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!

How do you Calculate Traffic Acquisition Cost

One question that is often at the forefront of people's minds when it comes to generating traffic is how to calculate traffic acquisition cost. Every method of traffic acquisition, be it paid or free, has an underlying cost.

Clearly, free methods, such as using Twitter, a blog, or even a service such as Traffic Swarm are attractive because there is no direct financial cost. However, the traffic that is acquired may not be highly converting, and there is an investment in time, which has an inherent cost.

Let's take a quick example. If we assume that you spend 30 minutes crafting a short Traffic Swarm advert, then another 30 minutes to set it up, and then 60 minutes generating some credits by clicking on other people's adverts, you have spent 2 hours of time.

A copywriter can earn upwards of $200 in that short fraction of a day!

So, any traffic that is acquired has a cost of $200. And that's not the end of the story, because, if you generate 100 credits, that only means that your advert will be displayed 100 times. What percentage of those displays will generate visits? 1%? 2%? 10%?

There is an upside - over time, the investment might be worth it, but only if the cost of other traffic acquisition services are higher.

AdSense CPC Explained

One way to pull in traffic is buy buying clicks through a PPC (Pay Per Click) broker. Google's AdSense is such a service - you can pay them to display your advert whenever certain keywords are displayed on a given page.

(Get the inside scoop on AdSense here with the Keyword Cracker's Free AdSense Report.)

The CPC (Cost Per Click) is the amount of money that you (and competing content providers) are willing to put down for each person that clicks your advert. This can be as low as $0.05, but as high as $50!

Clearly, it is easy to calculate traffic acquisition costs in this case. If you want 100 visitors, based on a keyword that costs $1 per click, it will cost you $100. Now, this compares favorably with the analysis we did above for Traffic Swarm, but there's a problem.

Highly converting keywords often cost much more than $1 per click.

In such cases, free and low cost traffic acquisition models will be more favorable, but in order to figure it out, you need to know how to calculate the cost of traffic acquisition. Something you now know how to do.

A final note : if you are selling a high ticket item, like a used Ford SUV, then the commission on that sale might make PPC worth your while. If you're selling a $17 eBook, it surely will not be, unless you find a highly converting, long tail keyword phrase, at a low cost.

The Keyword Cracker was designed with that in mind, and is highly recommended by all who have used it to better their traffic acquisition strategies.