Real Cost Of Free Traffic

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process then this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend a free workshop at Igor.ac where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.45 cents in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day. I’m also explaining why I walked away from ClickBank and I don’t promote ClickBank offers anymore as well as the five things I look for in the perfect affiliate offer.

I’m even going to show you the one page website that I used to make over half a million dollars in affiliate commissions this year and I’ll even bribe you to attend this workshop by giving you a $497 value course that shows you how to share your big high converting affiliate offers for your next affiliate promotion. In addition, I’ll even give you the three offers I’m promoting right now that are making me money as we speak. All that and more at Igor.ac. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your host Igor Kheifets. One of the things about parenting that they don’t tell you is that once you are a parent, most of the time you will only make friends with other people who are parents. It’s kind of like when once you’re a couple, you sort of go out only with other couples. It’s really hard to maintain a friendship and a schedule going out with people that are basically single. And you can still make it work probably, but it’s going to be very difficult and you will find yourself kind of reverting back to couple dates rather than couple to single dates.

Now, but that’s not the point. The point is that ever since I became a parent that I started making friends with other dads and one of those dads that I’ve met about a month ago or so is a guy, amazing guy, big heart. And he actually helped me out big time with one of the issues that I had. So I met this guy and we went out to grab some coffee because when he found out that I’m into marketing, right? And I’m like, “I know how to build lists and get leads,” et cetera. He was like, “I have to pick your brain. You have to be help me. Tell me what to do.” Because he runs an insurance company, he’s an insurance agent and insurance, it’s all about the leads, right? It’s all about the numbers. You have 20 phone calls, you close five people. You collect from three and then that’s pretty much the game. And the quality of your leads pretty much dictates whether or not you’ll be making money.

And that industry, the way it works right now is it’s mostly based on search engine optimization and paid traffic. And meaning that for the most part, people go online looking for insurance and that’s where a lot of these companies get their leads.
Igor Kheifets: So my friend and I were having coffee and he started sharing with me how they’re getting their leads. And their strategy is old SEO, right? Their strategy is old search engine optimization. So that’s free traffic, right? And we spoke about this and I encouraged him to do paid traffic. I told him he needs to build a webinar. But of course when you’re used to getting traffic, quote unquote for free automatically from the search engines, you are not really pumped up to go and build a webinar, especially if you’ve never built one before. So that’s, I mean that’s still a conversation. I planted a seed and I will continue to plant more seeds and more seeds until he actually does build the webinar. But until then the conversation is about traffic, not so much about the offers. And we’ve been talking for an hour and a half and we’re chatting and chatting and chatting.

He’s very adamant about not trying pay traffic because there’s no reason to. They’re getting free traffic. And but it’s evident that the competition is fierce. It’s evident that they need to create lots of content. They need to build those backlinks. And there’s a lot, but there’s a proper business that goes behind optimizing a website for search engines these days. And then I’m not sure why I decided to ask him, “So what, how do you do that? Because that’s a lot of work. How do you do that? Do you hire people to do that?” And he says, “Yeah.” And turns out he’s got a bunch of people working for him for a payroll of about 20 grand a month, and they’ve already invested three quarters of $1 million into, you know, traffic basically and some infrastructure. And I was like, “Wow, this is incredible.”

So you want to tell me that you’re investing 20 grand a month and you’ve already invested three quarters of $1 million, that’s $750,000 in order to get the free traffic. Yeah. Wow. So that’s what I’ve been saying for years now. If you’ve been following my podcast or reading any of my emails, you know that I’ve been saying this for years. There’s no such thing as free traffic. It just does not exist anymore. You can’t just get online and start getting tons and tons and tons of visitors for free. It doesn’t work like that. You will have to put in a lot of work and often times that will require monetary investments. When I was doing SEO and I was doing SEO eight or nine years ago. When I was doing SEO, I still had to buy the keyword research software. I still had to join some kind of a blog network that exchanges backlinks and that costs money. I still have to create content. I had to design my website, which costs money.

So there was always an investment. And I’m not even talking about the time investment because SEO was not instant SEO is not paid traffic where you turn it on and off as you please. SEO is that thing that takes a really long time to actually see results. So you could be investing 20,000 a month for the next six month and you can still walk away with very little traffic. That is why I was never a fan of free traffic. I mean I went through that path myself. I went through the path of trying to build free traffic portfolio, putting together assets, writing lots of content, shooting videos, building a backlink network. And that was tedious effort. But when I look at all the traffic I’ve got and how it converted for me and I realize that of all this time and all the effort I’ve put in, I’ve made very little. I’ve made very little.

