Traffic Generation with Colin McDougall

Internet Marketing Secrets – Podcast #135 – Transcript #1

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Michael Campbell: My good friend Colin McDougall is author of the highly acclaimed VEO Report for natural search engine optimization, and cohost of the Fly on the Wall Club private membership site that specializes in Web2.0 training and conversational marketing. Colin is the only person I know that consistently has his web site in the top 5 positions, for such competitive terms as creditcard applications.

Michael: Hi Colin, and welcome to the show.

Colin McDougall: Hi Michael, It’s great to be here!

Michael: Let’s have a little chat about traffic generation. What are your three favorite methods for generating traffic, and why?

Colin: One of my favorite methods is actually using Web2.0 entities – I’m just going to list off my top three favorites and then go over why. Web2.0. Followed by natural search. Followed by paid search, or pay-per-click advertising.

Now, what I absolutely love about Web2.0 is the ability to go out and test markets. Control multiple positions in the top 10 at Google. Engage in discussions and get people talking about your website.

Web2.0 for me has simply made this fun. It’s a lot of fun to engage in Web2.0, because you don’t really worry about any of the traditional SEO stuff. These sites are so authoritative in nature, that they just go shooting to the top, on any given keyword that you are talking about.

I’ve even done this in very very competitive industries, such as bankcards. I like making Web2.0 posts, driving people to my site, and more importantly, getting people talking about my website, and linking to my website.

And this actually leads into the natural search end of things. I love organic traffic, everybody loves search engine traffic.

Michael: Organic traffic is a gift really.

Colin: You don’t have to pay for it. What better kind of advertising can you have?

Never before in the history of marketing have you been able to get complimentary advertising. Even if you go to do a billboard at the side of the road, somebody is going to charge you for that space.

If you post your own billboard at the side of the road, somebody is going to come and tear it down. It’s just so phenomenal, the amount of traffic you can drive, without dropping a dime into advertising budget.

And of course, I do like paid search because a lot of times people instinctually know that the ads at the top and down the right are where you go to shop. So I tend to have a higher conversion rate on a paid search campaign than I do in natural search.

That’s just kind of the nature of the beast. I do like generating revenue. So paid search is definitely… really an important part of my traffic generation, when you can do conversion rates of 10%. I one instance, I’m spending 10 dollars a day and flipping that into 250 to 300 a day in profits.

Michael: Right.

Colin: That’s not bad. I kind of like that. When I’m doing natural search, I’ll get, say, 2% conversion rate on that. And I think you just capture more of the Lookie Lou’s when you are doing natural search, but again, it’s complimentary. So there’s no real risk posed there.

Now, again, let’s get back to Web2.0. I’ve got that report out there – there’s a link from Michael’s site where you can go download the Constant Conversation from – and it talks about going out and creating these conversation…

Michael: Yes, you can get the Constant Conversation free report at: http://www.cdzn.com/cc

Colin: You start controlling the conversations and taking over. You can go beat up your competitors using Web2.0 almost instantly.

I was just talking to Michael before we got on this call regarding some new sources. Ones that are highly effective, that take very little time to create some content, like Slideshare.net…

Michael: That’s s l i d e? Slideshare?

Colin: Yeah, slide, like going down the slide. It’s Slideshare.net. It’s a sharing mechanism for sharing PowerPoint slides. And what you do is upload your content.

Michael: Oh, excellent.

Colin: Creating a PowerPoint is so much more fun than writing SEO copy. SEO copy gets to be a little cumbersome and monotonous after a while. And I’ll talk to you more about how I actually create my SEO copy.

When you can spend 30 seconds putting together really cool slides, popping in the images, and have your site come up in bankcard related terms in a matter of minutes, it’s like "Wow, that’s kind of cool." It starts instantly driving traffic.

You can use that to entertain your audience even. They might say, "Wow, what a great site."

So start using it as a branding mechanism. Getting into their heads. Getting into their minds. A lot of these people are just hobby bloggers that might actually start talking about you and linking to you.

And I have this happen more often than not. Where I no longer go out and really build links. I’ll let the community link to me. That’s the kind of links that Google actually loves and counts and values highly.

Michael: Now, what about advertising in other publications? Have you advertised in any other newsletters or anything like that? And if so, how effective has it been for you?

Colin: Well, that varies newsletters by newsletter. I’ve found some newsletters that mail to 50,000 at 99 dollars for the mailing. I’ve found that they’re really not that responsive.

The more you pay for a mailing, the higher quality of a readership it is, the more responsive they are. I’ve had success mailing where it costs upwards of two to three thousand dollars for one blast out to a 100,000 people.

But still when it’s not your audience, and not your brand, you don’t really know how often they’ve mailed, what they’ve done in the past with them, how respectful they’ve been. Typically when you’re buying access into somebody’s subscribers, my experience has been, that it hasn’t produced the results that I’ve been hoping for. However, it is actually a portion of what I do to advertise my websites.

Michael: Now, let’s talk about SEO for a moment then. Do you optimize your pages while you are on the fly, as you create them, or do you not really pay that much attention to SEO and just write them for the reader?

