I wrote this arti­cle way back in 1998. It seems to have made a resur­gence, espe­cially with today’s econ­omy. So I said to myself, “Why not repub­lish it?” So here it is. Enjoy!

If there is some­thing about which I’m pretty adamant, it’s the idea of attract­ing qual­i­fied prospects who are will­ing to do busi­ness with you. And this involves many dif­fer­ent things.

Posi­tion­ing is one of them. In fact, it has been one of my favorite mar­ket­ing con­cepts for this very reason.

How­ever, this fun­da­men­tal mag­net­ism is not only based on pure mar­ket­ing prac­tices or strate­gies. It also involves some­thing at a much deeper level that is far more effec­tive than any other mar­ket­ing tool or process in existence.

This “thing” to which I am refer­ring is, I believe, the most impor­tant mar­ket­ing secret I can ever teach you — and it’s far from being a secret at all. It is con­sid­ered as one sim­ply because it is often neglected or ignored by many mar­keters and businesspeople.

What is this “secret” that’s so elusive?

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Organic traf­fic is a fan­tas­tic source of vis­i­tors that’s often ignored by many marketers.

Search engines change all the time and many of them now charge for the priv­i­lege of includ­ing your web­site. So, peo­ple often ask me how to gen­er­ate traf­fic, beyond the search engines and with lit­tle to no cost.

Let me be can­did by say­ing that I am not a search engine expert, nor do I play one on TV. But there are two meth­ods that I’ve used con­sis­tently to attract thou­sands of qual­i­fied hits to my web­site at vir­tu­ally no cost and with very lit­tle effort.

Granted, everyone’s dif­fer­ent. And these tech­niques may not be appro­pri­ate for every­one. How­ever, let me share what works for me and what I do, along with a few tips.

My biggest organic traf­fic gen­er­a­tor is con­tent marketing.

Namely, there are two categories:

1. Post­ing con­tent on social net­works, includ­ing blogs, blog com­ments, forums, social net­work­ing sites, dis­cus­sion lists, and of course, my own blog;
2. Con­tribut­ing con­tent, such as writ­ing arti­cles or reports, and sub­mit­ting them to ezines, mag­a­zines, direc­to­ries, and guest con­tri­bu­tions on other people’s blogs.

Now, let’s take a closer look, shall we?

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In an ear­lier blog post, I talked about the fact that lately I’ve been lean­ing a lot more towards test­ing the reduc­tion in bottlenecks.

Some of the results are staggering!

In short, the more I increase the sense of secu­rity and trust, bet­ter the flow and ease of order­ing, and project a more con­gru­ent and pro­fes­sional image, the more sales I make.

Since that post, some read­ers have asked me for some exam­ples. I pre­fer not to reveal mine as they are pro­pri­etary. But I can say this…

One of the things that I’m start­ing to really like are ecom­merce sites that are less “saleslet­ter­ish” — i.e., less long-​​scrolling copy in a direct-​​mail for­mat, and more clus­tered lay­outs that are reader-​​focused, commerce-​​centric, and action-​​driven.

They still use com­pelling copy and a solid response mech­a­nism. If the user needs more details, a “more info” link then sends them to a typ­i­cal, long copy saleslet­ter. But these sites’ front-​​end are more action-​​oriented than they are scrolling-​​oriented.

I’ve decided to test this with our main web­site at Suc­cess Chef. I still use long copy. But I’ve con­verted the front-​​end into an ecom­merce, multi-​​product, catalog-​​like format.

And the results are in…

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I once took a media com­mu­ni­ca­tions course in which I dis­cov­ered an inter­est­ing exam­ple of the way the mind works. I soon real­ized how this applies to copy­writ­ing as well.

As part of a given les­son, they showed a video­tape of a tele­vised news­cast dur­ing which a jour­nal­ist was about to give a live report on a for­est fire dev­as­tat­ing the mid-​​west.

