AP 1135: How Do I (and Should I) Diversify My Traffic to My Brand?

AP 1135: How Do I (and Should I) Diversify my Traffic to my Brand?

Announcer:
Ask Pat. Askpat.com. Askpat.com.

Pat Flynn:
If you are a small business owner, this is for you. Running a business is hard, right? There's endless to-do lists, so many hats to wear, things to do, employees to take care of and your ever-present bottom line. So first of all, kudos to you for staying on top of it. I want to tell you about Gusto, our sponsor for this episode. It's a tool that we use on team SPI, and I wouldn't be here having the ease of managing this team without it. They built an easier, more affordable way to manage payroll, benefits, and more. They've helped over a hundred thousand businesses with tasks like automated payroll, tax filing, simple direct deposits, free health insurance administration, 401Ks, on-boarding tools. We use these things ourselves. Gusto even integrates with your favorite tools like QuickBooks, Xero, Google, and more. And they actually, and really do care about small business owners they work with.

Pat:
We've even had chats with their support team. It's awesome. They're attentive and extremely helpful. And since money can be tight right now, if you want to get access to Gusto, you can get free access for three months. Three months free once you run your first payroll, just go to gusto.com/askpat and start setting up your business today. You'll see exactly why I say it's awesome and it's easy if you get in. Again, that's three months free of payroll at gusto.com/askpat.

Pat:
What's up everybody Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 1,135 of AskPat 2.0, you're about to listen to a coaching call between myself and an entrepreneur, just like you. And today we're speaking with RJ from thewaystowealth.com. And specifically, we're talking about website traffic and website traffic diversification, but you'll notice right away that I actually take the conversation in a little bit of a different direction. Obviously we do talk about answering RJ's questions about traffic—and he's getting some good traffic right now. And the question being, well, do we double down on that or do we look for other ways to bring traffic in? Let's talk about it. So yeah, let's listen in. This is RJ from thewaystowealth.com.

Pat:
RJ, welcome to AskPat 2.0. Thanks so much for being here today.

RJ Weiss:
No, thank you Pat, for having me, looking forward to it.

Pat:
I'm really excited about this because I'm here to help you. But obviously, like I said before we hit record, just thank you so much for allowing us to sort of dive into what it is that you're up to so we can all learn together. So before we get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

RJ::
So, yeah, thank you. My name, RJ Weiss. I am background as a certified financial planner. In 2016 started what was ... went into blogging for a while, but in 2016 started The Ways to Wealth, personal finance blog, a general personal finance blog. And over time ... really happy with how it's grown. It's how I make a full time living now, left the financial services' industry and have a great team behind me and it's growing well. So very happy with it.

Pat:
Awesome. Can you give a link or a way that we can find out more you based on what you do now?

RJ::
Yeah, definitely thewaystowealth.com and then you could check out the about page of the site and then myself as well to learn more.

Pat:
Nice. That's pretty cool. If you were to consider what's your superpower in the world of finance, what would you consider that to be?

RJ::
I love writing and consolidating the best information on a topic and putting that into a format that someone who is brand new can read and understand and then use it to make their life better. So it's having a broad array of experience myself in the financial world, it's helped me explain a lot of basic concepts to readers that I find very helpful.

Pat:
That's awesome. That's awesome. Thank you. Well, we look forward to checking more of that out, but why don't we dive into a little bit about what's on your mind right now? So what's been going on, what might you need help with?

RJ::
Yeah, I'm always interested in diversifying traffic sources and really, in the end, diversifying and putting a better foundation for the business itself with more diversification in traffic sources. I'm battling with putting a lot of resources into, whether it's to start a podcast or put those into YouTube or really double down on what has worked in the past. And then specifically for us, it's got a strong search presence. I do drive paid advertising to the site and then Pinterest is also ... organic Pinterest reaches a strong traffic generator for us. So it's always wondering whether to double down on those sources, diversify a little knowing that resources are limited?

Pat:
Awesome. This is great. Before we dive into diversification of income, excuse me, traffic sources, might I ask if you are also collecting an email list at this time?

RJ::
Definitely am. Yes.

Pat:
Definitely. Okay. Well, that's good because that's a way to, no matter where traffic is coming from, no matter what happens to technology or where we are getting exposure, you have an email list obviously you can do a lot with that and you can take people wherever, no matter what happens. So that's great. That was going to be the first thing. It's more almost kind of like an insurance plan, if you will, to build that email list. And I'm really glad to hear that that's happening.