Colin: Well, the way I start off writing my SEO copy, it’s  100% for the reader. I do have the keyword in mind and I make sure I get that in there. And then I just publish it out 100% for the reader.

Then when I notice some of the long-tailed search terms coming in on that particular keyword, maybe I’m going for a two-phrase word ultimately, but in the short-term maybe I’m getting four or five-word phrases coming in. After a while I’ll go take a look and see "Oh, look at this, I’m on page four for the two-word phrase."

Now’s when I’ll go back and edit my copy for SEO, and what I’ll do is: Did I make sure I got that in my title tag or have a variation somewhere in my H1 tags, and I’ll do some theming with the copy as well.

Michael: Right.

Colin: And what I’ll do is a tilde search, where I put that little squiggly line tilde and look for what Google say are related words on that phrase.

Michael: Oh, that’s a good tip, yeah; people tend to forget about that one. (A tilde search looks like this: ~keyword )

Colin: Yeah. So, here is what Google thinks are semantically related words. You put a little tilde in and where you see the highlighted word showing up. The ones that are not the words that you typed in, are the tilde words you might want to work into your copy. Put those in and watch your rankings rise instantly.

Michael: Excellent. Now, are there any traffic generation schemes that don’t work? So in other words, what traffic generation tactic can backfire and become a big mistake?

Colin: Well, if you start looking at things called like a blog blaster with millions of inbound links to your site instantly, stay away from those gimmicky type of link building and traffic schemes. They just don’t work. That goes for auto comment submitters or whatever the case might be.

You know, keep it real, keep a real human behind it. You can go out and create massive exposure by hiring very cheap commenters. There are sources like Pay-Per-Post that you can go to and get… I call them "ghost buzzers."

Michael: Right.

Colin: Hire someone to go and do your commenting. However, what I like to do is identify a list of, say, maybe 10 to 20 blogs that are related to my niche, that are proven to drive traffic to my website via those comments. Again, notice, I’m not using the comments to instantly build the link.

I don’t care if they’ve got nofollow links throughout their blog. What I am doing is advertising, making people aware that I exist.

From the comments they’ll see, "Oh, look at this really great site over here, I’m going to write about that site." And that’s when the links start coming in to your website.

Michael: Excellent. Have you heard of a product called Fast Blog Finder? I haven’t used it myself, but it looks like it goes out and finds blogs on topics that are related to whatever keywords you feed it. It’s like a little search tool, but once you find the related blogs, you actually do rely on a human to leave comments.

Oh right… I think that’s a very good point that you made… that you want to get the word out about your site, to brand yourself. People will see you adding these intelligent comments, then go to look and see what your site is about. Now, all of a sudden they are talking about you. And they’re linking to you. That’s excellent.

Colin: Yeah, absolutely. And everything I do is about acquiring the natural inbound link.

I use a lot of tactics that people are currently using to build their links for the here and now. Yeah, some of those links are counting, but I know from experience, Google is going to just flip the switch on the effectiveness of those kind of links and say, "No, those don’t count anymore."

So you want to really position yourself, so you are getting those truly cast natural links to your website. And that just requires some creativity.

Think a little bit, come up with some unique selling points and really don’t fall for where the crowd is hanging out. And what I mean by that is… if the crowd is saying, "Go do this." Don’t go there.

For example, I was just talking to a friend of mine that trades stocks for a living, and that’s kind of mentality he goes by. When people are dumping stocks, he’s buying.

So, go against what the crowd is doing in some way, shape or form. That’s really going to make you stand out.

Behind that, what I’m really getting at, is to create controversy, as it always attracts links and visitors. But don’t be controversial just for the sake of being controversial…

Michael: Now… is there one traffic secret you could share? Like a method that you use, yet very few other people know about it, or they don’t realize how powerful it is?

Colin: Well, actually… the website I just talked about called Slideshare.net. I create literally, 30 seconds of content. I put some pretty pictures in, and upload the slide show to the site.

Within 15 minutes, I’ve got 10 views already. That’s cool. Then I check Google and I’m ranked in the top 10 on that. I check my referring log, and of the 10 views, three of them clicked through to my website… all within 15 minutes!

Michael: That’s amazing. That is absolutely incredible.

Colin: This is happening literally faster than I can get a paid search ad campaign up and running on Google AdWords. Sure he nature of the traffic is a little bit different. But when I’m making sales within hours of publishing content, I get pretty excited.

Michael: Yeah, that is very exciting stuff.

Colin: So I don’t know if we can call that a secret traffic generation method, but it’s certainly a highly effective one. And I haven’t heard many people talking about Slideshare.net. So, fire up PowerPoint, (Keynote on the Mac) get some content going, and, yeah, watch the traffic come pouring in…

Michael: Thank you so much Colin for those wonderful tips and ideas for generating traffic!

(If you’d like to have Colin McDougall as your mentor for Web2.0 training, join his private Fly on the Wall Club, or get his highly acclaimed VEO Report.)

Download the Podcasts:  Traffic Generation Part 1
Get the Show Notes:  IMS Podcast #135 Show Notes
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