The news anchor said: “We now take you to Sally Smith, report­ing live from above the scene of the fire…”

He then turned around to face the back­ground screen, which gave a live bird’s-eye view of the rag­ing fire, and asked: “Sally, tell us, how big is the fire?” In a voice par­tially drowned by the whizzing sound of heli­copter blades, Sally reported:

“John, it’s so big, it’s cov­er­ing well over 140 acres of land… that’s about 200 foot­ball fields back-​​to-​​back for you and me.”

What is this telling you? A lot more than you think…

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The other day, one of my read­ers asked me the fol­low­ing ques­tion, which I found rather inter­est­ing: “Why should the author of a prod­uct be included in their sales copy?”

Seems like a pretty redun­dant ques­tion, right? Espe­cially to any vet­eran copy­writer or mar­keter worth their salt.

But the ques­tion didn’t stop there. The reader offered the fol­low­ing insight, which explains why this issue was such an impor­tant one to him, and why I felt com­pelled to answer:

“Specif­i­cally, why do my read­ers need to know who I am or what I bring to the table? How does telling them my qual­i­fi­ca­tions increase the strength of my copy? My prod­uct solves a med­ical con­di­tion. But I am not a doc­tor and I have never had this con­di­tion myself. I’ve spent a year research­ing the best method to cure this con­di­tion. I have a list of 20,000 peo­ple with this con­di­tion and con­verse with them a lot. I know pretty much every­thing there is to know about this con­di­tion and have made it into an ebook.”

The answer is quite sim­ple, actu­ally. In fact, in his attempt to defend him­self (i.e., that he’s not a doc­tor but has lots of expe­ri­ence and spe­cial­ized knowl­edge about his mar­ket), the reader answered his own ques­tion. Let me explain…

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In prac­ti­cally every major mar­ket­ing teach­ing, course, or sem­i­nar I’ve come across, I have found that almost all suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing on the Inter­net really boils down to two essen­tial fac­tors: traf­fic and con­ver­sion.

Sim­ply put, vis­i­tors and sales.

In fact, I’ve been to two-​​day Inter­net mar­ket­ing sem­i­nars and work­shops, where the first day focused on gen­er­at­ing traf­fic and the sec­ond day on build­ing sales.

That’s all well and good. How­ever, I believe there’s one more key com­po­nent. It’s one that’s grow­ing not only in pop­u­lar­ity, but also in need and impor­tance. It’s the one fac­tor on which the other two hinge. And it’s one that seems to be the least talked about.

In my career, I’ve seen the proof again and again. If you incor­po­rate this third ele­ment into your busi­ness model, chances are you’re going to see sub­stan­tial, con­tin­u­ous growth in your busi­ness — with a lot less effort than you’ve orig­i­nally thought possible.

What is it? What is this third, miss­ing element?

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Ryan Deiss, who is a friend and mar­keter I highly respect, didn’t see eye-​​to-​​eye with me on some issues. One of them is cer­tainly forced continuity.

How­ever, just this morn­ing he released a new report, enti­tled, “The Death of Forced Con­ti­nu­ity.” I’ve read it, and it’s a good report. I rec­om­mend it.

Granted, Ryan’s intent in releas­ing this report is not 100% altru­is­tic. After all, he is, like me, a diehard capitalist.

Ryan sells a course on how to cre­ate con­ti­nu­ity pro­grams, and he cer­tainly makes the case for his own prod­uct in this report. How­ever, noble or not, he did switch gears and noticed a dra­matic improve­ment in his over­all prof­its, which he shares in this report.

So read it because it con­tains a few very pow­er­ful lessons on the sub­ject of forced con­ti­nu­ity, and what you can do instead to make more money with con­ti­nu­ity programs.

Now, I won’t go into detail with regards to what I feel about forced con­ti­nu­ity (I have done so sev­eral times already on this blog). But let me add a few addi­tional comments.

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