The Most Expensive Traffic Lesson I’ve Ever Learned

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Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast
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Igor: Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your
host Igor Kheifets. Free traffic is a myth, it’s a turd in a candy wrapper you’re
being fed since day one in internet marketing. It’s the sole cause of misery for
tens of thousands of marketers who put in 40-60 hours a week into their online
businesses without no return. Eventually you find out there’s no such thing as
free in his business, no such thing as free traffic, no such thing as free help,
no such thing as free education. The free tools you’re using for productivity are
restricted and buggy. The coach that promises to help you for free is misinforming
you so bad it slums another two years when you’re learning curve. Worse part he
doesn’t even know he’s misinforming you because it’s blind leading the blind kind
of thing. And the free traffic technique you learned in the YouTube tutorial, well
it’s taking so much time to set up and manage it, it’s just not worth it. Even if
you make less than minimum wage right now. Plus by the time you’re done there’s
about 14563 other people trying to do the same thing so it doesn’t work because
get saturated. Of course, yours truly had to learn all this the hard way.

My first business opportunity was Global Domains International. The $10 per month
GDI membership and a $9 per month get response account was all I, a broker
teenager could afford at the time. Since I sunk all the money ahead in getting
position, I don’t even bother wit paid traffic techniques. Frankly even if I had
the money, I’d try free traffic methods first anyway. When you get started online
you don’t feel you’re qualified to use paid traffic. As if you have to be
initiated into an inner circle of marketers who are allowed to do the sort of
voodoo magic. Of course, there is no initiation rituals or board of council here,
no one can actually give you permission to use paid traffic or take it away. It’s
not just something that they can give you or it’s not something that you can give
them or give to yourself, it’s just, it’s literally something that you decide to
do and you just go do it. But more about that later. The first free traffic
technique I tried was My Space. Now don’t laugh because we’re talking about 2008
and 2009 or so. My Space was actually pretty hot back then and Facebook is still
in its infancy. Twitter is only starting to make any noise. And for the next two
months I did nothing but create fake My Space profiles that sold my fake it till I
make it story. I had no idea what I was doing, I was just copying a lot of it from
my idols such Jonathan Bud and Mike Diller. Now My Space was really just a waste
of time in terms of getting any actual traffic to my GDI affiliate link, but I
learned a lot. I learned how to build html pages, I learned how to learn how to
use the html tags to make my text look pretty, I learned to upload videos on
YouTube and embed them into page, which was big for me at the time. I learned a
lot of different technicalities, but I didn’t make any money. Next I got hit by
the web 2.0 bug and I started creating these Squidoo lenses. I am not even sure
what happened do Squidoo, I think it was bought out by something or someone, but I
really created a lot of those because they had SEO value, and I posted those same
articles on Ease On In pages, which was sled by Google, and so that went out of
business. I put up Google Diary pages, I think it was called Google Diary, maybe
I’m wrong maybe it was Google Books, but it was some sort of Google article
directory. Tut there was like a fiasco, I guess, because it doesn’t exist anymore.
And even, I even posted all that stuff on hub pages, which I think still exists. I
then turned my articles into YouTube videos by talking out what I wrote to a
camera, and it was cool. And then I would take the video link and I would tweet it
with fingers crossed that someone would find my rambling useful and shares it, and
that was my plan for getting rich quick. I became a content generating machine. I
was producing more content weekly than most pro bloggers bothered to write in a
month. Yet I wasn’t making any progress. Besides an occasional pat on the back
from my upline Judy Thompson who was very nice, and was coaching me for free,
because they I joined her GDI down one which when I realize made her almost no
money, I think it was just like a dollar. All I got was just getting myself banned
from three different internet marketing forums for spamming within a span of three
months, including by the way the Warrior Forum which only banned me temporarily,
and that’s a good thing because I would later go on to build an impressive
portfolio right on the Warrior Forum, but I guess we’ll talk about it on some
other episode. So free traffic was already costing me tens of thousands of dollars
in missed opportunities, time investment and misery, but I was a determined SOB,
so when I really wanted something I pushed on and right about that time on auto
tweets became a new fad.

I bought a software that automatically follow people so they would follow me back,
which is the strategy people now use on Instagram ironically, so really nothing
changes in this world. I could also schedule my tweets which meant I could tweet
when I am at work, when I was pooping, when I was playing FIFA, when I was feeling
sorry for myself, I could just do it remotely, which was awesome. And reflecting
on this time, I can’t help but see the irony in buying software, so actually
putting money down to get free traffic. But such is internet marketing, it’s
ironic and it’s never free, and it’s cruel. It wasn’t long before I did the same
thing on Facebook. I’ve had five profiles maxed out with about 5000 friends each,
three of those profiles got banned for auto posting, I dropped the automation idea
all together. Now at this point I’m thinking, “Something must be wrong with me
because I couldn’t possibly be wrong about free traffic, can I and so many people
enjoy free automated traffic doing the exact same thing as, wee because they teach
it in their info products, which I’m buying now and implementing. So how come some
working for me So something must be missing. But what? Oh, I know, it’s probably
blogging.” And so at this point I can write an article about my neighbors kidney
transplant or pretty much anything in about 40, 45 minutes or so because I wrote
so many articles for Squidoo and Ease on articles in the past several months. So
it wouldn’t be a very good article, but it’d be good enough, I guess, to pose as
valuable content on my own web 2.0 website. So if I’m that proficient at producing
content, why not build a website of my own where I would post it and I would build
my own forum. So that day I set off an eight month journey into a blogging, and I
published new unique piece of content every day, I bought a domain, hosting
account and an actual workers theme which cost me $376, which was way more than I
could afford because it would translated to around 12,000 New Israeli shekels, and
yeah, I know it sounds like magic beans, but trust me it was a lot of money. That
was actually about ten days worth of hard work for me. So I bought an SEO course,
a Search Engine Optimization course for another $997, so it’s another $1000, which
was pretty much all I was making per month if I was working twelve hours a day
without weekends. And I’ve gone through it in a day, I pulled no punches and
within just four months my blog started ranking SERPs, SERPs being Search Engine
Result Pages. Now notice how I’m saying just four months, because compared to what
I’ve had previously done, four months seemed like a very, very little time. If it
takes me four month develop something today, I’m actually not considering that to
be a success. But back in the day, that was what I was thinking and feeling.

