In this video, we're gonna talk about understanding web traffic in general, understanding what it is. A lot of people have some misconceptions about what traffic is, how to get traffic, where to find traffic, and how to manage abundant traffic sources. There is such a thing as abundant traffic sources, and you might be looking in the wrong place if you're just thinking that traffic is like, you know, highway traffic or vehicles moving through a highway. That's not quite what it's like. You have to master the process of getting traffic. If you master it once you master it, I'm not gonna say, if I'm gonna say, when you do master it, you'll be able to make money on command, because internet marketing is very simple. It's not easy to do, but it is simple to explain and understand. You need to get traffic to an offer, okay?


You have to have an offer, something online for sale, and you have to get people to that offer. That's the traffic, okay? So once you master the part about getting traffic, well, there's an abundance of products online that you can sell. So you can essentially make money on command. The key is to avoid platform and other dependencies in the process of generating this traffic. And this is a trap that a lot of people fall into when they're first starting. They think, well, oh my God, I gotta get traffic, but I don't have any money, so I'm gonna do it with SEO. I'm not gonna buy the traffic. I'm gonna wait for my traffic to come in forever. And then I'm gonna complain during the process that it's taking too long to make money. So they start creating a platform dependent business. They start trying to appease Google and trying to appease Bing and Yahoo and all these search engines and try to create the perfect webpage that will come up on searches for keywords that they never even really looked into creating a product for.


So it's very difficult to create organic traffic, pla and, and, you know, develop platform dependent businesses in the process. And, and, you know, that's why I'm gonna say you wanna master the art of, I'm gonna talk about the three ways to get traffic and how to avoid these platform dependencies. But in my business, I do zero SEO zero, literally zero. I care absolutely not at all about whether I'm on the first page of Google or that's, or the other thing. And I still make millions of dollars a year. So you know, it really just is about mastering the process of getting traffic and don't fall into the trap of becoming dependent on Google or someone else for traffic. 'cause The moment that they change something, your business, it just, it just stops, right? So once you perfect, you know, you perfect the process of creating a positive return on the investment for the traffic that you're making.


That investment could be a cash investment, it could be a time investment, whatever the case might be. Once you master that with your traffic campaigns, you can literally write your own ticket in any niche. This isn't specific to internet marketing. Make money online, personal development, supplements, health and fitness. It doesn't matter. Once you understand the principles of getting traffic, you are gonna be able to make money on command regardless of the niche that you're doing business in. So let's start right here. What is web traffic? It is not a whole bunch of people surfing the wires of the internet to get from one website to another. That is not traffic. Now, in, you know, conventional wisdom makes us think that traffic is like driving in a vehicle. And usually when people are driving in a vehicle, they're going from one destination to another.


Well, online traffic is just people on the web. It could be a bunch of people that are already at the destination. They're not in the transit to get there. And, and the word traffic by definition kind of makes you think that they're in, in the process of moving, that they're going from here to there, and that your job is to kinda jump in front of them. You know, so my people are surfing the web and I'm, I wanna jump in front of them on a, on a wave next to 'em and hold up a sign and say, wait, stop surfing. Come here. That is a man, that is a tough job to create for yourself, because that's not what it is. It's not cars on a super highway. In reality, it's more like people wandering around in a giant mall. They're not speeding from one destination to the other.


They're just, you know, there for various reasons. Some people are there shopping, some people are there just browsing, spending a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday afternoon. Some people are hanging out trying to pick up chicks or guys or whatever. Some are just having a good time. Some, some might have gone to dinner or whatever. So it's a bunch of people there. They're at the destination, but they might be going from this part of the destination to the other part of the destination. They might just be congregating in one particular part of that destination. Maybe they all just went there to drink and they're at the bar. You know, who knows, right? So it, it's, it's a, it's a place where a whole bunch of people are congregating. The traffic itself is the people that are on the web. And your job as a marketer, if you're gonna be successful at traffic, is identifying where these people are congregating?


And by what means do they congregate? What is it that brings these people together? And once you master that, you will have mastered getting traffic. 'cause You'll be able to infiltrate and, and influence these groups of people, okay? And that's a big difference from thinking that they're just zipping from one place to the other. And that you gotta jump in front of them as the word traffic implies. Okay? So here's the types of traffic. First of all, not every traffic, not all types of traffic or people on the internet. Remember from this point forward, whenever I refer to traffic, I'm not talking about people zipping from one start point to a destination on the internet, okay? I'm talking about just people on the web and congregations, okay? So not all of these groups are equal. They're not created equally. Therefore, not all traffic is equally effective, okay?


Some of it is better than others. There's good traffic and there is bad traffic. There is literally traffic that can hurt you. I'm not saying that there's traffic that didn't convert I I, and which means, you know, converting from a visitor to a buyer. 'cause Obviously that's non-responsive tar traffic or on targeted traffic or traffic that just sucked and I couldn't sell. But there's actually bad traffic, traffic that can hurt your business. You know, for example, and, and we'll talk a little bit more about the specifics of bad type of traffic with another slide here, but there's actually types of traffic that you want to stay away from because they could hinder the prosperity of your business. When you create a campaign that's successful, what you're doing is you, you're, you're doing a bunch of things, right? There's a bunch of variables to make this work, okay?


So an offer doesn't just fail because of the traffic or because there's a bunch of things. You gotta have the right offer for the right group of people and being presented the right way. I talk a lot about this in, in other videos that I cover product creation and where I cover sales copy. We're not gonna dive into it here because this is more about the traffic itself, but you can't sell to everybody the same product in the same way. So there's three things there that you've gotta consider, okay? You gotta consider the type of person, the type of product and the type of sales message, okay? So we might be selling with video, or we might be selling through long form sales copy, or we might be selling through a billboard or through a letter, or through a magazine ad, or there are so many ways to sell, right?


So that's part one. There are so many types of people to sell, right? There's tech savvy people, and there's not tech savvy people. There's, there's people that are very intelligent and there's people that, you know, never graduated, you know, never got outta grammar school or whatever, you know, or dropped outta school. There's people that are, you know, baby boomers. And then there's people that are a generation what is that? The millennials that they just got outta college or whatever. So you've got various types of people. You could have somebody that's a baby mover, that's very tech savvy. You might have a millennial that doesn't even know how to use a smartphone. That's usually not the particular demographic structure. But you know, my point is that you've got a lot of different ways to sell to a lot of different types of people.


