But I’d say one question is asked more than any other – “how do I get (more) traffic to my website?”

So last fall I began mindmapping all the ways I could come up with to get more website traffic. My first goal was to reach 100 ways to get more visitors. I quickly, however, crossed that boundary into 147 ways. Then I stopped listing them and taught a couple of teleclasses from my list.

Some time in January, I picked the list back up and started adding to it. Soon, I was past 200 ways to get more traffic. And I settled on more than 220 different ways to get more website traffic. I’m sure the list will continue to grow, and I’ll definitely continue updating the materials I have.

So now I had this list of all these ways to get more website traffic – the next thought, “what should I do with it?”

Of course, being a blogger I know a list like this would make incredible link bait. I even began a post on the topic. But the more I thought about posting it, the more I felt that just giving it away for free would dilute it’s value. I thought about how many lists you can find in the blogosphere and how often those lists get hot for a couple of days, then dropped.

My business is about helping business owners find hidden profits in their business and exploit them. So I didn’t want something of such value that could help so many people, go to waste.

So I’ve decided to, once again, offer my traffic driving booklet as a teleclass – 220 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website.

What’s great about this format is that I can provide a booklet listing all my website traffic generating ideas AND make myself available to answer questions about how to use them. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Next Wednesday, July 1 I’ll lead a 60 minute teleclass for you that covers (some of) the materials in my booklet, 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website. Half the call I’ll speak on some of my most successful tips in the booklet and briefly on topics like qualifying traffic and tracking traffic sources. Then, the second half of the call is yours to ask me any questions you like about any of the methods I list in the booklet.

UPDATE: I have 60 8 copies of the entire course materials, including the 53-page booklet, my series of mindmaps and the 60-minute audio recording available right now for purchase. Click here to buy now for only $69.

Let me be clear here, the 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website booklet is not just a list. I’ve included some tips in the beginning and have tips and commentary on every single traffic generation technique I cover. And you get to keep the booklet.

What’s more, I’ve also decided to include the mindmaps that helped me initially create, organize and structure the more than 50 pages that make up the booklet. So you’ll get the booklet and the mindmaps together.

Also, I’ll be recording the call and forwarding the a link to the recording so you can download it. So if you can’t make the live teleclass order right now and you’ll receive the booklet, the mindmaps and the full 60-minute audio.

One last thing – since I want to give ample time for you to ask your questions about driving traffic to your site, I’m limiting the number of copies for sale to 60 8. After 60, I’ll won’t have any more for sale.

Here’s what’s included:

• My 53 page booklet 220 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website & Increase Your Business, with tips and commentary for each method.
• A Series of Mindmaps summarizing each of the traffic driving methods – use as a resource when deciding which methods to use. I used these mindmaps in developing the course materials.
• A 60-minute LIVE teleclass with me, talking about how to find the right traffic for your business.
• Time for you to get your specific questions answered. There will be ample time to take your specific questions. And since conversation often leads to the most interesting teaching, the more questions, the merrier.
• I’ll record the teleclass and send you a link to download it in full.
• Click here to ORDER NOW!

There was so much in the booklet that when I got it before the class, I was overwhelmed. But your calm voice and simple explanations took me from overwhelm to excitement. Can’t wait to launch my website.
- Gillian McDowell: Vancouver, BC

What’s inside?

This isn’t just some random list I’ve come up with that I’m tossing at you. Rather, I painstakingly put together the booklet and the mindmaps over a number of months to give you the most complete resource I know of. Then, I divided the booklet into 13 different categories for building your traffic. Here’s those categories:

• 7 ways to drive website traffic using General Office ideas
• 8 ways to drive website traffic by getting Published Offline
• 22 ways to drive website traffic through Direct Marketing Offline
• 16 ways to drive website traffic through Networking Offline
• 12 ways to drive website traffic through Email Marketing
• 59 ways to drive website traffic through Marketing Online
• 7 ways to drive website traffic through Backlinking
• 28 waysto drive website traffic through Blogging
• 14 ways to drive website traffic through Social Bookmarking
• 22 ways to drive website traffic through Social Media
• 11 ways to drive website traffic through Online Paid Advertising
• 13 ways to drive website traffic through Offline Paid Advertising
• 21 more ways to drive website, my Final Brain Dump

There it is. You can see the breakdown of how many ideas come from which sort of categories. And there’s something there for everyone – offline marketers, social marketers, paid advertising, even email. And if you add up all the ways, there’s actually 240. I just got tired of changing the name of the program.

