The 3 T’s (The Secret To $)

9 out of 10 businesses fail, so, I guess, start 10 businesses. And – another statistic I like is this: 99% of people work for the 1% that never quit. So, just to premise this post, I’m discussing three vital ingredients you need to succeed in Internet Marketing. Known as the “three T’s”. Let’s dive in!

OK, without some long-winded intro, let’s get into it….

Trust

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

Ernest Hemingway

I couldn’t agree anymore.

I’d also agree with the old Russian Proverb and a saying that was used a lot during the Reagan Administration (especially by Suzanne Massie):

“Trust, but verify”

Suzanne Massie (and an Old Russian Proverb)

Anyways, without trying to come across all intellectual here, the point I am making that with anything online, “trust” (“credibility”) is really half of the battle.

How “legit” are you and how legit is your business? It’s so easy to scam over the Internet so building trust with your traffic and community is absolutely vital when trying to engage with any form of business online, not least with our growth hacking and SEO efforts.

Traffic

The second “T” is “Traffic”!

Without traffic to your site – landing page – or whatever, the fewer chances you will have to sell. Kinda obvious but it’s true.

Because SEO generates “free” traffic, that can come at a cost. It takes time to rank for keywords and to spin-up your SEO efforts. Sure, once you rank well for your desired keywords then that can be considered as being the ideal route to getting traffic – but – let’s also remember that the cost to have got to the top of the SERP’s could have been high. For example, typically, to get high rankings you need the “basics”:

• Quality high DA-Authority Niche-Specific Backlinks (paid or otherwise)
• Quality content
• And – a ton of other positive signals.

^ That all takes time – your time – or outsourced time – which can become very expensive.

Of course, there is another solution: pay for the traffic. Here’s a gem of a quote from Ryan Deiss.

“There is no such thing as a traffic problem”

Ryan Deiss

Remember, that when you’re starting out, you are still testing your theory or concept; i.e. you need a “proof of concept”, so perhaps it’s better to just go ahead and pay for the traffic because ultimately that might be cheaper (and hugely faster) than SEO-ing the site for your keywords.

Anyways – this “T” is all about “Traffic”.

Theme

Design is, of course, vital.

Crappy design = crappy conversions.

It’s as simple as that.

There are dozens of proven UI/UX strategies that work really well for conversions, and in fact, I have a list of some really great Growth Tools / Landing Pages here.

Once you get a page that converts, using a Split-Testing methodology, then you’ll be golden.

Remember that the more fields you add on your page, the more the drop-off will increase.

I have noticed recently, that a lot of traffic I have been getting for a client from Facebook was really quite bad, but in that instance when I added more fields to the landing page it seemed to improve the quality of leads, so use the number of fields with caution.

Wrapping Up

Get these “three T’s” right and you’ll be just fine.

I’ve been in SEO since 2002 (on and off) but for the most part, these T’s: Trust, Traffic, and Theme are the constant drivers that have always been there ever since I’ve been doing Internet Marketing.

Good luck with your journey and thank you for reading this.