Traffic Acquisition Strategies for Lifestyle Businesses

A lifestyle business is one that let's you lead the kind of lifestyle that you want - be it as a kind of nomadic business owner working four hours per week (as in Timothy Ferris' "Four Hour Work Week"), or a stay-at-home parent - without any pretense that you're trying to build an empire or legacy.

On the face of it, it's a fairly easy proposition. After all, there are any number of bloggers out there who make a reasonably healthy living, as well as freelance SEOs, article writers, and various affiliates.

However, as Sean Ogle points out on his blog:

"The single most difficult roadblock you’ll encounter when starting a business like this is traffic. You know there are thousands if not millions of people out there who have the same interests as you, but finding them during your first year can seem like nothing short of an impossibility."

(As an aside, it's well worth checking out his Location Rebel product - it's free, and I get nothing for pointing you in that direction - it's just a great read!)

So, lifestyle businesses will live or die on the amount of traffic that they will receive. I don't care if you're a bricks and mortar business, or an affiliate marketer, or some kind of online-offline amalgamation mash-up of the two, business is your lifeblood.

On Sean's blog post, he gives his approach, but it can be easily generalized, although your mileage will vary.

He embraces the Facebook route : set up a Facebook page, get traffic to it by using Facebook adverts, point the visitors to a domain that captures their email address by dangling a carrot in front of them, and then give them a great freebie to say 'thanks'.

That's one way, but it works equally well with any high-traffic content-centric well-curated publishing platform. Squidoo, Hub Pages, article repositories, even Blogger can all be used to generate traffic as long as you provide high quality on-topic content.

On the advertising side, Google AdWords are a great way to get some targeted traffic. You'll need to test various campaigns (and Google's made that really easy), but it will work for the correct set of keywords.

Paid inclusion to search engines can also help, but again, you need to be sure that the keywords that you choose are conducive to bringing in traffic that is actually going to convert into actions. Check out my Future of Organic SEO article for more information in that direction.

Bricks and mortar lifestyle businesses can also benefit from using traffic acquisition strategies - but you'll need to go local. Local search, local web site traffic (i.e. local Facebook pages and Blogger blogs) and locally facing keywords.

For example, in my own niche, model rail, there often seem to be different keywords for different locales - in the UK it's model railway, in the US it's model railroad, for example - and it's worth taking a moment to segregate the search terms by country just to make sure that you're still bang on target.

Not forgetting, of course, to test, test, test!

SoLoMo, Google In-Depth and Video : Improving Traffic Acquisition

Modern traffic acquisition techniques are no longer merely based around getting the word out and doing a bit of search engine optimization or PPC campaigns. These days, any strategy has to integrate high quality content, social marketing and multimedia aspects.

The so-called SoLoMo approach (read SoLoMo Minded SEO Strategies from Websitemagazine.com) for example, embraces [So]cial, [Lo]cal and [Mo]bile aspects of modern organic SEO. We can also leverage this approach. For example, Social traffic acquisition might include anything from active tweets to maintaining high-quality social profiles on Facebook.

Local traffic acquisition may prove to be a harder nut to crack, especially if your target audience isn't that bothered about where they get their goods and services from. However, if they do, anything from a local domain name to some kind of physical presence will all contribute to helping boost traffic acquisition strategies by giving them a local aspect.

Mobile traffic acquisition strategies follow much the same path as local SEO - low page load speeds, high visibility, mobile specific content, etc. - with the added bonus that we can now leverage things like apps (iPhone/Android) to help improve incoming traffic.

The recent addition of In-Depth to the Google stable also favors traffic acquisition through high quality, in-depth (i.e. well written and researched) articles. Again, Websitemagazine.com has a great article on Google In-Depth, and the underlying message is clear : to get users interest and confidence/trust, you need to provide high quality content.

Now that Google is recognizing that content for what it is, you can build an additional level of trust into that relationship, making the target (potential) customer more likely to (a) bookmark, (b) share  - see Social traffic acquisition, above, and (c) buy!

Time to get researching, creating, and promoting your high quality, industry and product-specific material, then...

Which brings us to video. A staggering 87% of marketers use video, according to Uflip, and it's easy to see why. For example, did you know that YouTube is the second most used search engine?

Clearly, there's a great avenue for traffic acquisition through video. In fact, this is nothing new - it's how soap operas got their name - but the possibility to combine Social, Mobile, In-Depth and Video in one campaign is something that only new advances in technology can facilitate.

Something to mull over when you design your next online/offline traffic acquisition campaign!

What is the Traffic Acquisition Cost for Google?

Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Google could be paying up to 1 billion dollars to remain the default search engine on Apple's iOS devices. Part of their reasons for doing this might just be that the cost of acquiring traffic is on the increase due to increased competition from the likes of Microsoft's Bing service.

The underlying question is : why should Bing (and others) matter to Google's TAC?

The answer is fairly simple. Google, Bing and others do deals to put their services on platforms as a default search provider. They pay money to be able to do this, and to hit the platforms with the highest penetration (Blackberry, iOS, etc.) they need to have deep pockets.

If they miss out on a platform, they have to work doubly hard (and pay more) to entice those 'lost' customers back to their service, as well as having a smaller customer base to start with. Even if advertising (or R&D) costs stay the same, the TAC would go up if they lost one of the key platforms.

According to TechCrunch, Google's actual TAC for 2013 is estimated at 3.3 dollars per iOS user, and is something like 5% of gross revenue across all platforms, which includes iOS and Mozilla, as well as Chrome/Android.

Now, obviously, the increasing penetration of Android, Chrome, and other Google platforms and products going forward will have an impact on Google's TAC, but unless iOS sales drop, that won't save them from paying absurd amounts to Apple, for the slightly dubious privilege of being the default search provider.

What can other businesses learn from this? Firstly, you need to make sure that your TAC is balanced by lifetime customer value. In other words, knowing your TAC per 100 dollars ratio (or similar) will be vital in helping you to understand if it is as efficient as it could be at retaining customer value.

The forEntrepreneurs website has a great graphic illustrating this key ratio. In essence, you can exchange CAC (cost to acquire customers) with TAC, factoring in your conversion rate as you go along.

It's interesting to note that Google has the R&D investment to increase several areas of the equation without shelling out to third parties (through open source participation, viral effects, and strategic partnerships that don't involve the exchange of real money), but that clearly their management puts a lot of stock in their core offering - the free search engine service.

That service drives the Google engine; and that includes opening up revenue opportunities. So, investing 1 billion dollars in keeping a high flow from established and emerging platforms makes good business sense, whilst also demonstrating the power of free.