Hey, what’s up TJ listeners? This is the Traffic Jam podcast episode#70. I am super excited to have you here with me today as we are going to be discussing some ways of getting traffic that are rather different.

Of course all to often on the show we just discuss things like Facebook, Google, content marketing, and the like and whilst all of these are great, sometimes the best opportunities exist in places where the majority are not. So in this show we’ll be exploring creative, out of the box marketing with Greg Cesar.

In fact my very willing guest was happy for me to put him in to the test by asking him to name his very best alternative traffic sources. This is a really fun interview and one that will open your mind to the many other ways that you can get traffic and grow your audience.

We discuss in the interview sales cycle marketing, the piggyback method, and UMPs. All terms that may not be familiar to you but that’s the reason they’re rarely ever talked about. Now we’re really going deep in to the lesser known in this episode and I think you are really going to enjoy it.

So let me give Greg a quick introduction. I first became aware of him through my friend Ernesto who raved about his Google Adwords prowess and then a little later on Tommie Powers, my guest on episode#67 suggested Greg as a must have guest on the show.

Greg is a really versatile marketer and has had exposure to many different marketing strategies since he first started his online business way back in 1997. He loves marketing and according to Greg would actually do it for free, which kind of makes sense, as you’ll soon discover, on the show that he talks about marketing with a huge amount of passion.

So without any further ado, here is Greg Cesar for a discussion all about alternative traffic sources.

James: So hey welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#70 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Greg Cesar all the way from Atlanta. Greg, how are you doing?

Greg: I am good. How are you?

James: I am doing awesome and super-stoked on today’s session. Let’s jump right in as I always like to do. You of course are pretty well known for your expertise using kind of mainstream channels like Google Adwords and the likes but you’re also known to explore less talked about and often more creative ways getting traffic. So today I think we should focus our attention there hopefully with some kind of free flowing conversation around out of the box ways to build an audience and drive traffic so let’s begin with that and perhaps talk about why might our audience want to look outside the conventional channels to generate traffic to their website.

Greg: Well you know I’ll start by saying that there is something I call UMP which stands for Unique Marketing Proposition. Everyone’s got to be familiar with USP, unique selling proposition, and that’s what makes you different. What UMP is how you are marketing differently because if you are doing the same thing at the same way at the same time as everyone else, you are going to get the same results. So when you do things a little differently and you are creative in how you are doing your marketing, what ends up happening is two things. One, you find opportunities that your competition doesn’t even know exist, and second is, you’re in an ocean all by yourself so the conversion is higher, your click throughs are higher. Everything is better when you’re in that field, so don’t look for things like, I have people telling me things like, I don’t see people selling this kind of product. That’s not what we are looking for. We’re looking for markets and opportunities in traffic that other people are doing but we brought it here in our own pond and we are not the same pond with all the sharks. The opportunities are so much better when you do it that way.

James: Yeah, far less competition and as you said, a larger swimming pool and more space to swim around makes things a lot easier, right?

Greg: Absolutely!

James: Well, let’s talk about some of the ways we can do this. Let’s sum the creative traffic sources, what’s your number one? What’s your most unconventional, untalked about traffic source that you’d like to share with us today?

Greg: Okay, there’s a lot and some of them are the properties and channels that most people are most familiar with. When you look at Google and Facebook- those types of places. I go about that very differently than other people do. But let me give you a really simple and easy thing that everyone listening can go out and do, and let’s start with the question. What is the most important page on any website on the internet? Right? And the answer to that is the thank you page. That’s the most important page and here’s why. Only the action takers and the buyers land on the Thank you page. So, what is a really easy thing to do? Go to people who have websites and those who are actively advertising. Why advertising? Because that means they’re getting buyers and leads. You’re not running an ad somewhere for months and months at a time and you’re losing money. You approach those people and you say, hey what would you charge me to advertise on your thank you page? By the way I am not taking any business away from you, these are people who are going to be leaving anyway. I am going to help you monetize your advertising. Some people may say, I don’t know, what do you think? Well, I can pay you on a monthly basis, I can pay you as an affiliate, I can pay you at a cost per action, tell me what you have in mind. Hopefully they’ll say, let’s do it as an affiliate, that way they only pay you on every sale. But what you are doing is you are tapping in to a piece of traffic that no one else is tapping in to while they are paying for the buyers and the non-buyers, you only get access in paying for the buyers. To give you an example how powerful this is, I did this with a gentleman who is launching a new product and I said, hey, your customers would be great for some of my products and offerings which is web hosting and things of that nature. He sent me over 700 customers in less than a year, and all I did was pay him to advertise on the thank you page. That was it. So very powerful, very easy, but look for people who are spending money advertising and let me say, let me buy your exit traffic. They’re leaving anyway, let’s not waste it. So a very simple thing to do.