And you have different types of products that you sell. So you might be selling coaching, or you might be selling a digital information product like an ebook or a video course, or you might be selling some sort of a, I don't know, a, a, a widget, a software or something technical like that. So you could be selling software to a baby boomer through a video, right? Or you could be selling information products to a millennial through a long form sales letter. There are so many different combinations of campaigns or, or of offers that you could put together. So we can't just blame the traffic. There's a lot of other variables that are involved. But just remember that not all traffic is created equally, right? And it's usually weighted heavily by a particular type of audience, okay? I can't say that, well, this traffic is just baby boomers.


It is only people between the age of 60 and 75 or whatever it is. You can never just identify it that way because there's always gonna be some mixture in the traffic, but it's, it's usually weighted pretty. He, you know, heavily on things. Now, one of the things that we do amongst each other as marketers is we kind of assign a temperature to these, to these traffic sources, right? And to these leads more specifically. So, lead temperature is one way that we refer to the traffic. Warm leads are ones that have been marketed to already or they've been pre-sold. They have a greater propensity to buy. Cold leads have no idea who the hell you are or what the product is. They've just kind of into this thing. And usually when newbies come on the scene, or when people just first start to do their business online, they tend to think that the more traffic you have, the better things are gonna be.


That is not the case, okay? Now, I've learned this firsthand in the brick and mortar world as well because the type of traffic is very, very important. You know, have they been marketed to, have they been pre-sold? Do they have a propensity to buy your product? You know, I learned this lesson the hard way when I was selling door-to-door, and I used to sell pizza coupons, right? So I used to have these coupon books for pizza a great deal. You get to buy one, get one free pizza for a year for $20. So when you buy one of these coupon books, you get one absolutely free pizza, which is free pizza, which is the value of the, the price of the book. So 20 bucks, you get a free pizza, and then you also get one, get one free pizza for the entire year.


Great deal for 20 bucks. So here's the thing if that pizza is a you know, I, I'll give you an example. I'm trying to, I'm trying to give you the best possible example. When I would go with that pizza certificate into an Indian neighborhood, Indians generally live in, in, in this neighborhood, and I would go in there, they would just buy it up because Indians are vegetarians generally speaking, and they buy a lot of pizza. They eat a lot of pizza. So that type of traffic right there, that congregation of people was much more targeted to the offer that I had. Okay? Now, if I was walking around with a gift, a coupon book for Omaha steaks or something like that where it was like a meat lovers thing, then I wouldn't perform very well for that traffic, right?


Even though I had all these buyers there in this huge apartment building that wanted to buy from me, and I can go from door to door to door to door super quickly I have all these leads, but they're not targeted, right? So there are warm leads, there are cold leads, and there are specific types of traffic, okay? So targeted traffic is people that you've identified as having a propensity to buy based on variables like prior interest, prior action, or demographics, right? So I just made an example of demographics. This Indian culture in this particular part of town in this neighborhood there's a big group of vegetarian eaters. And if you have a vegetarian type of offer in that area, and you're selling it door to door, or you're doing a postcard mailer to that area, you're gonna do much better than if you mail them a stake offer, right?


So in that particular case, demographics played a role. What's another particular case that, you know, might be something to consider? Well, prior action. What if you were targeting people that had already filled out a request for an information form? Those people are very hot leads because they've literally asked for more information on the product, which means they've had, they've demonstrated a prior interest, right? They've demonstrated a prior interest and they've taken prior action. So if, if they've never shown a prior interest, if they've never taken a prior action and they're not a targeted demographic, the traffic is cold. You can assume that it's just cold traffic. Now, I mentioned earlier about bad traffic, right? Well, bad traffic can be dangerous and dangerous traffic is something that you have to be mindful, okay? This is traffic that actually hurts vendor stats and can actually cause blacklisting, okay?


This is usually unsolicited or unwitting or traffic that you force onto your page or onto your offer. It's when someone has zero propensity. You see, look, if you put a billboard on the side of a highway and people are driving past it, if they're not interested, they're just gonna keep driving, right? But when you block the road with that billboard and they're not interested in it, and now you're somehow inconveniencing them or affecting their lives in a way with something that they have zero interest in, guess what? Now that person is upset, well, that traffic can hurt you because that person can click a spam button and that person can report your site to their ISPN. 


What happens is, it's that little spam button on that, on that email client and on that browser, when people click that little, that little button you know, what ends up happening is when the, the, the ISP, the internet service provider gets a whole bunch of these reports f from, from people that are reporting a specific site as malicious or as hazardous or what have you, they might just be upset. You might not be malicious, you might not have any kind of virus or anything like that that you're trying to do, but they just, you know, they're just upset that they were forced onto this page that they didn't click to be on, or somehow they got onto this thing. 


You know, I give you a perfect example. You ever go to a website and you open up a website. This happens a lot with these blogs, like celebrity blogs and advertisement blogs, and you go there and you click on the thing because you saw an ad somewhere, and then all of a sudden it doesn't just open up one side, it opens like three, and then like these other things kind of open. It's like, you're like, oh god, Jesus, why did I click on that? You know, I, I saw the picture of the, of, of the girl with the big boobs and I clicked it, and all of a sudden I've got like 10 things opened up on my browser, and like, oh, and now you're trying to close it, and you try to close this one, it opens another one.


They're like, oh, what have I done? Right? It's happened to everyone. But the, the, the situation that you have now is you're gonna have people that are possibly gonna click the spam button are gonna report that page. If you're, if you're sending traffic this way to offers that traffic is dangerous if you're the vendor that's receiving that type of traffic from affiliates, that affiliate is, is hurting your business, it's, it's, you know, possibly gonna cause your domain or your URL or your IP address where your website is to get blacklisted. And like I said, this usually is caused by unsolicited, unsolicited unwitting, or forced traffic. Okay? So this, I've learned this lesson the hard way as a vendor. You know, usually when we're talking about traffic driving traffic, you know, it's about making sales. So the purpose of learning to drive traffic to an offer is because we wanna make money.


