing and thorough examination of exactly what their organic traffic looks like. You are going to want to focus in on what keywords or phrases they have been using on their page that is bringing them the most web traffic.

Create a Cheat Sheet.

Build out a cheat sheet that lists every significant keyword on your competitor’s website. The most valuable keywords or phrases are those that are:

1. High in volume
2. Low in competition

Finding keywords that are low in the competition is crucial! If a word is low in competition it typically means that your competitors aren’t utilizing it much. This means that if you start to incorporate this word into your website, you’re going to start appealing to the Google algorithm and potentially ranking higher. 

Competition is ranked 0 - 10 (0.0 - 1.0) so if the competition is at a 0.5 then it is fairly hard but not impossible to beat. If it is at 0.8 then there is literally no point using the keyword since it is going to be SO competitive (and crowded out by websites that are using ads to target it!). 

Ideally, you want your cheat sheet to only list words with a competitive rating of 0.20 or less. 

Using Your Competition Research To Hack Traffic

But what is this all for, I hear you say! Good question. The reason behind this research is that you are strategically mapping out how best to use SEO and bolster your Google ranking. Goggle doesn’t take you to a website, it takes you to a specific page within a website. This means that you need to take your keyword and use it all over your specific page and make that page an authority for that particular keyword. 

For best in class SEO performance, try to use your keyword in all of the following places within your webpage:

• Page title 
• Page description 
• Menu
• You’ll notice that our Mayes Team website menu contains the word ‘Skoolie’ is the keyword that we were trying to go after! 
• H1 Title + H2 Titles 
• One of our main features of Maisey is that our text widgets tactfully use H2 titles, to help you place your keywords into the page in a way that makes sense. 
• First Sentence
• Image Alt Text
  

The trick to using keywords is to weave them into your copy in a way that feels as natural as possible. Google can tell when brands are trying to spam their pages with keywords. We also know that Google’s ranking values freshness. This means it is important to continuously update your website and make changes (tweaks to your images or copy) in order to improve your domain authority. Finally, be sure to get your website SSL certificate installed!

Building Your Look-Alike Audience

Have you ever viewed a product on a website? Maybe you’ve been browsing clothes. Maybe you added some to a cart, but never went through with the payment. Then, have you ever had these exact products appear as an ad on your Facebook or Instagram feed? Funny, huh?

Your online movement is being constantly tracked, in order that companies might be able to present the most appropriate products possible to you. The reason that brands you’ve been exploring can gather information about your browsing habits, is due to Pixel. 

Now, as a business, imagine how powerful it would be if you could gather information from every browser that came to your website, in order to target them later down the line. It would be great right? You know they are a warm audience because they’ve already shown interest in your website. Now, imagine that you could pull the information of a look-a-like audience - one with the exact same user habits as your current audience base, who hasn’t yet discovered your business. 

This is what a Pixel does. It finds audiences that are just like yours, and it puts your product in front of them. Here is what you need to do to install a Pixel into your website:

• Go to Facebook.
• Create a business manager profile for your business.
• Create a Pixel.
• Install this Pixel into your Maisey website.
• You’re going to manually install the Pixel code, and place this in the website header. Then go to your settings within Maisey, and edit your Header HTML with this Pixel code. Super simple.

Once you’ve done that, people are going to start visiting your website, and your Pixel is going to snatch and store that web-visitors information. You can then mirror this group: Mirror their demographic (their age, location, internet user habits) and get your business in front of an audience that has not yet discovered it. 

The beauty of this is that it means you never need to pay to put your business in front of cold leads ever again. Since this look-a-like audience is already warmed up to similar products, they are far more likely to make a purchase. It is perfect!

Coming In To Land

This has been a lot of information. But I cannot emphasize enough how learning the basics of traffic hacking is going to revolutionize your business.

Don’t be overwhelmed. 

Remember that all you need to do is to ‘Make It Happen’! 

You’ve got this. 

Looking for more inspiration for growing your business? Check out our blogs about How to Make Lead Magnet Landing Pages in Just Ten Minutes and How to Build A Product that Will Make You Over $100K in Online Business.