Should I Pay For Traffic Before My Products Are Ready?

Nicole Asks: I just launched a new design of my website. I am new to all of this. My primary goal is the business, not the blog, so I’m combining social networking with traditional advertising. But, I don’t have my services offered up yet as it’s requiring some programming that won’t be done until the end of the month. However, I can see merit in bringing visitors to the site now and the blog. I just don’t know if I should invest a small amount of money in advertising before the services go live or not. I think a couple hundred dollars to advertise on a few blogs (including this one) would not be a large investment. But, is it worth it if I don’t have anything to sell yet?

Thank you so much for any advice you might have on this subject.

Nicole - PickNicksBrain.com

Hi Nicole

First of all congratulations! You’ve got a great looking site with excellent information!

As far as advertising goes I would encourage you to hold off until you set up a system for capturing visitor emails. You want to immediately start to convert visitors into subscribers.

It’s great that you’ve got your blog set up for both RSS and Email subscriptions. But since you are focusing more of your attention on the business side of things you’ll also want to have a separate email list.

Keep in mind that a more effective and sustainable approach to online marketing is to take a long-term view. Your primary goal should NOT be to sell to visitors the first time they come to your site. That might make you money up front, but you’ll be losing out on the ongoing sales.

Instead, focus on providing great information (you’re already starting to do that) and encourage people to join your list with an incentive - a free report or recording of a teleclass for instance. My guess is that you already have some material that you could easily turn into a free report and offer as a sign up incentive.

These visitors who convert into subscribers are much more likely to become customers and, if you treat them right, they will very likely become customers for life!

That’s what you want.

Even when you begin advertising, I encourage you to think of it as a two-step process.

1. Convert visitors to subscribers.
2. Convert subscribers to customers.

On the technical side I recommend two email solutions:

If you want an integrated solution that includes a shopping cart, email and autoresponder management, and affiliate management you’ll want to go with 1ShoppingCart. I’ve been using it for over 3-years and it keeps getting better.

That said, the individual parts of an all-in-one solution will never be as good as a dedicated solution. So if you are just looking for a top-notch email and autoresponder system, I recommend Aweber. I am in the process of migrating my list from 1ShoppingCart to Aweber mainly for its higher email deliverability. But I am also enjoying the ease of use, the enhanced testing and tracking functions and their flexible blog subscriptions.

Whatever email service you choose, make sure it has - and you use - double or confirmed opt in for your list. Even though your list will be a bit smaller, it will be more responsive and more legal!

To your success!

Ed