My Least Profitable Traffic Source

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Igor: Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your
host Igor Kheifets. In spite of me bashing Facebook and social media all the time,
my least favorite and least profitable traffic source is actually banner ads.
Yeah, in fact, least less profitable than Facebook too, because I was able to make
Facebook work several times in my life time, although less so recently, but banner
ads have always been sort of like this rotten apple in my basket. Because see, the
problem with banner ads is that you pay for impressions and it’s up to you to
generate that click through rate, the CTR so you could be on average, you could be
getting say 100 clicks from 10,000 impressions, which means your banner ad has
appeared 10,0000 times on people’s screens and phones and computers, well probably
mostly desktop traffic actually, and then only one hundred of these people clicked
on the link. Now of course 10,000 impressions, I mean those are not unique, so you
could have appeared only on 4000 people’s computers, but you appeared several
times for each of them. But that’s not the point. The point is that, regardless of
how many clicks I pull whether 50, 100, 200 I will always pay the same price for
the impressions, which means that my cost per click is calculated based on how
many clicks I could pull, which means that as a banner advertiser, somebody who
runs the damn banner ad my job is to do whatever I can to pull the most clicks. So
I have to walk the fine line between doing something outrageous to get people’s
attention to get them to click, and to not go overboard and generate clicks that
are not interested in whatever you got to offer. And so the reason, one of the
reasons why I really hate banner ads at this point is because no matter which
banner ad strategy I try, I am never able to make it work financially for me, and
the traffic I’m getting is always oh so cold, really really cold, in fact almost
offensively called because instead of filling out their details people often times
fill out bogus information into the form and they sort of just come in to trolling
and see what I’ve got rather than to genuinely inspect, and maybe even make a
decision. So in my entire life span of marking online I’ve made about a dozen
attempts to run banner ads, and only one of them was successful, and the only
reasonable successful is because I was selling a really, really expensive coaching
program to a really, really target crowd advertising and banner on the website
where I was already pretty famous. Of course I’m talking about the Warrior Forum.
The Warrior Forum is probably one of the few places I will ever test from now one
for banner ads for internet marketing products, and if you haven’t yet, I would
probably recommend you do. Ever since Freelancer took over however, when they
bought the Warrior Forum out for like 80 million dollars, it’s not been the same.
The quality of the traffic has really gone down and compared to when I was
advertising on the Warrior Forum back in 2013 and 2014, I could run a $100 banner
ad for 24 hours and generate one or two $6000 or $8000 sales off of that. So
naturally, I only needed one sale to cover a full month worth of banner ads, but
at this point it’s not so. Because first of, the competition has grown a lot on
the banner ad and this is probably one of the downsides of having any publicly
available traffic sources where everybody else can see that you’re advertising, so
soon as they do, they start trying and they upload ads and they compete, etc.

Second thing, the price has gone down. Incidentally, it’s supposed to improve your
advertising, of course, but by dropping the price a little bit by now charging 60
for 10,000 impressions Freelancer has killed the banner ad in the Warrior forum.
What they’ve done is that they lowered the barrier to a point where anyone can
advertise and they can do whatever they want, and it takes them too frickin long.
When Warrior forums was owned by the previous owner, which incidentally, I cannot
recall the name, they were charging $100 for 24 hours. So they weren’t really
charging you based on impressions, they were charging based on time. And with that
made, it made virtually impossible for most people to advertise in the Warrior
forum because they just couldn’t afford it. I mean it was just too little of an
advertising for such an incredible amount of money, and so that is why I was
thriving because I could easily afford that with my high ticket program, but now
that everybody’s advertising and it’s so polluted then it isn’t as effective as it
once used to be. Now but you think then, “Hey Igor, but that’s just one form of
banner advertising, why don’t you try other forms?” and so I did. I’ve tried
banner advertising on Google, the Visual Network, on the Graphic Network, whatever
it’s called. I mean they could have just called it Banner Ads, but they came up
with some stupid googleish name for it. That has generated the same effect. I’m
able to get the clicks, however they just don’t seem to convert for me personally.
Of course everything I mention in this episode is my personal experience, I don’t
know what your experience is going to be, and I would recommend you test it out,
but for me is the least profitable traffic source from all Google related traffic
sources is the banner ads. And why is that? I really don’t know. Perhaps people
take it the wrong way, perhaps they perceive anyone who had advertises on a banner
ad even if it’s a retargeting ad, maybe they just perceive in their own way, maybe
they don’t take it seriously like Facebook. When people go on Facebook, their news
feed is flooded with ads and nobody takes those that seriously anymore, so you
have to appear in their Facebook feed for like 30 times before they will even
acknowledge your existence, and that just again takes too much time and too much
money, because on Facebook just like when other banner ads related traffic
sources, even though Facebook is not a banner related traffic source, it’s sort of
like its own little hybrid. On Facebook you’re paying for impression. And so if
your ad doesn’t pull the right CTR, click through rate, then you end the paying
way more money per lead. Now it doesn’t mean that if you’re pulling a good CTR
then you’re going to pay less per lead, because then it could be just getting lots
of clicks and no conversions.