Now, that offer might be our own product as a vendor, or it might be someone else's product that we're promoting as an affiliate. Nonetheless, it's an offer. So when we're talking about dangerous traffic, you know, it's really dangerous to you both ways. If you're an affiliate, you shouldn't be trying to drive forced traffic. You shouldn't be forcing people to go, you know, if, if that person didn't somehow show an interest, or if you didn't cause that person to first be interested in the pro product that you are going to be marketing to them, then you are sending very you know, sketchy traffic to an offer, you're not gonna convert well. So your metrics are gonna be skewed. And we're gonna talk a little bit about metrics in another slide. As a vendor, man, I've learned this lesson the hard way because I've, you know, like many marketers, when you first start, you think it's, man, I just need to get as many affiliates as I possibly can.


The more traffic the merrier, right? And that isn't the case, because if you start approving affiliates that you don't know, and they don't know what the hell they're doing and you know, you got two people that don't know what the hell they're doing, you got a vendor that's just approving anybody as long as they got a pulse and they got a computer, they're, or not even a computer, as long as they got a pulse, you can market and send traffic to me through your phone, through whatever. But if that person's not sending the right kind of traffic, if they're not pre-selling and pre-marketing to that traffic, they're sending you cold traffic, that traffic is gonna hurt you. Not just because it could be potentially dangerous and get you blacklisted, but it's also gonna affect your metrics because it's gonna be traffic that doesn't convert. It's untargeted. 


It's people that weren't pre-sold, and generally speaking, it's not gonna perform well. So now it's gonna count as a lot of hits that don't turn into sales. It's gonna negatively affect your metrics or your statistics for the product. And those statistics are what big affiliates look at when they're deciding whether or not they're going to promote your product. So, again, this traffic can, bad traffic can be dangerous in various ways. Let's talk about generally, and, and you're gonna, you're gonna hear me talk about types of traffic and ways of getting traffic and, and there's, there's three types of traffic here that I wanna mention. And later on you're going to, you're gonna hear me mention three type three ways of getting traffic. So don't confuse the two, the three types of traffic are evergreen, transient, and viral. 


So evergreen traffic is traffic that's consistent and perpetual. It's something that you're just, it's just constantly coming in. Alright? So for example, you set up some sort of a lead acquisition on a particular website that's constantly frequented by new people, and now all of a sudden you're constantly having an evergreen source. Whenever you hear the word evergreen, it generally means open forever, like perpetually open, okay?
That's usually what the word evergreen means. Lasting forever, not expiring, not ending. And that's what evergreen traffic is. It's, it's just consistent. It's perpetual. It's traffic that continues to come in, even though you've just set it up one time. 


Now, traffic that is transient is traffic that spikes up for a specific event. Transient traffic is what we see when we do a product launch. When you do a product launch, this is a coordinated effort to get a whole bunch of people to click that link around the same time. And that usually is a launch date. And what happens is the vendor, you might be the vendor in this particular scheme, or you might be the affiliate, but the launch is planned for a specific date and time. And what the vendor tries to do is get every one of his affiliates, he recruits affiliates, and he sets this all up with them time and time, you know, days in advance in order to get them to mail their lists of prospects that they've pre-sold, obviously, because these are not cold people, these prospects know the marketer that they're subscribed to.So it's not really cold traffic, it's warm. 


Your product is being recommended to people that ask to be on a list of a marketer that typically recommends products, and he is going to, or she is going to endorse your product in an email before sending you that visitor. So this person is warm, this is a warm lead. Cold traffic is a little bit different. It's, it's, it's traffic that somebody's just sending right off the internet through maybe an ad or, you know, doing some sort of keyword targeting or something. These are people that don't know, and until right now, this moment when they click, they didn't even care. So that's transient traffic. It's usually timed towards the specific launch date, and it spikes up and then it quickly dies down. Viral traffic is usually customer or prospect referred traffic. So when things go viral, it's because the people that are visiting it are spreading it at the same time.


That's generally what viral means on the internet. And I'm gonna recommend that anything that you're doing, whether you're an affiliate or you're a vendor, you know, you, you try, you should strive for it to go viral. I teach this in both the vendor side and the affiliate side. We've been very, very successful, and nobody's done affiliate stuff. Nobody's done viral affiliate stuff in the internet marketing space, the way Melinda and I have. We are the trendsetters in viral traffic when it comes to affiliate promotions and creating contests for prospects on product launches, not for affiliates, but for prospects that were gonna buy the product. And we've done this so successfully to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per campaign. And the cool thing about viral traffic is that it's generally free traffic because it's the people that are arriving at your website that are inviting more people to arrive at your website, that are inviting more people, and so on, and so on and so on.


So when you strive to create those kinds of processes in your marketing, you're gonna be very, very, very successful. And you're gonna, in essence, use viral traffic to create evergreen campaigns. So let's talk about the acquisition of traffic. Okay? So all traffic is gonna come at a cost, okay? It almost crawls, it creeps you know, like it gets under my skin when people are just like, well, no, I just want, I just want free traffic. Just want free traffic. Listen, free traffic, what you think is free traffic is the most expensive traffic of all, okay? Traffic comes at a cost, and you have to choose the currency that you're gonna use to pay for it. You can pay with money or you can pay with time, okay? And to me personally, I know that when it comes to time and when it comes to money, there's only one of those two things that I can make as much as I want to, okay?


You don't have the ability to make time. Like you have the ability to make money. So when it comes to, when you ask me, well, what would you rather pay this with? Would you rather pay for this with a week of your time? Or would it, would you rather pay this, pay for this with a hundred dollars out of your bank account? I'll choose a hundred dollars. Now, unfortunately, most people, myself included, when we start out to build a business, for some reason, we got it in our head that it was a good idea to build, build a business when you're flat broke, right? It's like, oh, I'm flat broke, my car is about to be repossessed, I'm about to get evicted, and I think this is the perfect time to start investing in a business, right? It's asked backwards, right? But unfortunately, a lot of people find themselves in that situation when they turn to the internet to make money.


No, a smart businessman, investor or entrepreneur would go into a venture, a money making venture or any kind of investment when they're in a bad situation in their lives, right? It just makes no sense. But unfortunately, this is what we see. And because of that, most people choose to try to compensate for the lack of money by putting in time, and then they complain when things aren't working instantly for them. Well, you didn't have any money. You know, I was recently talking to one of my friends that's made millions and millions and millions of dollars through email marketing, and we were talking about the subject of advertising, and we were talking about making a hundred thousand dollars a month. And one of the things he said to me is like, oh, Omar, making a hundred thousand dollars a month using Facebook advertising or email marketing is super duper easy.