Pat:
I would recommend definitely on top of traffic building strategies, think about, okay, well, are you also optimizing what happens when the traffic comes to your website after people subscribe? Or are you optimizing how people subscribe to your email list and then what happens after that? Tell me a little bit about the journey—about what happens when I land on your page. How are you getting me to subscribe? And then also, what happens after I subscribe? Because if that's not optimized, then we could double the amount of traffic, but if we're not optimizing those conversions, as well as what's happening after, well, it could be a big hole in a giant sort of pipeline.

RJ::
Definitely. I would say one thing is I don't have a great email strategy in place, although the list size has grown to a significant amount. It's over 10,000 subscribers now. I really just send out an email once a week with the latest post and a little more in there. I probably have under-monetized, or underdeveloped, I should say, the email platform and haven't done as great job of building that out. And then in turn, I haven't put a lot of resources into that as well. So it's definitely an area in terms of email to grow for myself.

Pat:
Yeah. I mean, I think that would be important. And in many cases I would say even more important than just increasing traffic. Because let me just ask you, let's say we double the traffic that comes in, what changes for you, as a result of that?

RJ::
You know, it's been pretty consistent. So one thing I track is the revenue-per-visitor of the site, and that's been pretty consistent as the site has scaled. Mainly is an affiliate model website, and then some advertising as well, so traffic isn't important in itself, but if people just come to the website and leave after one time, it really doesn't do any of us any good long term.

Pat:
Right, right. So, okay, this is great. So in terms of business-model affiliate marketing, is there anything that you have that you own that you could push people to at some point, if, for example, they subscribe?

RJ::
So I have two different email lists. One is a financial goal-setting workbook that I have. And then the other is a course on how to start blogging and get interested into building your own website. So two different segments of the email list. I have opt-ins for them, but really after a first couple of series of emails, the automations or the ongoing series of that and the education itself drops off since neither is what I necessarily specialize in.

Pat:
Gotcha. If you could snap your fingers and after people subscribe, they go to a place where you'd want them to go, without worrying about the creation of them or how much time or money it might require to invest in that, what would be on your wishlist of eventually where you would want people to go and how you might be able to serve them?

RJ::
So, I mean, from a business mindset, the way I think about it is creating value for the email list and also using it to drive revenue. So being able to say at 30 days this is how much a subscriber is worth to me, at 90 days, this is how much because as someone who also drives paid traffic, I can then work backwards into figuring out, okay, this is our cost-per-lead and this is where it's profitable and how much time it is. So having an email that's very valuable to the reader that I can measure in terms of ROI would be where I want to go with the email list.

Pat:
Love it. Cool. And then in terms of how close you are to that, like percentage wise, how far do you think you are to that?

RJ::
So I'm about 1 percent knowing that I have very little done. So it's definitely a place I need to focus on.

Pat:
Cool. And this is where I would in fact put most of my focus on now, because you are already getting traffic, you have numbers that could come in that can help prove a conversion rate one way or another for you, so that you can optimize for those experiences so that, way more traffic comes in. I'm not saying don't get more traffic, obviously more traffic the better, but it's just another part of this that I want you to think about that we make sure we don't overlook is all. So that's enough on that, but hopefully ... Does that sort of sit well for you? Does that make sense?

RJ::
Yeah. I'm putting it in my mind as it brings more experience to the reader and even if I do grow traffic, the overall site in revenue will grow at a far greater level than leaving that email list alone.

Pat:
Exactly, exactly. And one great way to get traffic is in fact, bringing people back who have been there before, right? And so an email list can definitely help you do that. It's a great way to, when you create a new piece of content, get a whole load of people seeing it all at once. It's a great way to increase those signals that ultimately help Google, time on site, people already know you, they trust you. They're not going to leave immediately after they visit that site. If they were to come for example, from an email list or a social account, and that can help with SEO and more exposure for traffic, for new people, right?

Pat:
So there's new people and there's old people coming back and to build for both is really key. And oftentimes the latter, building for people who've been there before to come back is often overlooked. And that's kind of where I was trying to get at as sort of traffic diversification strategy number one, if you want to call it that. Tell me you're interested in ... You mentioned podcasting and perhaps other platforms outside of what you do now, what interests you there? What gives you the spark or the excitement to go outside of what's already been working?