So that is why these impression based traffic sources that require you to worry
about the click are so annoying to me, and I really really hate them. I honestly
do hate them. I much rather drive traffic on a cost per click basis, cost per
click meaning that I’m only paying for an actual click on my link, and these of
course are Solo Ads, AdWords, you know, these types of traffic sources that are
working much better for me, and have always worked much better for me, because
there’s no need to get distracted on the CTR. Because the problem with CTR hunting
is that you forget which are number one goal in an advertising campaign really is,
and that goal is to make money, to make sales, and when you’re so busy, when
you’re investing so much energy into getting more CTR, and to get higher CTR, into
perhaps like trying to figure out how to draw a red or a pink frame to your ad
image, what kind of arrow to use here, maybe like a smiley face, maybe you’ll just
put a text on a wight background and disguise it as a hyperlink by making it blue
and underlying it. Maybe you’ll do that and that’s when they click. When you’re
busy figuring that shit out, you’re not figuring out how to make more money, how
to create more offers, how to create a better backend, how to be smart about your
email follow up and so on and so forth, all you’re concerned about is the damn
CTR. But then what happens if God forbid you succeed? What if you then take your
CTR from 0.02 of a percent, to say 0.98? Then you’re just getting more clicks, but
you’re not making any money still because you forgot that you’re supposed to sell
something, that you are supposed to get the right type of leads. And so all the
sudden you find yourself spending a ton of money, getting a ton of clicks, but now
it’s even more frustrating than it used to be because while you’re getting all
these clicks and all this traffic, you’re not making any sales. So you’ve just
wasted two weeks trying to come up with this brilliant banner ad or this brilliant
Facebook ad image that didn’t yield any results whatsoever, and your just spent a
lot of time, a lot of money trying to get where you are today. So why would you do
that if you could literally not worry about any of that nonsense and simply pay
for the targeted click with something like solo ads or AdWords, but of course,
again, I’ve mentioned this in several previous episodes, AdWords is not as easy as
it seems. Decent key word and decent click will cost you anywhere between $5 and
$15, depending on the industry. If you’re in the weight loss, then you need to get
ready for $20. If you’re in the insurance, I need you to get ready for $50. And a
lot of times you won’t even be allowed to advertise because of some stupid Google
policy. So you have to keep that in mind, and you have to really consider the
opportunity cost when you’re choosing the traffic source to use for your business.
Is it worth investing two months into trying to figure out a great CTR strategy
and go CTR hunting because once you do, and maybe even if you make a few sales,
you’ll have a competitor trying to knock it off real, real quick. Because anyone
who advertises on the impression based traffic sources, they’re always watching
their competitors, they’re always watching for the ads that appear all the time,
they’re running all the time, which means these ads are successful and the moment
they figure out you’re ad is successful, they will knock it off, they will copy
and paste it. If you’re using a pink arrow pointing sideways, and that’s the
reason why you’re getting great CTR, two days from now you will have someone
upload an image with the exact same fricking arrow pointing sideways in pink
color, because that’s what people do. They don’t wanna split tests, and they don’t
want to test for themselves, they want to optimize. They just want to come in and
hit the jackpot, so what they do is they use software and creativity to spy on
successful ads, or at least whatever is perceived successful and to knock them
off.

So what you’ve done by investing two months of hard work, is really you have
prepared to soil for the guy coming after you, and you made his job easier by
telling him what works and what doesn’t, and testing it with your own money. So if
you want to do that, be my guest, but honestly just drop the impression-based CTR,
the impression-based traffic sources and move to a CPC traffic source of some
kind, so if you’re a business opportunity space or internet marketing space try
solo ads. If you’re in a different wide niche then try something else, but
whatever that is, impression based traffic sources for me, my experience have so
far been nothing but a waste of time, and I would recommend you go the other
route. So thank you again for tuning in for another episode of the List Building
Lifestyle, I’m your host Igor Kheifets, and till 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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This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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