Ep 31 | How To Drive Traffic WITHOUT A Budget?

A very, very great question that has been brought up. As a matter of fact, I’m going to shout out to this person who brought out this question for me in our daily huddle. It is by Hugo Boimvaser.

What is the best way to get traffic to a site without a budget?

Let me set the expectation first. This is very, very important. The first expectation that I want you to actually have about traffic is that you need to actually invest in traffic to control the traffic that is going to your website. It doesn’t mean that if you don’t have a budget it’s basically the end of the world for you; I’m not trying to say that. I’m just telling you that if you want to get traffic right away and get quick results and see the data and basically know what’s happening within your site, it is very important that you invest in traffic.

There are ways where you can get traffic without a budget. But here goes to the second expectation, you need to invest a lot of time and effort. What you’re essentially doing is that you are trading your time which at the end of the day, time is equals to money for traffic and in order for you to get that kind of traffic. With what we call free traffic, it’s not always going to be a way where it’ll always work and it’s not going to be sustainable because you don’t get to control it. It is controlled by Google, Facebook, YouTube etc. Let me come back into that question, “I don’t have a budget, how can I get started?”  There are several ways for you to actually look into right out the gate. I’m going to talk about different scenarios right now regardless if it’s an e-commerce store, a digital publishing business where you own your digital products or you’re running affiliate traffic and email traffic.

Let me first set off the way that you can get traffic to your store without a budget. First thing is you can be basically guest posting. Now, what is guest posting? In a guest posting, you are going to be the article writer for a bigger blog or a bigger website where you get to actually have a bio box to link back to your website. There are a lot of websites out there right now in your specific niche and obviously in every single niche it’s very different. There are some authority article blogs or some authority sites here and there where you can guest post so you simply reach out to them. I tell you, every single large website that are in a specific niche always want people to write articles for them because they have the platform and they need article writers and it’s just free content for them to put on their site and they can actually invest a lot less in article writers. And there are people like you who are passionate in writing articles and the only thing that you ask in return is have a bio box where it links back to your e-commerce store, opt-in page or to your products that you are selling. That’s one way you can do it.

The other one is forum posting. I’m not telling you to actually go and spam forums. That’s not something you want to do especially if you a new account in a forum and you start spamming your links, your account will get suspended. Again, that’s why I keep telling you that you have to be in your niche. You have to be passionate about your niche because if a topic comes up in a forum that really resonate with you and you have a lot of information about it that you can actually share to public, people will start responding. And every single forum post will also have a bio box where you get to link back to your website at the same time.

Another great method is Reddit. I saw and read an article that was written in Reddit about six months ago. It was a person’s experience on buying a mattress online. He simply posted that in the minimalist channel inside Reddit and that post just went absolutely viral and it generated over six figures by simply having that post so Reddit is actually a very amazing forum. If you are active in Reddit and you are basically seeing a lot that you have been posting people will look up to you and love your feedback and you link it out boom, that’s it, traffic right there.

Another method is SEO. I’m not an SEO guru. In my entire career I never look into SEO because I just simply don’t understand it. I never really invest my time on acquiring knowledge for it because I value advertising more than SEO and I believe each person is very different. Let’s say that you are working with a limited budget and you can really look into SEO side. On the SEO side obviously you do meta text, linking in, linking out and all those other stuff. I don’t even know what they use but you can look into doing SEO and I bet you there are a lot of YouTube videos which talk about SEO best practices etc.

The second last option that you can have is giving content. It sucks in the beginning. I totally understand that. When you shoot a video about your specific niche or whatever product you have in the beginning you’re not going to get a lot of views. Maybe 50 views, 100 views but as time goes on, it will slowly keep adding up. The more content you have out in the market and in each content piece like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube you can actually link it back into your store and you can talk about it in these videos. I have to tell you in 2018, regardless of what businesses you’re running, whether local business, agency, ecommerce store, digital publishing, affiliate marketing any form of online business venture content is going to be the key. Video content to be more exact is going to be the key because that’s what people love to do. People want free stuff. The more content you give out, the more of an authority you are and the more people actually click on the link that is going to be on your page.

Again, like I said with all these routes it does take a lot of time and a lot of effort. If you can justify yourself on basically trading your time to do all these stuff then you can do it without a budget but technically you are still spending money because time is money. I have set this before in our daily huddle is that we all share one thing in common, we only have 24 hours. How you maximize your 24 hours is the way to succeed, right? For me, one hour is basically going to be like $5,000 to $10,000. Some people who work in a 9 to 5 job an hour only cost them $20. You can justify that and figure it out. It’s just like why do business owners or people fly private jet? Well, they flew private jet because they were able to justify that the three hours that they’re stuck in the airport and the driving time to the airport, the three hours going there and coming back; they can justify that if they pay extra to use private jet. They can buy back those three hours of time where they can be more productive. So, that’s what you have to look at and this is a mindset entrepreneur side of things that you really need to look into, “how much is your time really worth?” And determine if you really want to work on a limited budget or with no budget route or basically figuring out investment traffic which is Facebook, Google, YouTube etc. That’s the real truth about free traffic.

