An exciting new area for internet marketers has been the development of the Flipper website. Flipper.com really has changed the whole buying and selling websites thing, because it’s a really good, safe place to conduct the transaction. 

But I think more than that, and this goes to the heart of everything you’re doing in terms of SEO, is that traffic is not as easy as it was three years ago. You really do need to educate yourself. You really do need to make sure you’re dealing with the right people and put in really serious effort. 

This has had the by product of making it much safer to sell your websites now. In the old days I used to really harrass people to say, don’t reveal your actual site. Talk about the actual thing, get a non-disclosure, get protection, get all this sort of stuff. 

What was happening, people were opening the kimono as they say in the business, and revealing everything about their site. Because traffic was so easy in 2006, people would throw up five cent Google campaigns or do some quick and dirty SEO and they would effectively mutilate the site. Rather than selling it, they would just rip it off. That’s just not possible these days, because you either have to spend so much more money to get the quick traffic, or you have to put in real effort on the SEO side.

For people who want to rip you off, effort is the last thing on their minds. So it’s very exciting. I think it’s a very exciting area now. It’s great. It really does sort the wheat from the chaff.

Traffic is such an important part, and I know to stay on the cutting edge, we’re having to constantly test and develop new techniques. We’re especially doing a lot of work with Dan Raine over in the labs for the Immediate Edge. Perhaps we should take a case study and dive into it. We talk about the Symphony of Four Parts and there is market research traffic conversion and also the product itself. Let’s really hone in on the traffic, and I know there is going to be some overlap obviously. 

Just recently I had a little product that I launched which went a little bit under the radar I think for the value of what it really could provide, which is my Valuing Websites course. This is obviously key for the buying and selling on Flipper. People can follow along in the Thirty Day Challenge and see the processes that we set out. That is about getting someone an excellent foothold, getting them to make their first dollar, taste a lot of different things. But when we’re launching a product, there are processes we go through for driving that traffic.

The most interesting thing is that the first week of the Thirty Day Challenge which is all about the market research side of things determining the keywords which will hopefully bring us traffic and using Market Samurai I suppose in particular, is absolutely no different if we’re doing a $10 product or a million dollar a year product. It really is exactly what we do. We don’t pull any punches.

The difference if you will, and a lot of people are interested in this, what is the difference? The difference is, once we find something that is going to work, then we apply a whole other bunch of traffic techniques. We teach effectively two or three traffic techniques, the most standard, the most important, the most basic ones inside the Thirty Day Challenge. There are dozens and dozens of strategies that you can use depending on your skill level and the financial resources that are available to you.

If we take that Valuing Your Website product, you can’t talk about traffic without talking about market research and why you create the product in the first place. I think the biggest mistake people make is that they think about that product first which we often talk about as part 4 in the Magnificent Symphony. They come up with a product idea first without really seeing if there’s a) a market for it and b) if there’s any traffic in that market and c) will that market actually buy anything?

In this particular case, we knew that because of the rise of Flipper and the resurgence of buying and selling websites and the raw data in front of us, that people were selling their websites either way too cheaply, or people were buying the sites and getting incredible bargains. A lot of people were missing incredible bargains because they didn’t realize the true value of their website. So we were satisfied that there was indeed a market for this product.