In fact, I was making less than a McDonald’s employee at the time if you took the averages of of what I made and how much I invested and for how long I’ve been investing it, then it was very clear to me that if I wanted more freedom, if I wanted more leverage, if I wanted better results, I had to get comfortable with the idea that not nothing is free. There’s no such thing as free traffic and that I might as well pay for it with my dollars instead of with my life because that’s what happens when you try to do search engine optimization. And again, don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of friends who are search engine optimization experts. In fact, this buddy of mine that I just told you about, they are making money, they’re just having to invest a lot as well.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. Oh and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

I also, I interviewed Greg Jeffries on the show. He’s big into the search engine optimization for affiliate marketing. So I’ve got, I understand SEO and it’s a strategy just like any other. It’s just a lot of people get into search engine optimization thinking that that’s free traffic, but it’s never, it’s never, never, never free. And it really depends of course on the kind of person you are. Because if you’re the kind of person that says, “Well, I don’t mind working 10 hours a day for three years to generate 100 visitors to my website every day,” then okay, SEO may be for you. Maybe that’s where you are. Maybe you’re a college student and you’re broke and you really, really, really don’t have any other way and you’re planning to succeed three years from now and not tomorrow. In that case, you can probably do SEO and that would be a very comfortable strategy for you.

But if you have a life, if you have a business, if you have goals and ambition, then you’re probably better off with paid traffic. You’re probably better off at, with paying for those clicks instead of trying to get those clicks for free and ended up paying for those clicks anyway by buying tools and services and outsourcing and bringing the team of content writers and joining networks and buying backlinks and getting memberships and joining SEO masterminds and on and on and on. Instead of doing all of that, you may be better off just by optimizing an AdWords campaign or optimizing a Solo Ads campaign or optimizing a YouTube Ads campaign, whatever. I mean, optimize anything besides Facebook ads campaign, right? Because those campaigns are just not worth your time.

But AdWords or anything else, anything that gets you in a position where you can pay for a click, get it predictably, you can scale or go backwards at a basically at will. Right? So if you, if it’s converting, you can go, you can ramp it up and if it’s not converting, you can shut it down. And of course, yes it does cost money, but the amount of time that you save is incredible because you will, I mean, you will still end up paying a lot of that money to SEO if you do SEO. And that’s what I’m saying here. You will still end up spending tens of thousands of dollars even if you’re driving free traffic. So you might as well do it with paid traffic because it’s just faster. And quite frankly it’s easier because with SEO a lot of times you can’t see things.

A lot of times you’re operating in the dark. It’s kind of like one of those pin a tail on the donkey games where the task is actually not as simple as pinning a tail on a donkey. It’s more like put together a really complex machinery with blindfolded, more like that. But with SEO, you really don’t know. You almost never know whether or not what you’re doing is working. You really can’t control the rankings. I mean you can do what Google is asking you to. If you talk to enough people, buy enough products, join enough masterminds, they’ll tell you about some of the white hat and black hat techniques that will get you ranked. The problem is that Google will never tell, so you can’t really have full control.

And another problem is Google can just change the rules as they’ve done in last… they’ve probably changed those rules about 10 times in the last 10 years where they went from penguins and pandas and other and giraffes and stuff like that. And they basically adjusted the algorithms all the time throughout the years. And the reason they do it is because people always try to abuse the system. And for as long as people will be people and for as long as people will try to abuse the system, Google will keep changing the rules because the moment they see that a lot, that most people figure out a way to rank in a guaranteed way, if you will. That’s when they change it because they don’t want people to know the secret sauce. They don’t want people to be able to do that because they want the natural ranking to occur.

I know it’s a little bit absurd, but what they want is what’s best for the user and not what’s best for marketing. And obviously that’s not always the case. So that’s my point. Don’t chase free traffic because it’s really never free. Don’t think that you won’t have to pay for it because you will. And the scenario I want you to try and avoid is chasing free traffic for three years and then eventually learning exactly what I just told you in the last 15 minutes and realizing that paid traffic is the way to go because that’s been my experience. I went for three and a half years basically doing that and then I was like, “Something ain’t working. Let me try a different strategy. Let me try something I’ve never tried before.” And that is paid traffic.

And the pleasant discovery was paid traffic even converts better, too. Sure you can get search engine really targeted keywords. And if you can manage it, awesome. That’s great, great, great, great bonus. In fact, I wouldn’t say no to that if I could get it, but the fact of the matter is it’s easier for you to build a business with paid traffic and learn how to convert advertising into profit rather than try to build an SEO empire that may crumble tomorrow because someone in Google wakes up and be like, “Well, we haven’t changed the algorithm in a while. It seems like people are ranking. It’s time.” And they press that big red button that says algorithm change and you’re done. You wake up and you ain’t got a business.

This happens every time, every single time. Every few years there’s going to be a horror story of this happening and it obviously it’s not just about Google because it happens pretty much everywhere. Amazon can do it. Google does it, Facebook does it. YouTube will do it. I mean it’s always the same. The process is always the same and that’s why another lesson here is to build your list because it doesn’t matter how great all your campaigns are working and how amazing your traffic is working right now. Chances are it will stop at some point, so you might as well. Might as well build the list because that will allow you to build an asset, a cushion, if you will, that will sustain your business for years rather than you relying on an ongoing stream of new customers all the time.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say for today. Thank you so much for tuning in for another episode of the List Building Lifestyle and until next time we chat, have a good one.

Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, a transcription of today’s show as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week where I show the two step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Matt Bacak, John Crestani, Richard Legg, Michael Cheney, and many, many others. In fact, on this workshop, I’m going to show you the exact approach which I take whenever I promote an affiliate offer, the exact offers I promote, as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000 people promoting a weird type of product that almost no else promotes. All that is yours at Igor.ac. So go ahead, claim your seat right now and I’ll see you there.