RJ::
Yeah. First of all, think from a foundational business standpoint of, I don't want to have necessarily all my eggs in one basket. SEO, I've done well in, but I've also taken hits in over time. So that goes up and down. Pinterest is something that's very seasonal as well in the personal finance niche so it spikes earlier on in the year and then kind of goes down and then paid ads too, that spikes at other times of the year or so hard to do come quarter four. So, just having another good stable traffic source is something I'm always interested in doing for the site to really build up the foundation and reach new people and grow overall.

Pat:
Yeah. That's great. I mean, that's really smart. I think that if you know there are things ... And the reason why I'm asking this is because a lot of times people gravitate toward these new ideas or diversification and they use diversification as the quote unquote excuse when they know that they should be doubling down on things that they already have, or they just haven't completed what they said yes to before. Do you feel, and this is just going to come from me, I'm not judging or assuming anything, but could this be a distraction from things that you know you could do more of that maybe are just more boring or tedious or you're sort of over it, or is this in fact yes, we're ready for expanding outward and getting exposure elsewhere?

RJ::
I think that's the question that I go back to a lot. There's obviously still more to do on Google. That's a never ending game of growing your site organically. Systems are in place on the other ends in terms of like Pinterest and paid ads. What frameworks do you think about where it's best to say, okay, it is time to diversify. What questions should I necessarily be asking myself when it comes to that?

Pat:
Yeah. This is a great question. Te question would be, are there any things that I need to finish that I once started before I sort of unlock that reward of trying something new? If that makes sense. That's number one. Number two, do you have the time and or capacity to add something new and with whatever you choose, so let's say for example, podcasting, we have to be very honest about, okay, well, how much time might we have to dedicate to that? It may seem exciting upfront, but it does take work. It does take a lot of effort, especially up front, and a lot of people dive in without realizing that, and they don't make any progress. They've wasted a little bit of time.

Pat:
So the time aspect is really important too. The way to combat that would be to ... and the way to kind of do both, to have your cake and eat it too, essentially, is spend and I call this the 20 percent itch rule. I do this in my life. I do this in my business and that is I spend 80 percent of my time doing the things that I know I should be doing, optimizing what I've already done, completing my incompletes, all those sorts of things. But I allow myself 20 percent of that time or the leftover time to experiment and try something new and to allow myself to have a container to do that where it's not going to go crazy and take up all my time, but it's there. And that time is meant for that, where even if it were to fail, at least it was sort of in a container and it didn't take away from anything else.

Pat:
So I know people like Ramit Sethi do this really well. And Gary Vaynerchuk, even Google as a company, they offer their employees 20 percent of their time to experiment and try new things. And I would see how you might be able to number one, prioritize these new ideas in the constraint of what might you have time to do, and then spend 20 percent of your time or some percentage around there to actually do these things and continually focus on that until you get to a point where you're either like, okay, this is working or, okay, obviously this is not working or I'm not excited about this anymore. Let's use the 20 percent for something else later on. How's that tracking for you?

RJ::
Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. I feel like I need to do more of that to experiment and have a quality run at something to where I can say confidently, this was for me, this wasn't. And I feel like I don't do that enough on certain things. I've built up the site now to where with solid SEO game plan in place. It's not like we're doing a lot of stuff, more so just executing. I like that 20 percent rule; should be devoted to experimenting.

Pat:
Yeah. And that way it's something that you could look forward to if you were to divide this into like the week, right? Monday to Thursday, you get your stuff done that you know you need to get done. Friday is like your play day, and this is what Ramit does. And he allows himself to try new things. Gary Vaynerchuk, he's on brand new social media platforms that he really has no business being on, but he does it because he wants to experiment and try it and see if there's anything there. And that's really cool because then you know that you're going to be able to try that and you have that space to do it, but then on the other end, you also know that you're getting stuff done. And what often happens with entrepreneurs and bloggers, especially, is we see a new tool or a fun, fancy new thing and then we just go all in on that and we've kind of forget and leave behind what actually was working.

Pat:
And that's just what we're trying to avoid here. So scheduling this out would be the strategy for, "hey, this is my time and space to try a new platform." And maybe this is when I podcast and we can dive into some of those specifics earlier, because I think the most important thing now is, if you do allow for this 20 percent of time to do something well, what is the thing? And how do you decide which one is which. Tell me again, what were those sort of ideas? I think you mentioned podcasts and other things?