The last thing is really for people who have a product maybe a digital product, a DVD or some sort of product that you own. The last thing is really for people who have a product maybe a digital product, a DVD or some sort of product that you own. It’s very rare that if you’re drop shipping this will work but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t because when you’re scaling it that’s where you want it to move towards which is building out sales funnels. Let’s say if you’re having a digital product you can sell a digital product on Clickbank and guess what? You can go and cultivate affiliates to drive traffic for you and you give a commission away. That’s another really free form of traffic. Let me say this, I love affiliate traffic because for me, I don’t have to dish out any money. I just go out, find an affiliate, work out a relationship with them, give them a percentage of the sale that they can drive traffic to. They can send emails; they can be a media buyer. It can be all sorts of things where they actually direct the traffic back to your sales funnel and you basically only pay them when you acquire a sale. So that’s like the last resort especially if you own a product you definitely want to look at affiliate marketing

Another very common way if you’re having a limited budget especially in the email marketing and affiliate marketing space is what we call a swap. A swap is when you start to have an email list of like 10,000 subscribers then you find other people who also have 10,000 subscribers and say, “Hey let’s do a swap” where you email their offer and they email your offer and there’s no money exchange. It’s just pure swap list. That’s also something that doesn’t really require you to actually invest any money in and actually get that traffic.

Put in a 1 into the comment box if that helped you out. These are free traffic ideas that I can basically share right out the gate with you. A question:  “Do you do press release?” I have played around with press releases but I don’t really see that much of high quality traffic to be honest with you. I may be wrong. I only bought it a couple of times but I saw the attraction that I got it’s not as great. I hope that helped you out guys a lot and I hope that answered your question.

Let’s move on to the second question of the day by Abi. Abi said,

Hi Fred.
I tried creating my first ever Facebook Ads last Thursday while trying to create my pixel, I discovered that 2 separate pixels were created, main pixel and sub.

The main one was not active but sub-pixel was active. However, my ad could not be completed because there was a prompt that my tracking facebook pixel had not been created. Since last Thursday, I have tried in vain to correct this. I also realised that the active subpixel was giving the wrong data.,

I have tried to deactivate the account but have to stop because of the possible consequence of not being able to create any other account, according to Facebook. I tried creating another pixel with the hope of renaming it but the name of the old pixel keeps appearing and it could not be edited or deleted.
Please, what do you think I can do as I’m stuck and cannot move forward on lady Thursday.

Abi, I’m not sure where you found a sub pixel for Facebook. There’s only one pixel for Facebook and that’s it. There’s only one and there’s no such thing as a sub pixel. You may be looking at the wrong thing.

Here’s what you can do, go to business.facebook.com and create a business manager account and from there you can actually create another ad account. You use that new ad account and when you go and create a pixel you’ll be asked to only create one pixel and again only one pixel gets to show up on one ad account, so it’s always one ad account, one pixel. There’s no more than one pixel in there. I don’t know where your confusion actually comes in place. All the pixels are basically standardized except for the ID. There’s an ID for every single pixel that got assigned to an account so you want to look into that. Again, I never really heard of a sub pixel, I don’t know where you saw that. You go to you businesses manager and on the top left there are three horizontal lines which is the menu bar, click on it and you’ll see pixels. When you see pixels you’ll see all the information on there and on the top right I remember you can actually view the pixel and you copy that pixel code right into your website. That’s what I would suggest you to do and really take a look at that. Again, if you’re like really, really stuck on that get a business manager account, get a brand new account and start from scratch and go from there. That’s my suggestion to you. Use the Facebook pixel helper too. That really helps. You can use it to see if the ID matches with the ID that you have in your ad account. Thanks for reminding me that [inaudible 16:24] on that end.

The third question is by Kenny Howse. Kenny asked,

Hi Fred, Enjoying the daily huddle on catch up as I’m in UK. My question is – My Shopify Store is priced in GBP as Shopify won’t let me price in USD. If I want to sell in USA I suspect that customers will be put off as it’s not priced in Dollars. What would your advice be?

My advice is very simple. Get a currency converter app inside Shopify. I would encourage you to talk to the live chat agent in Shopify; they’ll recommend you what is the best one. That way you can showcase your store in USD or going back to GBP if you have people from United Kingdom. That’s what you have to do.

Next question is by Nadya Saltykova. Nadya asked,

Hi Fred, Thank you for Live session on Saturday! Your Daily Huddles are very powerful and helps me keep going everyday. I am thinking about introducing digital products through my email sequence, and have a question. When we create a new page, should it be visible on the store or only accessible when customer clicks on the link in my email? Also, on this page should link go the click bank product directly, or need to create opt-in page first? What would be your suggestions? Thank you

Nadia started actually having traffic. She wants to introduce digital products through her email sequence. She is basically asking if she needs to create a new page that is visible to her store. I believe that you already have an ecommerce business and you are trying to introduce digital products. If that’s the case I will not showcase that page for the affiliate offer on your store because it kind of derail people off a little bit. They don’t know why it is there. So, I won’t do that I will keep it in the back end.

