Traffic: Without It Your Funnel Is Dead

A funnel without traffic is like…a river with no bridgea fire with no wooda house with no wallsa car with no gasYou don’t create traffic.Traffic is already out there and you have nothing to do with that.All you are trying to do is jump in front of enough traffic to get the attention of your target audience.Your only goal with traffic is to get attention in the marketplace.The best writers aren’t the ones with bestselling books. The people with best selling books are just the people that keep showing up over and over and over again anytime there is an event for authors.If you are already podcasting, you are building your largest traffic source that is free in exchange for creating great content.So if you started your podcast and you have listeners, you have successfully jumped in front of traffic that would otherwise be listening to other content and they are now listening to your content.What most podcasters miss is that the game is not over when you successfully pick up enough traffic for your podcast. The traffic you pick up for your podcast is most valuable to you and only you.The traffic that you have is only valuable to other people at scale. So in other words, it’s only valuable to other companies, sponsors, authors, etc. in large volumes.Since your traffic is most valuable to you from the moment you acquire it, you need to have a way to capture that traffic and KEEP it consuming your stuff.This is why we recommend creating products and services to your audience so that you can teach them what you know and get paid for it.I see over and over again that podcasters only ever gain enough traffic that is valuable to them, but yet they never monetize that traffic.That’s like thinking that you won’t start a business unless you can just go straight to the franchise model.Almost every franchise starts with a single location. Before a podcast has enough traffic to become valuable to other companies, you already have enough traffic to make it valuable to your company.So at the time when ONLY YOU qualify to benefit from your audience, you aren’t taking any steps to monetize that audience. That’s crazy!I can tell you all day long how to get traffic, but if you don’t have any way to capitalize on that traffic, then there is no mechanism to convert your traffic into customers.What have you created to ascend your traffic to the next level to convert them to customers?You may be thinking that eventually, when you have enough traffic, you will create something to monetize. Create it now and then go capture more traffic!Don’t get tons of traffic and have no way for them to become a customer.You can pour jet fuel on your traffic by taking some very specific actions...Once you have a funnel built, it’s time to ramp up your traffic acquisition methods. Depending on whether you have more time or money, you will be taking completely different actions.In fact, the larger you can build your organic traffic, the less money you will have to pay for traffic.So where can you jump in front of traffic if you have more time than money?Other podcastsConferencesProfessional organizationsTrade organizationsLocal groupsFacebook groupsOnline...