Here’s the details:

• Teleclass will be Wednesday, July 1 at 1pm eastern / 10am pacific U.S. time I’m making this available for a limited time
  
• There are ONLY 60 8 COPIES of this course available
• The cost is $97 SPECIAL SUMMER PRICE $69!
  
• Click here to ORDER NOW!

Dawud, why haven’t you been teaching more often. I love your way of explaining complex ideas with simple language. The course and your enthusiasm helped me believe I could actually get more people to see my website. Thank you.
Karen Loveland: Seattle, WA

I’ve had more 300 people take this course. All have told me that they would have paid more knowing what they know now. And many are now using my suggestions to actually get more clients.

So if that’s the case, why would I lower the cost to $69? Just like the hundreds of others who have these materials, I know that you’ll get a huge benefit from taking this course. My clients constantly ask me for information about driving traffic to their website. So I’m simply making it easier for more people to get access to this all-important information. After all, no website traffic, no business.

Now, let’s get you registered before you lose your slot.

Now there’s two things left to do:

1. First, order your copy right now.
2. Second, tell 5 people who need to get more traffic to their websites. Send them an email, make a phone call, text message them, Tweet about it on Twitter, Write a blog post – however you can reach the people you want to help.

(note: image from lynac on Flickr, some rights reserved)

As a blogger, you learn pretty quick how to look at your traffic stats. You see that your traffic goes up the days you write and down the days you don’t. You look at your referring sites regularly to see where all the traffic is coming from and spend more time on the sites that are driving you the most traffic. And hitting the motherload of website traffic is getting to the front page of Digg, Reddit or del.icio.us.

But do your traffic stats mislead you? Is your goal just to get gobs and gobs of traffic to your website?

Maybe it is. If you’re blogging for fun, to make a few bucks on the side or using your blog to sell ad space and affiliate products, it may just be about generating as much traffic as you can.

But if you own a business where you only get paid when you’re clients are buying your service, having tons of traffic may completely mislead you.

Website traffic is great, don’t get me wrong. And it’s certainly an important part of your business strategy on the web. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be teaching a teleclass called 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website.

Yet you want to be careful about evaluating the health of your web marketing by only looking at how many visitors and page views your site is getting. You need to also compare your overall traffic stats with stats on solid lead generation, prospecting, conversion and sales.

You can do this pretty simply by tracking all contacts people make with you through your site in a specific period of time – say, a month. An RSS subscription and a comment is a contact. You could consider those soft leads. A newsletter signup is a firmer lead, because now your visitor has given you something of theirs – so track that. And obviously phone calls, emails and form submissions from your website are solid leads also, so track the number of those each month.

Then, you want to follow through with how each of those interactions develop. Do any of your commenters, for instance, contact you directly about your services? Do they then convert into paying clients? The same goes for your newsletter list, phone calls, email and form submissions – any of the ways that people can contact you directly. Do these generate sales?

If they do, it means your website traffic is serving your business. If not, then you need to make some adjustments as to who you’re targeting in your blog posts. For instance, let’s say you’re a life coach and you’re using your blog to promote your coaching services. Inevitably some of your readers will be other life coaches – that’s actually a good thing. But a good portion of your readers need to be potential clients as well. If you’re only getting other life coaches to read you blog, it’s unlikely you’re going to convert many clients. This means, you’d want to look at how you can adjust your content and your promotional efforts to reach your market, rather than your peers.

Generating huge amounts of traffic can be compared to creating a massive newsletter list. If you have a business, it doesn’t really matter how many people you have on your list. What matters is how many of the people on your list will buy your services.

So, how are you using your blog to promote your business? Is it working? If so, why. And if no, what’s one thing you can change to make it work better?

And maybe the most interesting question of all…are you currently, or have you in the past, been too focused on generating as much traffic as you can without really caring about how it affects your bottom line?

Let’s talk about it.

And if you would like to find more ways to generate traffic – specifically traffic that increase your bottom line, take a look at my upcoming teleclass: 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website.

(note: image from c0ntr0 on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

But I’d say one question is asked more than any other – “how do I get (more) traffic to my website?”

Since I seem to seldom lack for ideas, I thought I’d start writing them down. Next thing I knew I had a list of nearly 100 ways to drive traffic to your website. Since all of these are things I’ve done at one time or another I knew they worked.

But I didn’t stop there. I started brainstorming even more ways to drive traffic. Then I had a few close colleagues take a look at my list and they added a few. Now the list is over 180 viable methods for driving traffic to your website.

So what do I do with this, I thought?