Your other question is, should it only be accessible through links in my email? Absolutely you to do that and that’s the way for affiliate marketing.

Your next question is, on this page should link go the click bank product directly, or need to create opt-in page first? There are two sides of the answer to your question. The first answer that came into my mind was going directly to the Clickbank offer. The reason why I’m saying that is because you don’t really need an opt-in page because you already have that person’s email address. What’s the point of opting them in again and wasting the hustle and time on creating another opt-in page that’s going to redirect to a Clickbank offer?

However, the second side of the answer will be, well, are you trying to create a segment of your email list? Let’s say, they came through you entire email list through ecommerce products and then you say, “Well, I want to differentiate people who will be interested in my digital product for affiliates and physical products. If that’s the case then an opt-in page may make sense if you want to segment out your initial email list on who will be interested in digital products and keep selling them other digital products too. Basically not sell digital products to the people who don’t express interest. That’s something that you can do. That’s why I have like two answers. It depends on where are you at but based on what I can see where you are at and you’re just starting new, I would say direct link for now since you already have their email address so there’s technically no point for you to create another opt-in page unless if you’re going more advance on creating segmentations.

To our last question of the day, it’s by Larry Vanfau.

Hello Fred, I’m selling men apparels. You are always telling us to use website conversion for ads, but my ad image (which is an apparel picture) doesn’t respect the dimension of a website conversion ad. What do you advise me to do for that?
Thank you.

Great question, Larry. What you have to do is resize your image. The one I tell people to use but it doesn’t have a photo shop is canva.com. If you have photo shop, use photo shop. I would tell you as an online marketer and as a business owner if you have skill sets in photo shop, it’s going to help you so much. It will do a lot of stuff for you if you know photo shop skills. There are a lot of YouTube videos that you can look at like photo shop 101 and you will basically master photo shop in just a week. It’s a great stuff to have.

Now, to answer your question, you have to resize your photo and just upload it through an ad. That’s what you have to do. You don’t want to basically take the image that Facebook has preset for you based on the link that you shared. It can be a vertical, a square, the 1,200 by 628 pixel. There are three pixel sizes that you can use. All you have to do is simply open photo shop or open canva and use the exact pixel size that Facebook is recommending and then resize your image. That’s what you should do. It shouldn’t be stopping you at all. It’s a very simple stuff.

That is really it for our daily huddle today. I’m looking at a lot of comments right now. Walter Bunn has a really great question, “Fred on Christmas day, are you going to do a Christmas day huddle?” I can’t answer that question. I don’t know yet. I don’t know what my Christmas schedule is going to look like. I may spend some time with my family so I don’t know, I can’t guarantee. I’ll do my best to get on even during the holidays but I can’t guarantee anything at this point. A lot of people saying they’re hustling. I just love the comments that are being given to me.

I think that if I wasn’t running a business, I think I would be a YouTuber and just play video games and record it. I would have to say holy molly those guys make so much money. It blows my mind like people are actually going to sit there and watch other people play video games and you can make lots of money. As a matter of fact, I can tell you if you shoot a lot of content on YouTube and you turn on monetization and you start to get attraction I can tell you, it is going to be a lot of money. I’ve read an article by Forbes the other day about a six-year-old unboxing a toy and doing a review and this year in 2017 he generated over $11 million. That completely opened my eyes. That really shows you the opportunity that’s out there right now and that’s why I keep telling you in 2018 it’s going to be all about video content. The more video content you have out, the bigger your authority figures are going to be, the more power you have within your niche, the more ways you can actually monetize from your business. Just some quick feedback and I can tell you I’m going to do so much videos in 2018 especially for my ecommerce brands. I’m going to focus a lot on videos especially video content. That’s really the way and the key to actually succeed given the fact that there are more and more Facebook advertisers and there more and more people creating a business. In order for you to standout, it’s always going to be content.

That is it for our daily huddle today. Listen guys, if you’re watching this reply or even if you’re here live right now please comment below, tell me your feedback. Tell me if you like, love, you don’t like or hate this. Tell me what your feedback. Make sure you like my Facebook page, subscribe to my YouTube channel and tell people about Fred Lam so that we can actually build a bigger tribe and that you guys help me make an impact to individuals like you and help you guys get on to the journey to become an entrepreneur. I’m hoping that I could do everything that I could to help you change your life and transform people’s lives around the globe. That’s what I want to do. Without your help guys I won’t be able to do it. Other than that if you guys have any questions that you want me to answer in our daily huddle make sure you go to fredlam.com/ask submit your question there and I will get it featured as soon as possible. That’s it for today guys I look forward on seeing you tomorrow in our next daily huddle. Bye now.