James: Wow! As you can see that is going to be highly targeted so let us talk perhaps how we might identify an appropriate target for this thank you page advertising. What sort of steps would you go through to identify who you want to target with this method?

Greg: Ok, so I will give you an unconventional way. There’s we can search for people who are online, you know what something people is not going to think about? People who are advertising in magazines. Think about it. Magazines exist because of advertisers. Advertisers exist because consumers are buying the product, so if you find someone who is advertising consistently in a magazine, by the way, which is not cheap. A full page ad in a magazine can cost $8-$15 thousand or more. So if that guy is spending that kind of money, they’re generating leads and sales. But here is the opportunity. No one is thinking about contacting those guys. So a really easy thing to do for people who are advertising in magazines. Look for people who are also sending out direct mail. Because if they are sending out direct mail in places, they are spending a lot of money to do that. Which is again the kinds of people we want to reach because that means they are always going to be marketing. The other thing that you can do is if you are going to go online is look for the people who are running Google Adwords for the people who are running ads on Facebook. Contact some of those people. Look for people who are offering newsletters and asking people to subscribe which means they have a mailing list that you can tap in to. Again, if they are buying that traffic, even better because you know that whatever they are doing must be converting which means they can get you in front of the right people.

James: Yeah, definitely. Well I guess we don’t normally encourage our listeners to go and subscribe to every marketing list possible but I guess that is one way of looking at this, you can identify the highly trafficked sites in your market, see who has some form of offer or opt in and list who just subscribed right? They are not doing anything with that thank you page, it is an open piece of real estate that is under-utilized I guess there is straight away an open opportunity to get in touch with that site owner and position some form of deal like this to them, right?

Greg: Absolutely! A lot of these posts are sitting on huge numbers of opt ins and sales and they are doing absolutely nothing with it and you can help them monetize that.

James: And what did you offer for the website hosting example that you gave? What was your positioning? What was your offer that you put there on the thank you page and how was it crafted?

Greg: He was selling a product and basically the offer was you’re going to need internet access or web hosting and go check this page out. The way you position it, especially with their initial product is what I call logical conclusion marketing. So step 1 you need this, step 2 you need this so I became that step 2. Think about, and I don’t understand why car dealers don’t sell car insurance. If they go to your dealership to buy a car, well guess what they need next? Car insurance! So you position your offer with people where your product becomes a logical conclusion. You are the next step, and instead of them going to someone else for the next step, here is the recommendation. So now you’re a recommended offer after step#1 which is a very good positioning.

James: Yeah, I call this being second in the production line and it is finding out who has that customer before you do and then just neatly positioning yourself in after that as a natural progression so yeah, I can see exactly why that would work and I am sure as a little exercise for our listeners, go and think about who is dealing with your customer before you do and see if there is advertising opportunities on their site, better still to those customers, or those opted in subscribers by advertising on the thank you page. Love that Greg, Awesome, what a great way to kick things off. Let’s talk about another alternative creative traffic source. What are the ideas that you’ve got up your sleeve?

Greg: Believe it or not, newspaper ads!

James: Well there you go! Where are we? Are we in 2015 or what year are we in?

Greg: Yeah, 2015! Most people say newspaper ads? What a waste of time and energy that is. Guess what? There are people who read newspapers, believe it or not. And there’s millions and millions of them, and here’s the thing. These are people with disposable income. It’s more educated people, they have disposable income. And they will buy things too! Not just newspaper ads, you know what else I like? Newspaper classifieds. In the United States for example, there are groups and in a lot of countries, they may have groups as well. It may not be as big as you’d find in the US but what happens is this. A bunch of newspapers get together and they form a collaborate. And so when you call to place an ad, one they can syndicate your ad to a hundred different newspapers. So instead of you having to place a hundred different ads, you can place one and you are in front of a million people in seven days. And so the cost of the ads are very inexpensive. To give you an example, I just recently did a test for a product and I ran that ad from Florida, all the way to Maine, which is you’re talking 13-14 different states and it cost me $100 to do that.