But the thing is that most people aren't willing to invest what it takes to make a hundred thousand a month. So I said, well, what does it take to make a hundred thousand dollars a month the way that you're doing it? And he says, it takes about $300,000. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, okay. And he goes, and that's an awesome return. That's a 25% return. You know, show me any kind of regular investment opportunity that gives you a 25% return. So when you start thinking of, of your business like this, in terms of actual business of the way that business and finance and the real world operates, not this fantasy that you've created in your head about how you're gonna be rich tomorrow, because the internet said so when you start realizing that business is about investment, and to make a hundred thousand dollars in a month, you need to invest 300.


These guys that are doing a hundred thousand dollars a month in profit through advertising, they're investing $300,000 a month in ads, and yeah, at the end of the month, the bottom line says, or the top line says 400,000, and the bottom says 100. So they did $400,000 and, you know, rotated in, in gross revenue, but a hundred thousand dollars in profit, it cost 'em 300 grand in order to make a hundred. And, you know, a lot of people that set out to do a business, they figure, well, I'm gonna compensate for the fact that I have little or no money by learning how to do everything myself. I'm gonna just learn how to do everything myself, and I'm gonna do it through free traffic. So I'm gonna learn how to drive traffic for free by spending hours and hours and hours learning SEO and backlinking.
And, and then, because these traffic methods are free, they are time consuming, and they are very latent. They take a long time. They, they don't happen. See, the difference is when, when you, when you invest cash into advertising for traffic, when you invest cash, you are getting that traffic right away. So if you put a hundred dollars on it today, within an hour, you've got a hundred dollars worth of traffic hitting your site, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, there's your visitors, you paid for your visitors. Here you are, right? It's like you can, you, you can go to the store, you can go to the restaurant, and you can pay for the meal, or you can go to the forest and you can hunt it down, okay? One of 'em is going to cost you money, the other one is gonna cost you time.


And, and one of 'em is gonna, is gonna take a lot longer, and it's a lot riskier. And, and lemme tell you something, it is not the paid way. A lot of people have this misconception that the paid traffic is the risky way. No, lemme tell you something. Paid traffic, you pay for that traffic, you're gonna know what kind of traffic you're getting. First of all, you can, you can order the specific kind of traffic that you want. You can really laser target the type of traffic that you're getting, depending on the type of method for that. You're, where you're buying the traffic, but you can get really, really targeted traffic that you're paying for, and you'll have it instantly. You'll know whether or not your offer is working. You can be tweaking that offer and


Perfecting it by tomorrow. You could be making money with it. Heck, if it's, if it's right from the get go, you could be making money with it within an hour. But the other guy says, well, no, no, no, no, I'm not gonna spend a hundred dollars. I'm gonna teach myself SEO. So I'm gonna spend the next month gathering every single bit of information that I can about SEO and then I'm gonna spend the month after that trying to rank my site, and then I'm gonna spend a month after that waiting to see if Google likes my site or not. So for three months, I haven't done a freaking thing as far as money is concerned, right? Because I've got no money to invest because I was, I, I didn't wanna invest a hundred dollars or whatever it is to buy traffic. So I just wanna make sure that you don't think I'm not bashing free traffic.


I understand that some people have no choice, but actually I, I, I wanna say that everybody has a choice. But usually most people are choosing wrong. They're choosing to pay with time instead of taking a couple bucks and putting it into paid traffic. Now, there are generally three methods of acquisition. We're gonna be talking about those, okay? And there's buying traffic, borrowing traffic, and creating traffic. So buying traffic means that you pay cash for clicks. This is also referred to as PPC or pay per click advertising. This can also be solo ads or media buys. Pay per click advertising is when you go and you run an ad on a platform like let's say Facebook, you can run those little ads on the side of Facebook, a very easy thing to do and very profitable. They have rules that you have to follow.


But the cool thing about tapping into the Facebook user base is that there are hundreds of millions of people that you can tap into. It's very easy to target them. And you know, it's expensive traffic though. I mean, it is expensive traffic, but you're getting it instantly. Now, solo ad traffic is when you approach an email marketer that has a mailing list, that has built a mailing list there, various methods, and they have this list of people, and they offer to email that list for you in exchange for a fee. So they will send you clicks to your site in exchange for a fee. Media buys are usually media buy would be banner ads, video ads. There's different types of media that you place on different networks that go and buy a space on, on highly trafficked websites. So there are literally advertising firms, just like there are advertising firms that you can buy Billboard space on highways.


Well, there are advertising space firms that sell billboard space on websites, you know, and you can put all kinds of videos and banners and stuff like that. So those are generally the types of traffic that you can buy. Now, borrowing traffic implies some sort of a joint venture, okay? Traffic fusion with another affiliate or a JV partner. Somebody, for example, will put a banner for your product on their download page in exchange for you putting a banner of their product on your download page. So when someone buys their product, they get to their download page to access that product that they just bought, and they see an advertisement for your product. And now when your traffic comes to your site and buys your product, they might see an ad for this. So this is called fusion of traffic.


You're sharing one another's ads inside of each other's websites. It's like a barter, if you will. Another thing, another way to borrow traffic, the most common way, the most common way that we see in our particular space would be scheduled promotions, right? Or ad swaps, if you will. And that is where I contact an affiliate and I say, Hey, listen man, I've got a launch coming on, on this day and this time I'm gonna be doing a giveaway. I'm gonna be doing prizes, I'm gonna be doing this, whatever I'd like for you to promote my product on that day. And they schedule a promotion for you. Now, usually there is some sort of an incentive. There's gotta be something in it for them, right? So maybe they're gonna be competing for a prize, maybe you've promised to promote their product for their launch that's coming up, or something like that.