So I’m getting visitors and I’m getting lots of them, but the problem is nobody is
buying anything. I check Google Analytics and discover I’m not ranking for any of
the key words I’ve optimized for, and instead I rank for a bunch of weird
keywords. Keywords that could never result in Wired traffic. Turns out that he
words I was targeting for were too competitive, so instead I was getting trickles
of traffic from stuff that wasn’t even relevant. “Now how about back links, then?”
I thought to myself. “What if all I needed to do according to the SEO course I was
studying, it was to build more back links, then I would rank for those comparative
keywords.” And that didn’t seem hard enough, didn’t seem too hard, I’m sorry. I
went to do some guest posting, I contacted the folks at daily blogger and a bunch
of other the great internet marketing blogs with some SEO value, and I was
actually checking their SEO value before contacting them or before responding to
their requests. And the weirdest thing happened. Now I’m getting more visitors,
but they don’t convert yet, and I’m still broke and I’m still overworked trying to
juggle a real job and this blog, but now I’m being perceived as somewhat of a guru
by my readers because I have a big website with a bunch of content, I’ve been
guest blogging another blogs, I get fan mail, I even got some coaching requests
from other people to teach them how to make money online for free. Got some GD
proposals going on, people wanted to interview me and create a product out of it,
which was exciting, but my exciting was short lived because as much as I’ve tried,
I couldn’t deposit newly found fame into my checking account. After having tried
every traffic method there was, I finally gave in and turned to the dark side of
paid traffic generation. The hardest part was to break away from the belief that I
wasn’t qualified to run paid traffic, that it wasn’t my birthright to play at the
big boys poker table, so to speak. It kept me from even looking into paid traffic
for years. I decided to take it slow. I must have bought half a dozen paid traffic
courses before pulling the plunge on my first paid campaign, and within just three
weeks I knew everything there was to know about Google AdWords, Yahoo PPC, which
has now Bin Ads, Pay Per View marketing, even CPA, cost per requisition marketing.
AdWords was the first thing I tried, everyone was doing it at the time so I
figured I might as well start there. AdWords was the Facebook Ads of the 2000’s.
These days everyone had abandoned the Google for greener Facebook bastards of
course, although I think that’s a mistake because Google AdWords is still kicking
but, it’s working much better. At least for me it’s working much better than
Facebook. Facebook is way too competitive at this point, ineffective, time
consuming and too overrated to be ranked in the same category as AdWords. But
again, let’s just leave it for another time. So I’m on AdWords and it took Google
AdWords 27 hours to ban me. I violated some kind of a clause in their user
agreement that I frankly never read, and honestly who does, they didn’t bother
explaining or warning me, they just kicked me out.

So I tried Pay Per View marketing. Those were the fastest $200 I ever lost, not
because it was bad traffic, probably because I didn’t know what I was doing. But
it was a start. My first bump on the long road and I mastered paid traffic,
primarily solo ads over the next year or so. First I relied heavily on PPV, but
when solo ad started coming around, although they were pricier, I moved all my
marketing dollars there and the rest is history. So the lesson of today’s episode
is that the pursuit of free traffic cost me three and a half years, it cost me
tens of thousands of dollars over the span of those three years, money I didn’t
have, usually borrowed then had to pay off in payments. And it’s time I could
never buy back. And looking back now, I really wish I just went directly into paid
traffic because trying to get this free traffic, it was the most expensive lesson
I’ve ever gone through. Okay, this experience I’ll never forget and I’ll probably
always regret having stuck away from paid traffic for such a long time because I
didn’t feel I was worthy or qualified to do it. And the lesson for you is to not
make the same mistake. Don’t feel like paid traffic something that only the big
boys are allowed to use. Paid traffic is for everybody, and is often much, much,
much easier to work with than free traffic, and it’s faster too. So think about it
on the coming weekend, as you kind of stare into the blank screen on your auto
responder account, see that it’s not growing, and then ask yourself, “Hey, what
can I do about it?” Well, mind-wise, start buying traffic. So this is Igor, thank
you again for tuning in for another episode of the List Building Lifestyle, and
until the next time we chat, have a good one.

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to
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one conversion tactic we share on the show might double your list and double your
business. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at
listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy
of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival .
This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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