James: Wow! That’s insane. Think about what that would cost you in display advertising, even on a CPM basis you’ll probably be through that budget damn fast right?

Greg: Oh, you’d do that in about five minutes. So that’s a hidden gem that most people don’t think about. Now you want to know what happens when you take your ad over there and like I said earlier where you’re not swimming with the sharks? You know what, that ad, what my conversion rate and what my opt in rate was for that offer? It was a 62% opt in rate with a 55% conversion rate.

James: I guess there is a lot more effort in landing off your landing page direct from a newspaper ad, you need to be highly qualified, someone’s got that noted down the URL, they’ve typed that in to their browser and they’ve gone there so any traffic that you get to that page is going to be super highly qualified I’d expect.

Greg: That is exactly right. That person had to work to get your offer so that tells me something about them already. And then the second piece of it is you’re in what I call the vacuum. So here is what happens when you are in the vacuum. Your competitor is not there so that means I can sell at any price that I want and I can ask that prospect to do anything that I want because the nearest competitor is not a click a way. They don’t even know where the nearest competitor is so I can do anything I want. So that’s what the vacuum allows you to be able to do.

James: Very nice! I like that a lot. I guess the next sort of step of this is to be going to real old school direct mail methods and even split testing these ads out right? That would be super cool testing different creatives and sending them to different landing pages and see how that sort of traffic splits out from there but yeah, I love it. These fusions are kind of old ideas with new technologies and new methods and reaps some huge, huge results. It’s like you said, while everyone is zigging, you’re zagging and you just sort of stand out there on your own, positioned there without any particular competition known to you and you can drive huge, huge results. This is great stuff Greg, two awesome ideas and action points there. I think let’s do perhaps a third if we can. What would be another cool, creative way of generating traffic that no other people or few other people tend to do right now?

Greg: Another thing, and this would be using more of the traditional channels when you look at YouTube, when you look at Google or Facebook. We start thinking of something that I call mindset marketing. In mindset marketing, you sell to the mind what is going on in their mind versus the product and everyone focuses only on their product when they think about creating marketing opportunities, so when you do that, there’s a whole lot more opportunity to sell things. To give you an example, let’s say someone wants to sell SEO services. So what do most people want to do in Google, Facebook, YouTube? The want to bid on the keyword SEO to find everyone who is looking for SEO. The problem there is you are now competing with every other person who is also selling the same services. It is hard to think about the mindset and ask yourself someone who is looking for SEO, what are they doing now? What are they looking for? What other things can I position myself that I can find that person that is not using the word SEO because if I go after SEO. I am swimming in the ocean with a lot of sharks. So here is an example of some things. One might be something as simple as 301 redirect, right? There are about a hundred thousand people searching for how to create a 301 redirect. The thing about that is only someone who is doing SEO is looking for 301 redirect. Let’s look at opportunities in terms of bidding on YouTube or Google for that. SEO – $10-$12 per click. 301 redirect, if you paid 5cents per click, you paid too much money. That’s how wide open that keyword is, so sometimes in marketing, I will create something to give away or to sell that really has nothing to do with my product but it tells me who that prospect is. It helps me understand that someone who is in my market. I will give you another example. An FTP software, are you familiar with Filezilla?

James: I am, that’s another blast from the past. I remember filezilla from a few years ago.

Greg: Do you know 1.8 million a month search for filezilla?

James: Well, I guess I do now. Is that the statistic?

Greg: It is. A lot of people are searching for it. Now, let us look at mindset marketing. Why does someone need filezilla?

James: Well, they’re probably building a website or populating some hosting or something to that degree I guess.

Greg: A hundred percent. You’re looking at someone who has, because the only reason you need an FTP software is you’re uploading a site to a server. I know if you are searching for filezilla or if you are searching for a tutorial on filezilla you are doing something with a website. And if you are looking for a tutorial on filezilla that tells me you’re not the most advanced person there. So that means you need help with whatever you are looking to do. So why not give that person a tutorial? Hey let me teach you how to use filezilla. And then on the thank you page, by the way, do you need help with marketing that website? Do you need SEO for that website? Do you need someone to do PPC for that website that you are looking to put up there? And the beauty is, from a cost standpoint, nobody else is doing anything with filezilla. You can’t sell filezilla it is a free software so no one is bidding on that keyword. So I can find that customer for pennies while all the other SEO companies are bidding out there paying dollars and dollars to get people to their website. It’s the exact same thing per person. They search for filezilla today and tomorrow except I found a way to get them that my competitor didn’t think about.