But generally ad swaps, this is you we're swapping ads. We're either swapping an email promotion, I promote for you, you promote for me, or we're swapping some sort of a, a banner or some, some way fusing traffic in one way or another. And the third way we spoke about it a little bit earlier is creating your own traffic. Now, this is powerful. It's very time consuming. Creating your own traffic is powerful, because once you've, you've got this, it generally tends to be targeted. Now, I gotta tell you this, it can be organically created through SEO, but man, I am gonna advise you to stay away from SEO when it comes to internet marketing and affiliate marketing. It's just such a time hog. Now, look, I'm saying this because of my personal choice, my personal opinion. I've gone the SEO route.
I tried it, and it was just tedious. You'll, you're always trying to juggle, you know, trying to, trying to appease the search engine. Everything can change in a minute's, a minute's notice when they change their algorithm it's tedious. It's time consuming. It takes a while for it to happen. It's competitive. You're competing with other people for keywords. You gotta rank higher than them. Why bother with all that stuff? Now, one way of creating your own traffic is building a list. Building a list of customers is probably the most powerful way to, to create your own traffic. It is, it is, man. It's like a license to print money. When you have a mailing list of customers or prospects, people that have opted in or given you their name and email and said, Hey, yeah, mail me with information about stuff. When you mail them, you make money.


It's that easy. Send emails, make money. The more emails you send, the more money you make. That's just the way that it is. And if you're not building a list, then you are probably doing the wrong thing. Because everything that you should be doing online should be geared towards building that list, okay? Now, building a list is time consuming unless you buy the leads, and that's another option for you. Now when it comes to the type of marketing that I'm talking about here and creating your own traffic, building a list is something that we do through squeeze pages. It's something that we do through providing value first. So I'm not referring to buying leads, okay? 


I'm referring to providing value and creating an ethical bribe in exchange for someone to give you their name and email and subscribe to your list. And now you can market to them doing that, especially in the beginning until you've learned to master traffic building a list, as it's time consuming. It's tedious. It took me three months to get the first 700 people on my list. And in order to do that, I had to create products to give away for free. I had to sign up to a whole bunch of free giveaway events and do all kinds of things, build squeeze pages, and do things like that in order to get people to start giving me their name and email so that then I would have the power to send an email and make money on command. 


So these are tedious endeavors, okay? Both of them are SEO and list building. I definitely think every single one of you should be building a list. I don't care if you're doing this as a vendor or doing this as an affiliate, you should be building a list. And I don't think any of you should be focusing on SEO regardless of whether you're doing affiliate marketing or vendor marketing, SEO. That's just a trap for somebody that's new. And that's my personal opinion. You can ask 10 other marketers, you might get nine other opinions. That's just what I'm recommending to you. 


One thing that I will mention to you is whether you're buying the traffic, barring the traffic, or creating the traffic, one thing to be sure of is don't waste the traffic wherever you are sending traffic to capture it, collect it, retarget it, and monetize it repeatedly. So nowadays, there are so many ways of capturing traffic. If you're sending traffic to a page, whether you're buying it, borrowing it, or creating it, traffic is precious. Whenever it gets to the target page, you should be seeking to capture it, seeking to get people to enter their name and email, seeking to drop a pixel on their computer, set a cookie, do whatever you need to do in order to be able to retarget them.


There are applications that you can use to retarget people. I'm sure this has happened to you where you visit a site maybe you were shopping for. This happened to me recently when I was buying a lamp. I was shopping for a specific type of lamp to do lighting for my videos. And I went to this website, I had done a Google search, and I went to this website that specializes in this type of LED lamp for photography. And man, after I visited that website, it seemed like every website I went to after that had a banner ad for that light. And it was like, I would go to YouTube, boom, there's an ad for the light, I'll go to like, you know, TechCrunch, boom, there's an ad for the launch. I go for the light, I go to Mashable, boom, there's an ad. Would you believe I go to Facebook and there's an ad for the light on, the exact light that I was.


Now this is, this isn't random, and this has probably happened to you. You're being retargeted when, when you visited that website, the, the site set, a little cookie, a pixel on your computer, and now they can track you, they can track where you're going on the internet, and the next site that you're at, they can market to you. So this is, this is the technology that you should be using as a vendor, and you should be even as an affiliate, you can be using this sort of technology when you run ads to bonus pages and things like that. So what happens now is you'll be able to advertise to people that have already shown an interest, thereby your conversion and your return on your investment in that advertising traffic is gonna be very, very high because it's hot traffic, they qualify, they've shown an interest, they've taken an action, they've visited a page where you set a pixel on them, right?


So this is why we do that. Now, I wanna talk about affiliate links and metrics. Those are two things that I still wanna cover here. First and foremost, affiliate links are referral links. Okay? So there's a product or an offer, it's on the web, you want to get somebody to buy it. Well, you need a way to send them there. And you can't just give them the URL to the website because how's the vendor gonna know that they came through you? Well, the way that a vendor knows that an, that a person came through you is by using an affiliate link. And that's how you refer people. Now, we get these links from affiliate networks. Usually products are listed on an affiliate network. I use JVZ. There are other networks out there. There's ClickBank, there's Deal Guardian, there's a few others. There's  a lot of others.


But JVZoo is the one that you should be using. When people click your link and buy the product, the network pays you a commission, okay? So pretty much pretty simple, self-explanatory. Now, there are things that we do with our affiliate links. Obviously you wanna saturate the internet with your affiliate link, but there's right and wrong ways of doing it. And cloaking is a tactic that we use to kind of disguise that link, because generally speaking, affiliate links, I don't know if you've ever seen an Amazon affiliate link. It looks like this giant thing. It must have like a hundred characters in. It's scary. It's like you click that link and go, wait a second, where am I going here, Ethel, if I click this, am I gonna be taken to porn or something? Where's it gonna go? I mean, it says that it's gonna go to the lamp, but what are all these other letters and characters?


So cloaking a link is disguising it so that it doesn't appear to be a long, scary and intimidating thing. You know, you know, we use a tool called Pretty Links to shorten and Track. Now, pretty Links is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to create sub-folders. So what happens is, let's say my website is my Unfair Advantage. Well, I can create a pretty link using this, this pretty Links plugin and that link, I can take my affiliate link and I can paste it into Pretty Link. And then Pretty Link gives me a, a, a vanity URL, so to speak. And that vanity URL is something that I can name. So I could name it my unfair advantage.com/lamp, right? So what happens is, whenever, whenever I share my link, they're saying that it, the, the URL, the domain says My Unfair advantage.com/lamp.