RJ::
I would probably put YouTube higher on the list, email marketing higher on the list of things. Whether going all in on Instagram or another social media platform, rather than just kind of having a presence there. So those are the types of things that I'm trying to weigh the opportunity cost of in terms of where exactly to go after. I haven't really done ... Instagram, I have a presence there and Twitter. I'm on there, but I'm not actively putting resources into growing that channel.

Pat:
The nice thing about this is, once you make this decision and now we know that we're going to sort of have this time to focus on something, it becomes a conscious choice of, okay, this is the one, these other things I'll put them in a box for later, but now I can do what's called ... I like to call just-in-time learning. That is everything I read about, learn about, watch about, is about that thing that I chose to do and focus on and grow. So now this also helps you in terms of productivity in terms of, well, all this noise out there, let me just find the noise about what I'm choosing to do, like YouTube, for example, and kind of gauging and finding a realistic expectation on how to grow and trying to find goals in and around that. And that's kind of where I would start.

Pat:
I would, almost essentially hypothetically choose each one to focus on for the next two months and just go, okay, what would life be like if I chose YouTube for the next two months to focus on in my 20 percent of time? How many videos would that be? Do I have the capacity to do that? Does sound even fun to me? Cause sometimes even just experimenting with just, okay, well what would life be like if I chose this and focused on this, you might quickly go, "wow, that's not how I want to live or what I want to do so let me cross that off the list," and then you'll have a more consolidated list, who might you need to learn from, what would be the goals related to that? So if you, for example, started a podcast, what would mean, after two months, success to you?

Pat:
Does that mean that you have hundreds of listeners, thousands of listeners? And realistically, what would make it a success for you and have you go, "Okay, this is great." The struggle is trying something new without having a goal. You never know if you're done or not, or you can't gauge whether or not it's worth pivoting or going deeper and further into it or trying something else. So I would just advise, and this is a lot to unpack. Obviously, it's going to take a lot of time on your own to reflect on these things, but having some set of, okay, after two to three months, if I focus on this and I give it a chance, where do I want to be after this much time? What would mean success there? And if you don't even know what that means, well, then it means having conversations with people who have tried YouTube and diving into all those YouTube channels about YouTube, on how long things might take, best strategies and finding other colleagues in your niche who have done it too.

Pat:
And you know, those kinds of things. So it might take a one or two hour session of planning to sort of nail this down. But the beauty of this is, you give it a shot and you have this container, you've actually given it a chance versus a lot of people they're like, okay, I'm going to try all these things. And then of course, none of them have a chance to do too well for you. Making that choice to focus on one would be the next step for sure.

RJ::
Great. Yeah. Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. Is there one platform that you would recommend being on and starting with first or is it more of a interest-based thing and you know, dependent on skills and abilities and so forth?

Pat:
Well, I mean all of the above. It depends on where you know your audience is, where you find there might be some big opportunity. You might find that for the specific niche you're in, there's not a lot of podcasts or maybe there's a couple, but there just needs to be more and you can do it better. There might be some indicators on YouTube. For example, you find a whole bunch of channels, but they don't talk about things in the same way you do. You can come in with a different position. Audience plus excitement from your end is sort of the answer.

Pat:
Like if you just dreaded getting behind the camera, then it's just not going to work, right? Having a little bit of excitement in there for you, as a creator is really important too. So if you were to have me go, okay, just tell me the one that you would choose Pat, I would either choose podcasting or YouTube after the email list is figured out, 'cause that can be automated, right? You can set up auto responders. That's actually a thing that could be finished and completed in terms of, after people subscribe, what happens, messages do they receive perhaps automatically, what survey questions do I want to ask so that I can get more information, where might I lead them to, what blog posts do I want to have them check out, what products do I want them to check out, what YouTube video demonstrations about a product that I promote do I want them to check out.

Pat:
And then after that that's sort of done and then I can unlock, okay, now let's get more traffic on one of these platforms, either YouTube or podcasting. You have the benefit of the algorithm and just millions and millions of people searching. And if you're talking about search-based topics a lot, that would be a great place to go. However, you're competing with millions of other channels as well, and all the noise on there versus a podcast where there's not even ... We just passed 1 million podcasts in April; April 20th, 2020. And that's not a lot. So there's less competition. And you have the ability to really get intimate with your audience too so although the reach might be less, the relationship that you build with your audiences is that much more far quicker pros and cons.

RJ::
Is there a way where, you know, say you give it a two-month run and you find out it's just not for you. Where would you go after that? As someone with a brand that's going to live on after that? I don't want it to look like it's a discontinued YouTube channel or something like that. So how would you create these little experiments and still go on afterwards if they don't work?

