How To Use Evergreen Traffic Drivers So Your Blog Grows While You Sleep

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evergreen web traffic

Smart Pas·sive In·come

/smärt ˈpasiv ˈinˌkəm/

Building online businesses that take advantage of systems of automation that allow transactions, cash flow, and growth to happen without requiring a real-time presence.

That’s Pat Flynn’s definition, and what a brilliant concept.  I don’t know if Pat Flynn coined it or not, but he owns it now and it surely does resonate.  It’s an ideal every online entrepreneur would love to achieve.

Pat Flynn: Smart Passive Income…

But there’s an obstacle in your way–many, especially new, online entrepreneurs are not creating Evergreen Traffic Drivers.

I participate in a number of online Masterclass Private Facebook Groups.  It keeps me in touch with entrepreneurs and what they’re interested in.  Recently, I read a great story from one entrepreneur.

She had put together a wonderful online course, had launched it, and it was making good money for her.  After her fourth launch, she started to wonder, “Where’s the growth?”  Each successive launch was about the same as the last.  She was expecting the business to grow with time and wondered whether there would be some sudden tipping point or just what the problem was.

When businesses like this don’t grow, it’s almost always because their leads aren’t growing fast enough.  For her, leads were names in her email list that she could appeal to each time she was ready to launch another course.  Unless her leads were growing each launch, the business was going to have a hard time growing too.

How can I make those leads grow?

But how to make those leads grow?  Her immediate reaction was she needed more advertising.

Certainly that’s a possibility, but the trouble with advertising is after the ad has run, it’s spent.  It quits showing and no more leads are produced.  So you have to run more ads.

That doesn’t sound much like Smart Passive Income, does it?

And in fact, if you analyze the top marketers as I have done, you find that none of them rely heavily on advertising to get their traffic and build their mailing lists.  In fact, the Top 15 Master Marketers get just 0.04% of their traffic from ads!

Obviously, they know something most online entrepreneurs don’t, and that’s how to build Evergreen Traffic Sources

What’s an Evergreen Traffic Source?

Evergreen Traffic Sources are simple,  They’re just places on the web that attract traffic forever and send it to your web site.  There are a variety of different kinds, and here are some obvious examples:

  • Your Own Blog Posts and Web Site Content:  Google and the other search engines index that content.  Searchers who find it can become traffic to your site.  SEO Traffic was the #1 source of Traffic for all of the Top 15 Master Marketers.
  • Quora:  When you answer a question on Quora and in your answer provide a link to your web site, it’s an Evergreen Traffic Source.  People searching Quora directly or indirectly via Google can find your answer, read it, and potentially click through to your site.
  • Comments on other blogs:  When you leave a comment on a blog that contains a link back to your site, it’s just like Quora.  If someone visits that post and reads the comments, they may click through to your site, even years after you leave the comment.  By the way, on many blogs, your name on the comment is a link that leads back to your web site, so you may not even explicity have to link.  Just be sure you check and don’t assume that’s the case.
  • Guest Posts:  If you Guest Post and there are links to your web site in the Guest Post (there almost always are), that’s an Evergreen Traffic Source.
  • Pinterest Boards:  Creating a substantial Pinterest Board can yield traffic for quite a long time as folks searching for sources of pins on particular topics discover your boards.

And there are other things that are not Evergreen Traffic Sources because they don’t stick around:

  • Advertising:  When the ad finishes running, it’s gone.  Nothing Evergreen about it.
  • Most Social Media Posts:  Most Social Media, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, is very focused on the idea of a news feed.  As such, recent posts are newsworthy and those are largely what gets the traffic.  While you could search for old posts, in practice, people usually don’t do that much.  So, most Social Media is a lousy source of Evergreen Traffic Drivers.
  • Email:  You can drive a lot of traffic with Email, but it’s not really Evergreen traffic.  Very few go back into their email archives to look for old messages and click through.  There’s a whole Inbox Zero movement that encourages deletion of all the old messages as soon as possible.

Where things can get particularly confusing is when you enjoy early success driving traffic to your site from a source that isn’t Evergreen.  You get used to that traffic, but you keep having to work to sustain it.  Unfortunately, that work doesn’t create any assets for the future.

The important thing is to strike a balance.  Drive some traffic from non-Evergreen sources as needed.  It’s often convenient to do so if you need a quick bump in traffic.  But make sure you’re investing heavily in creating new Evergreen Traffic Drivers.

That’s the only way you’ll keep getting traffic while you sleep!

Free traffic while you sleep–the best!

 

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