So somebody that's reading that domain is like, oh, okay, well, I'm gonna see some sort of a lamp that gives me an unfair advantage. They can almost, it almost relieves apprehensions before they even click on the thing, right? Because we all know it's about pre-selling, and you don't want to have to sell somebody that's scared, that was scared to click. So cloaking is a way that we disguise clicks, okay? And we shorten them and make them a little bit prettier. Now, another thing that cloaking does, and by the way, you notice I mentioned this in the prior bullet with certain tools for cloaking, they also have built-in tracking. So you can go back and since you've created this little linking mechanism, it keeps track of how many people have clicked on it. So tracking is usually however performed by the networks, the affiliate networks, like JVZoo.


And what they do is they use something called cookies. So you've probably heard the term clear your cookies, right? And that doesn't mean chuck up your lunch on the floor. It means clearing your cookies means erasing little bits of information that websites are storing on your computer. Okay? So when somebody visits a website through an affiliate link, the network sets a cookie for that affiliate and that product on the user's computer. So essentially, the network has set a little post-it note on that computer that says, this guy, this computer visited my unfair advantage through John's affiliate link. Okay? So if anytime in the future when John is buying, when the person that owns this computer is buying my unfair advantage, one of the things that the buy button on every website does is it looks on the computer that's purchasing to see if there's an existing cookie to credit that affiliate with that sale.


So what happens now is that your computer is loaded with a whole bunch of cookies that were set for different purposes. This particular cookie application that we're talking about is for crediting affiliates with sales. So these little bits of information are what keep track of who gets paid for what. Now, a lot of affiliates use their own tracking methods, okay? So like I was just mentioning you know, pretty links and things like that. But cookies are more so for crediting affiliates than they are for tracking. They're also used for tracking, right? So we'll know a lot more about the device and the people and, and things like that by setting cookies. But for the, for the most part this is how we track who came, you know, who sent the, the referring affiliate? Who was, who was it exactly that sent the sale?


Okay, let's talk about redirecting an affiliate link. So when you apply a method of pointing or moving the user from one site to another that's, that's when, and this is after they've taken an action. So redirecting someone means they're on this website and they do something and then they're automatically taken to another site that is redirecting the traffic. So this can be done effectively and it can also be done in a way that freaks people out. 'cause You don't want to, all of a sudden I'm on this website and all of a sudden I'm on this other site that I was not interested in whatsoever. But redirecting plays a role when you're creating affiliate links because, for example, I redirect people when they exit my bonus page. So if somebody closes out my bonus page, I automatically do a redirect using my affiliate link to the target page, right?


So it's not it's not generally gonna upset people because they were already on a page where I was explaining to them that this is a bonus for the product that's for sale. Now, when they leave, I redirect them. So I put my affiliate link on the redirect. They didn't click the button to go and buy the product through my affiliate link, but I redirected them through my affiliate link. So I kind of set my cookie on their computer without them even realizing it. Now, if that person ends up buying that product later, I'm gonna be credited with that sale because my cookie is sitting there as a result of the redirect. Okay? 


Spreading your affiliate link around and the internet is the key for getting clicks. Now, you've gotta be weary of using methods that could get you banned from groups and forms. One of the biggest moving mistakes that I see made all the time is, you know, people just, they're like, okay, well, you know, somebody, Omar said, I've gotta get a lot of clicks to this link in order to make sales.


And yeah, you do. But it's gotta be the right clicks. And the wrong thing to do is to jump into a place where a conversation is taking place and then just interrupt and be like, Hey, hey, click this. And you're gonna be seen as rude. You're gonna be banned. That's v that's viewed as spam. That's kind of like showing up at someone's birthday party and whipping out your whiteboard and trying to do an Amway presentation, right? That doesn't usually go over very well. Let's talk a little bit more about dropping cookies. So as an affiliate marketer a cookie is your affiliate marker. So it's a little marker that gets set on the visitor's computer. Now, the reason I wanna talk about this a little bit more is because cookies are the methods by which affiliates make money. It's the way that you get paid, okay?


Most affiliate networks work on a last cookie basis. Now, obviously, last cookie implies that there's also a first cookie basis, okay? What that means is that if multiple people are promoting the same product to the same potential buyer, which happens all the time, don't ever think that the people on your list are only on your list. You could say to yourself, well, I don't mail my people on Sundays because that's just rude. No problem. 'cause Somebody like me is gonna be mailing them and they're on my list. So guess who they're gonna buy from on Sundays? It ain't gonna be you 'cause you don't mail. They're gonna buy from me or somebody else. And trust me, they buy, people buy products on Sunday. So don't be that silly marketer that thinks, well, it's offensive to, to mail on Sundays. Don't do that. Net networks tend to work on the last cookie. At least the good ones do. I would never work on a first cookie network. Last cookie means that the last person that moved, that traffic, that stimulated that prospect is the one that gets credit for the sale. And in the natural order of things, in the natural universe, that's the way that sales should work. I've had arguments with people that don't understand sales. 


I've had arguments where they're like, well, no, I sent the person there first and I should get the sale. Yeah, but you failed at getting them to buy. You didn't get that person to buy. Yeah, but I worked hard to get 'em. Yeah, but you didn't work hard enough. I came along and I got them to buy. So I get credited with that sale. Yeah, but, but, but that's not fair. The world's not fair, honey, and you don't get a trophy cupcake. Okay? So relax. Look, when, when you're going door to door, this is very, you know, very, a very important lesson that you learn, right?


So I can go to somebody's house and I will give them my pitch. And they don't, they don't, like, they don't, they don't buy, right? I just didn't convince 'em I wasn't persuasive enough. Maybe I didn't look right. Maybe I looked like a gimel. I had on my shirt untucked. I just looked terrible. And my presentation just wasn't good and the person didn't buy. And then maybe Melinda could come by tomorrow and she knocks on the door and they love her and they buy from her. Now, do you think it's fair for me to say, well, you know what? I should get paid for that sale even though you made the sale. I should get paid 'cause I knocked on that door yesterday. Door knocks don't count. Presentations don't count. Sales count. So the last person that spoke to that person too, to that prospect before that prospect purchased, that's the person that deserves to get the sale.