First thing I did was start crafting a blog post so I could share it with everyone. And the post was almost finished until I realized just giving away my hard work diluted its value. Think about how many lists about anything you just read and toss. Yet I want people to get real help with their businesses and websites. So it helps neither of us to just add this to the stacks of useless lists forgotten in the soup of the internet.

So I’ve decided to turn my traffic driving 53-page booklet into a teleclass – 97 147 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website.

What’s great about this format is that I can provide a booklet explaining all 240 (yeah, that’s right, there’s even more) my website traffic generating ideas AND make myself available to answer questions about how to use them. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Next Tuesday, November 25th (second showing – Tuesday, December 16) at 3pm I’ll lead a 60 minute teleclass for you that covers (some of) the materials in my 53-page booklet, 97 147 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website. Half the call I’ll speak on some of my most successful tips in the booklet and briefly on topics like qualifying traffic and tracking traffic sources. Then, the second half of the call is yours to ask me any questions you like about any of the methods I list in the booklet.

Let me be clear here, the 97 147 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website booklet is not just a list. I’ve included some tips in the beginning and have tips and commentary on every single traffic generation technique I cover. And you get to keep the booklet. And I’m also making available the mindmaps I used to create the course.

Also, I’ll be recording the call and forwarding the a link to the recording so you can download it. So can’t make the live teleclass order anyhow and you’ll receive the booklet, the mindmaps and the full 60-minute audio.

So let’s go over the details one more time:

• My 53 page booklet 220 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website & Increase Your Business, with tips and commentary for each method.
• A Series of Mindmaps summarizing each of the traffic driving methods – use as a resource when deciding which methods to use. I used these mindmaps in developing the course materials.
• A 60-minute LIVE teleclass with me, talking about how to find the right traffic for your business.
• Time for you to get your specific questions answered. There will be ample time to take your specific questions. And since conversation often leads to the most interesting teaching, the more questions, the merrier.
• I’ll record the teleclass and send you a link to download it in full.
• Click here to ORDER NOW!

There was so much in the booklet that when I got it before the class, I was overwhelmed. But your calm voice and simple explanations took me from overwhelm to excitement. Can’t wait to launch my website.
- Gillian McDowell: Vancouver, BC

Here’s the details:

• Teleclass will be Wednesday, July 1 at 1pm eastern / 10am pacific U.S. time I’m making this available for a limited time
  
• There are ONLY 60 50 COPIES of this course available
• The cost is $97 SPECIAL SUMMER PRICE $69!
  
• Click here to ORDER NOW!

Now there’s two things left to do:

1. First, order your copy now.
2. Second, tell 5 people who need to get more traffic to their websites. Send them an email, make a phone call, text message them, Tweet about it on Twitter, Write a blog post – however you can reach the people you want to help.

(note: image from masochismtango on Flickr,  some rights reserved)

One way to do this is through testimonials and case studies. You know, something like this…

When Judy called me, her business was struggling, her website traffic was stalled and her newsletter list was all-but stagnant. I helped her see what she was doing wrong. I corrected those problems for her and now he business is thriving.

Sounds fine, right? My client needs to be rescued and I can save them from their peril.

I thought so too until I read Drew McClellan’s post Are We Playing the Wrong Role in Our Stories. Drew’s post changed my thoughts on how I approach case studies and testimonials. He suggests that when we tell out clients story we have the classic setup…

We have a hero, a problem/villain, a victim and a glorious solution.

Uh oh. If we’re the hero, guess who we’re casting in the role of victim? Yup. Our client.

While the prospect might identify with the challenge and be heartened by the solution, do they really want to see themselves in the victim role?

Of course we don’t, Drew. We just want to tell the stories of how our clients have gotten so much from working with us. But we don’t want to make them into victims. So how else do we tell their stories?

What if we twisted our tale in those case studies or testimonials, so that our clients were the heroes? We shift to being the glorious solution. (Not a bad role to play) But we give the credit, spotlight and heroine’s role to the client. They are smart enough to see the problem and devise a solution. And, in the end, everyone lives happily ever after.

Oh, I get it now. So I could retell Judy’s story like this…

When Judy phoned me she knew her website wasn’t meeting her goals. She knew she needed more traffic but didn’t know how. Together we devised a strategy to incresae her traffic. We also optimized her newsletter list for greater conversion. Judy’s business quickly increased and now her website is not only meeting, but surpassing her goals.

Subtle differences in this case study over the first one. You can see I wrote about Judy as being in control the entire time. And she was part of the solution. Never was she the ‘victim with the problem.’ And I come out as the solution instead of the hero.

How do you write about your clients? Are they victims or heroes?