Pat:
Yeah. I mean, I think the answer and solution to that would be to have a plan going into it, in terms of here's the content I'm going to film or record or create and knowing that, okay, I may not want to continue to do this. At least having the ability to create a final or quote unquote final video or final podcast episode that says something like, "Hey, for right now, I've given you everything that I needed to give you. I recommend that if you are watching this video, you check out some of these other videos and here's some other resources that I have on my website that you can check out. But for right now, I am going to be focusing elsewhere." And just being very honest with your audience is really key that way there's some closure there. And then of course you come back to it later, maybe you get reignited and then you just remove that video and continue on.

Pat:
So many channels start and stop and start and stop, and might need to do that in order to get into a good groove or find their right voicing. But that's not a huge deal. And there are ways to sort of send people off. Like, let's say you do a podcast and it's a container of however many episodes within two months, well say in final episode say, "Hey, this is the end of this season of podcasts. When the next season is going to come out, I'm not exactly sure, but for right now, I'm going to be delivering value over here. And you can find me here on these social channels. And you know, if I come back in the future, I'll definitely let you know, but make sure to check out the archive and I'm not going anywhere. I'm just going to be putting content into these spaces for right now," and that'll do the job. The thing that you don't want people to do is like come to a dead end and go, "Well, what happened?" And you can avoid that with just an additional piece of content after.

RJ::
That's great. Thank you for that. And kind of saying that it was like an excuse in my mind that wasn't very valid to not start something.

Pat:
No, hey it's okay. And I think that the last point here with regards to, when you make a decision to try these things, to really go all in on them within that 20 percent of time that you're allowing yourself or whatever percentage you are offering to give it a chance, right? And to learn everything you can about it, to fail and make mistakes and try. And now that you have an audience, you have the ability to not start from scratch anywhere you choose to start, right, you can start a YouTube channel and have viewers on day one, which is great.

Pat:
I would in fact, see, with whatever you choose to do, to let your audience in on what you're doing, even before it happens to get them excited, to allow them to become a part of the process, to even perhaps crowdsource information—maybe the first couple of podcasts episodes include some conversations with some of your audience, or at least answering some of their questions to connect where they were on the blog to the new place, wherever they're going to listen or watch. You have that advantage and so that's really neat. And so you should be able to start to understand how it will affect your brand and how it could supplement it quite quickly, because it's not going to be zero even from day one, if you do it right.

RJ::
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. All great information. Got some ... mind is running with good thoughts. So thank you.

Pat:
Well, great. I don't want to overwhelm you though. Any final questions or thoughts before we finish up or you got what you need?

RJ::
No, I definitely got what I need and just to say, thank you. I've been learning from you for a while, and I really appreciate the time you took and hopefully this is helpful to others as well.

Pat:
Awesome. Thank you, RJ. Let people know one more time where they can go to check out your stuff.

RJ::
So my name is RJ Weiss, and I run the website, thewaystowealth.com.

Pat:
So much RJ. We appreciate you and good luck.

RJ:
Thank you Pat. Take care. Bye bye.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that coaching call between myself and RJ. Again, you can find RJ at theways ... that's the ways plural; thewaystowealth.com. Thank you RJ for calling in. Apologize about the audio. I just realized that now editing this, I think it recorded from my computer iMac microphone, as opposed to my normal microphone, but either way, I hope it was helpful for you. And I appreciate you and your time today. If you'd like to get coached by myself, much like how RJ did today, all you have to do to have a chance is to go to askpat.com and you can fill out the application there. You can also go to askpat.com to see the thousand plus other episodes in the archive to see if any are relevant to you. I wouldn't recommend going through all of them. I would pick and choose the ones that make sense for you.

Pat:
You can just scroll through the list of episodes that you have access to, find the ones that seem most interesting to you, and based on the title, I will be able to help you too. So thank you so much. I appreciate you. And again, check out RJ at thewaystowealth.com. Thanks so much. I appreciate you. And if you'd like to check out SPI Pro, our private membership community for existing business owners, ones who are serious about and are committed to growing their business, you can check it out at smartpassiveincome.com/pro, and you can apply and see if it's right for you. And we are rolling new members in nearly every single week now, which is really amazing. So smartpassiveincome.com/pro. Thanks so much. And I look forward to serving you next week. Until then, keep rocking it. Love you, cheers. And as always #TeamFlynn for the win.