Just 'cause you visited the store and you said, Hey, what's up John? Yeah. And, and, and yeah, mention my name next time. You, just because you talked to a salesperson today, that doesn't mean that that salesperson should be the one that gets credited with the sale. Now, if, if you, you honestly didn't have the money and you that that person sold you, if he sold you well enough, then the next time you come back you're gonna say, Hey, I was brought by so and so by John. I wanna make sure John gets credit for my purchase. That's John doing his job properly. Alright? If John didn't do his job properly, then the next guy that greets you, he's gonna get credited for the sale because ultimately he's the one that influenced the purchase. Okay? The guy that pre-sells isn't the one that gets credited with the purchase. The guy that sells is the one that gets credited with the purchase. And that is the way that it should be. That is, if you set it up any other way, you are removing any kind of, of, of you know, you're, you're removing incentive essentially for people to, to promote getting a prospect to clear as cookies before they purchase is really important. So, so that you
Don't get overwritten by another affiliate, right? So in a, in a last cookie scheme, so schema, so, so look, here's what I mean by that. Telling your prospect that they should clear their cookies before they buy, basically says, Hey, look I'm the one that's selling you here. Clear your cookies to make sure that I get credited for this sale. Okay? if they don't clear the cookies and you haven't set an overriding cookie, they, you might not get credit for that sale, okay? Because the vendor there is no cookie to track you. There is no if, if that person is just typing in the URL, like for example, if I watched a video where you're doing a demonstration of the product and you're referring me to go to buy that product, if I watch that video on my iPad and I said, wow, what a great product.


And Omar says that if I buy, he's gonna gimme this and that and the other thing. But then while I'm watching the video on my iPad, I type the URL manually to the website on my computer, and then I buy that way. Guess what? Omar's not gonna get credit for that sale. 'cause You didn't click Omar's link, you didn't get a cookie set on your computer that told the order button and the network who referred you. Therefore there's no, and then, and then you're gonna submit a ticket later. Say, Hey Omar, I'd like my bonus. And I'd say, okay, well shoot me your receipt number so I can check if you bought from me. And then when you shoot the receipt number, I see you didn't buy from me and I send you a message. Say, sorry you didn't buy from me. I say, whatcha talking about I watched your video?


Yeah, but did you follow the instructions? You know, so you have to give instructions to people. Tell them to clear their cookies. That way anybody that has pre-sold them, that's gonna be overwritten and let them know what you're doing. Say, look, I need to get credited with this sale. If you want these bonuses, then you need to buy through me. I am giving you these bonuses in exchange for the commission that I'm gonna make when you buy through me. When you're, when you're honest and upfront with people about that, then there's no problem with it. If the person says, well, no, I don't want these bonuses. I'm not gonna clear my cookies, I'm gonna buy through the other guy, then that's fine. Then you just, you know, but it's important that you, you make that it's, it's no different than the salesman in the store.


If you didn't make the sale, say, Hey, when you come back, here's my business card, make sure you ask for me. Or make sure that you tell them at, tell my manager at the door that you bought through me. That, that, you know what I mean? So if that person just shows up and walks up to the shelf, takes the item off the shelf and then goes and pays for it, that's just regular, regular traffic. They're not gonna give that commission to a sales person. That could have been just somebody that was driving by, saw the sign for the store and said, oh yeah, I, I've been wanting to pull in here. Lemme pull in and go and buy. They don't owe a salesman a commission on that, right? That could have been sold by a TV ad that, that the, that the company paid for, right?


So you know, the vendor might be running ads and, and you know, that might just be some organic traffic. So you have to make sure that you're telling people to clear cookies. Now, speaking of cookies, there's something that can be done called hard coding cookies. Hard coding cookies is something pretty cool that some vendors do. And what that means is they basically tag your referrals. So you send them a customer and then they put some technology in place on their side where now the vendor can track any future purchases from that same customer and credit you with those purchases as well. So pay you commissions for life on anything else that they buy. So that's also pretty cool. And that's called hard coding. That's like when you, you basically hard code. But that's done on the vendor side.


That's not particularly done on the prospect's computer. Now, stuffing cookies, this is something that's done on the prospect's computer, and this is done by, eh, not so cool marketers. Cookie stuffing is when prospects are tricked. And the one way, or there's various ways of doing this but they're tricked into clicking something that overwrites the cookie. They weren't sold by another marketer. They weren't the, the cookie wasn't purposely overwritten because the offer or the sales pitch was better from another marketer, but rather because that other marketer used some clever trick to overwrite cookies and inserting their own cookies. We used to see this all the time with vendors that are stupid enough to have comments open on their sales page. That is the stupidest thing. I mean, some people say, oh, Omar, you know what?


It's that social proof dude that is just silly. I don't do that. I'm not saying that it's terrible to do. But we see cookie stuffing in all those scenarios. That's where cookies get stuffed. People put them in comments, people insert little images and little tags, and these hackers are getting better and better. And they find ways of inserting cookies on the comments that are on the page where the buy button is. You're literally allowing people to insert text and code and stuff into a field on your order page. Why would you do that? Oh, well, Omar, because, you know, it's cool for social proof. There are like a million other ways to show social proof and fear of loss and indifference and greed and sense of urgency. Why would you open up comments on an order page? You know, it's, it's, it's nuts.


Now, going to a separate page to review, maybe to see reviews and things like that, you know, where we see this, this is prevalent. W sos in the Warrior form. This used to be a big, big problem. I haven't been in there in a long time 'cause it's just a cesspool, it's a public toilet. So I don't go in there anymore, but I'll tell you what, a lot of people would go and stuff cookies for WSO products in the comments. So they would literally steal all the credit for all the sales until they got found out. And then they would, you know, they would shut down. They'd delete that cookie or that common order, and then they'd just go create another account and do it all over again. And it's just like, per perpetual, like hunt to, to kill the cookie stuffer, you know? So stuffing


Cookies are something that can happen. And you know, there's so many different ways. I've seen people stuff, cookies in the, the play button for a video and like, there's, there's clever little tricks and stuff to know, and it's just something that I wanted to cover in this section. So, you know that that's out there, that's happening. You don't want to be one of the people that does that tracking. So I mentioned tracking being handled by the affiliate network, but you can also use certain softwares to do this. Most browsers allow you to see cookies that you've set. You can actually go and, and see the cookies that are on your machine right now by going to your browser settings and, and actually displaying the cookies. And you could see, and you can clear them you can clear the history and clear the cookies and clear the case of your browser.


