Dear fellow subscribers,

I just wanted to take a snippet from my product “The Viral Marketing Blackbook” and share a little inspiration with you.

The Art of Traffic Generation

As you may know, traffic is the lifeblood to success for all online businesses. Making money on the internet is all about traffic monetization.

You’ve probably heard this phrase many many times before: “The money is in the list.”

WRONG!

And nope, it’s also not “the money is what you do with the list.” This list is just part of the big picture in internet marketing. Building a list is just one way of generating and monetizing your traffic

But in the end, everything comes down to traffic. Forget what the so-called “gurus” have taught you over the years. Most of them probably haven’t even made a single cent outside the internet marketing niche, and only know how to make money by teaching others how to make money.

The true remarkable stars of internet marketing are people like Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith (founders of Hotmail), David Filo and Jerry Yang (founders of Yahoo), Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) etc.

I don’t think any of these made their billions using an opt-in list. They made their billions by driving massive traffic to their website and monetizing them. List building is just one way of monetizing your traffic.

The foundation of all internet businesses is traffic. No matter how good your website looks, if you don’t have any traffic, you won’t make any money. Using a red headline in your sales letter isn’t going to help much if you are only receiving 10 hits a day.

Stop wasting your time and money, trying to find the “secret” formula to increasing your Adsense revenue or your subscriber list. Concentrate on building the quality targeted traffic first, before working on your conversion rates.

Many people think conversion is the way to get started. Yes, conversion is essential, but you need the traffic to work on your conversion. Even if your conversion stinks, you can still make tons of money if you have a large volume of traffic.

That is why you should focus on building the traffic first, so that you are in a much better position to test the conversions. (How would you know how good your conversions are if you have no traffic to test on?)

Bottom line: the person with the most traffic wins almost every time.

This brings me to the basic formula to online success:

Traffic + Conversion = Profits

It’s as simple as that. Get massive amounts of traffic and convert as much of it as you can. If you can achieve that, then you will become rich online. This is the exact same fundamental formula ALL online businesses use, including Google and Yahoo. EVERY SINGLE internet marketing strategy in the entire universe fall under either the “traffic” or “conversion” category.

(If you can think of one which does not fall into one of the two categories, please tell me, because I want to know )

Do you think Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube because they had good advert optimization or good web design? NO (in fact, their click through rates sucks). They bought YouTube because it had a wide audience and massive traffic, even though it had no revenue. Google paid for the traffic that they hope will eventually monetize and convert to create profit.

So by being able to generate traffic, and constantly testing and tracking to see what converts, you will make money.

Fundamentals of Traffic Generation

According to internet guru John Reese (of income.com), there are only three legal ways of generating traffic in the entire universe (with the fourth being stealing, which is using spywares etc – we won’t be talking about those, obviously).

1. Buy Traffic

You can buy traffic. This includes things like PPC advertising, banner advertising, ezine advertising, co-registration etc.

2. Create Traffic

You can create traffic. This may involve things like article marketing, press releases, search engine optimization, traffic from your list, social networking, social bookmarking etc.

3. Borrow Traffic

Finally, you can borrow traffic. There is no better way than to leverage other people’s traffic. This may include things like placing ads on other people’s ezine or newletter, joint ventures etc.

Viral Traffic

Traffic from viral marketing goes somewhere in between creating traffic and borrowing traffic. This is probably the most powerful, yet underused internet marketing strategy to generating massive amounts of free traffic.

In fact, many successful businesses you see today (both online and offline) succeeded by using the power of viral marketing, or word-of-mouth advertising, as its called offline. And of course, most importantly, viral traffic is free.

The Fatal Traffic Mistake

Before I move on, let me start off by emphasizing something vitally important to you. This is probably the number one fatal traffic mistake almost everyone makes when trying to get traffic to their website. This mistake practically guarantees that they are wasting their time and money on ineffective advertising.

And what is this fatal mistake?

They do not track every traffic source individually.

Tracking every single traffic source individually, including individual keywords, is the most important thing if you want to get profitable traffic. And if you are not doing that, then you won’t be able to know which traffic sources are making you money, and which are not, meaning that you won’t be able to improve and increase your targeted traffic.

Are you confused?

Here is an example. Let’s say I ran a pay-per-click campaign, placed some banner ads and bought some ezine ads to drive traffic to my website, but I forgot to track my traffic individually. At the end of the day, I look at my results and see that I have spent $500 on advertising and earned $1000 in revenue. I made a stunning $500 profit! I should be happy right?

Absolutely not.

Why? Because there is a good chance that probably $400 of the $500 spent on advertising was useless, and probably all the revenue came from the $100 advertising. If I was tracking the traffic source individually, and was able to pin-point where the traffic were coming from, I could have saved up to $400 and have made a profit of $900 rather than $500.

And that is the number one fatal mistake almost everyone makes.

As John Reese said, “testing and tracking is where 95% of the profit is made”, because it allows you to differentiate the winners from the losers.

To your success,

Stanley Tang