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!