And that's what I recommend to people. I literally give people instructions on my bonus page on how to clear their case and their cookies before they buy through me. Now there's you know, how does this, what does this have to do with tracking? Well, when you're, when you're doing tracking for yourself, as your business gets more and more advanced, you're gonna want to be keeping track of who's clicking on your links. How many of those clicks got to the target page? How many of those actually converted? I do this different ways, you know, in my email, for example, in my autoresponder, I can see how many people opened my email, how many people clicked my link, and now I can take the number of people that clicked my link and compare it to the number of visits that I've gotten.


So if I see that there's a mismatch, right? If I know that I've gotten a hundred clicks on my email, so my autoresponder says, one more, you've got a hundred clicks. And then I look at my metrics on the sales page or on the affiliate network, and it says, well, there's only been 10 clicks. There's a problem. Where are my clicks going? I, you know, there's an issue here that needs to be looked into. So when you start, you know, doing these promotions and you're setting cookies and you're looking at different platforms, and you're using an affiliate network, plus you're using an autoresponder, maybe you're using something like pretty links. 


You're adding several redundancies in there to check and track your clicks and conversions. So speaking of clicks and conversions, let's explain exactly what the differences are. So generally speaking, clicks are the count of users that have pressed on your affiliate link to get to the target page. Okay?  Those are clicks. Anytime somebody clicks that affiliate link, the link itself is what's counting the clicks, not the target page. Okay? So you might say, well, Omar, shouldn't they all get to the target page? Yeah, but visitors and clicks are two different things. The amount of people that click a link is pertinent in one regard, and the amount of people that land on the website is pertinent in another regard. Because, for example, the same person that you've set the same cookie on could click that link 10 times. 


Now that's gonna count as 10 clicks, but only one visit. Does that make sense? So even though they go to the site multiple times, it's gotta count as just one person. Now, here are the, the, the number of total impressions. Okay, so how many, how many visitors or robots? And now that's another thing.
And this is the reason why visits, and there's, there's different types of visits. So there's unique visits, and then there's, there's just hits, right? So hits are how many times something or someone has landed on the page. So a hit can be how many people have clicked through a link to get there? And also how many robots have visited? There are tons of robots crawling the internet. All the search engines have robots out there clicking. There are all kinds of tracking robots out there, and there are literally programs that visit and scan your website. And when they get there, that hint counter is counting that visit as a person. When it comes to metrics, you know, this skews your metrics. If you're dividing this and you, if you had 20 robot visits today and you only had two human visitors, you got 22 hits, right?


So if you are looking at that and you're like, well, 22 hits, I'm converting at, you know, 1%, I should have made a sale. You know, I, why haven't I made a sale? Well, because 20 of those people weren't human, 20 of those hits were, were not, not human. So the, the important thing to remember is that hits are measured at the target site, not at the link. So clicks are measured by the link, whatever technology's being used to put that link in place. Now visits are the total impressions, but visits are unique and unique visits, typically, they don't count returning users, okay? From the same IP address. So remember, every single computer that's on the internet has its own IP address, its own internet protocol address. It's a string of numbers and every single visitor, whether it's a robot or it's a person, originates from a computer and they are all traceable by their IP address.


So when it comes to d differentiating unique visits versus hits, what, what usually a platform or whatever mechanism you're using to count these visits what it does is it looks at the IP address, it says, okay, well this IP address has been here 10 times, so we're not gonna count it as 10 clicks. We're gonna count that as one visit. So or 10 hits rather. So you could have one number that represents clicks, another number that represents hits, and a completely different number that represents visits. But visits tend to be the more, the more accurate number to use when dividing metrics. So what kind of metrics, metrics do we divide where there's two primary metrics that we wanna look at when deciding whether an offer is converting, whether it's doing well, whether we should promote it. And the first, and most important of all is actually called EPC.


And that represents earnings per click, or rather earnings divided by clicks. It predicts how profitable an affiliate might be. So if I look at an offers EPC and it's $2 per click, and I know based on my list and the history that I have in my email marketing, I, I know that I can send 200 clicks per email, then I know if that thing has a $1 EPC, I'm gonna make an average of $200 per email that I send to that product. So EPC is the most important metric that an affiliate looks at when making the decision of whether or not to promote a product. But it's not the only metric. The other metric that we look at, and it's second to EPC, would be conversion. So how well is that page converting visitors into buyers? So a conversion rate is the percentage ratio, or the percentage or ratio, not the percentage ratio, but the percentage or ratio of action takers to non-action takers on a given site.
And the way that they're, that, the, the networks generally arrive at this is they divide clicks by buyers. Okay? So how many clicks got to the page? How many clicks did the link get? And how many people actually bought on the page? So when you divide those two numbers, you end up getting a conversion ratio. And these are the metrics that we usually see in the stats column in the stats section of JVZoo and most affiliate networks. You've got clicks, you've got hits, you've got visits, you've got EPC, you've got conversion, okay? And they're the main ones that you should know about. Remember, traffic, it's, it's not necessarily a stream of moving targets that you're gonna be showing a billboard to, but rather traffic is a congregation of like-minded prospects that you have to infiltrate, okay? They're hanging out in the mall, they're, they're there, they're, they're not necessarily going from one place to another as the word traffic implies.


Traffic can be bought, it can be borrowed, or it can be created, but ultimately all traffic must be paid for with either time or with money. And ultimately, you're gonna have to choose which of those currencies you value the least. I know that in my particular case, I can always make more money, but I can't make more time. So to me, every opportunity that I have to pay for traffic, I will take that opportunity. I will choose that opportunity over investing my time. With that said, I'm gonna stay, I'm gonna end this with saying, don't put the cart before the horse. 


A lot of people go out there and they create the product first or they go find the offer first, and then they go get, they go nuts trying to create traffic for the offer. Instead, the the right way to go about this. To be successful at affiliate marketing and at vendor marketing, the right way to go about this is to find the traffic first. Find the congregation of like-minded prospects that you're gonna be infiltrating. And then once you infiltrate them and find out their likes, their desires, their wants, their needs, their problems, go out and find the offer that they need and put it in front of them, that is how you're gonna be much, much more successful. 


I hope you've enjoyed this presentation and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.