James: Yeah, I love that. It’s also why I like advertising to those people who are possibly searching about how to tutorials to sell to them because whilst they seem to be kind of the total opposite of the customer that you want, someone trying to do it themselves, than getting a service, there are people that will then get frustrated because they can’t do it themselves. They why you can position in a done for you solution that will take all of their pain and concern and frustration trying to do it themselves away and I guess this is kind of the same thing at play right? Seeing how they are having a problem and then presenting a solution it would be either to solve their problem or perhaps auxiliary to that the hosting and the serving example that you gave?

Greg: Yup, you see that it’s that person who has the problem. They say if they want to do it themselves and it is okay but what you’ve done is you’ve identified a huge group of people who’ve identified themselves that say I have a problem, I am looking for a solution and you have the solution. And what I like to teach my students is books. Whatever niche market you are in, whatever product you sell, go out and find every book that has to do with that market and then you bid on those in Google. Because the person looking for that book is serious enough to spend enough money. You want to be in front of those people. That’s some of the best converting keywords ever used with Google Adwords. So again, it’s a traditional channel but we’re going at it in an untraditional, unconventional method.

James: Nice! So aside from books which seems to be a fantastic way of identifying these people, how else might you locate these search terms or people that are typing these types of terms in to the search engines?

Greg: So I will start with something we all learn in grammar school: who where what why when. And so I will start by asking who are my prospects. What are they looking for? Where else are they getting it from? When do they need it? But the most important question out of all of them is why. When you answer the why question, why do they need this? That opens up the door. To give you an example, let’s look at an ergonomic chair. If you go in to Google and you do a search for ergonomic chair. Every ad there says we’ve got them in stock for a low price. That’s not why people look for an ergonomic chair. The reason they look for an ergonomic chair is because of some level of back pain or some back problem so someone said hey you need to go out and get an ergonomic chair so once you answer the why questions, you start to see that there’s a whole lot other opportunities that I can start going after. People who have back pain, what else are they doing? So now you start placing your ergonomic chair in front of people who have back pain, people who have sciatic nerve, people who need lumbar support and all other opportunities. So you ask yourself, who are they? What are they? Why do they need it? When do they need it? But most importantly is the why question, why do they need this product? And when you answer that, that’s when the floodgates open wide up.

James: Nice! Before we close out, let’s cover off some of the what ifs and objections to targeting alternative traffic sources. Is there anything that we should be on the lookout for or perhaps any sort of pitfalls of trying things in an alternative fashion that other people aren’t doing. If they were, what would they be?

Greg: There really is no negative or pitfalls to it. The only thing is for people who in an internet marketing space is you don’t want to look for – what is the best way to say it? We’re selling the same things everyone else is selling. We’ve just found ways to get to that consumer that the other folks are not thinking about so don’t say to yourself I want to find markets and opportunities that don’t exist. That’s not where you want to be. We’re just selling the same product and the same services and we’ve just created a different way a more efficient way that consumer. So no pitfalls, the only pitfalls I think is lack of ingenuity and lack of creativity but as long as you think outside of the box, you will find customers that competitors don’t even know exist.

James: Nice! Well I know you’re teaching some of these stuff. Certainly you’re teaching the piggybacking method using sites like Amazon. Is that now available? Greg, is that potentially somewhere that we can send our listener off to to get a little bit more of a flavor of more of this stuff?

Greg: Yeah, we are in the final stages of our new site which will have all our courses and trainings. It’s at gregcesar.com.

James: Awesome! You’ll get a link to Greg’s website and some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show by going to TrafficJamCast.com/70. So all that remains Greg is for me to thank you for coming on the show. This has been awesome! I love looking back and going at this some of these old school methods and some of these less talked about channels because I think it really brings up some of the best insights as opposed to talking about Facebook, and YouTube and Google in the traditional fashion all day long so I found it thoroughly insightful and I just want to say thank you to you for coming on the show.

Greg: And to bring that point home, here is a question to you. When did you go to your mailbox and check your mail last?

James: Yeah, in fact we just put out a funny cartoon as we do on the site kind of making a joke of how things completely changed originally when we started getting email, we get this little ping that says you’ve got mail and it was just different to get an email in your inbox and now literally we’ve turned a full 360 degrees. It’s got the complete and utter opposite, so I don’t know Greg, I don’t know the last time I got mail but it happens pretty infrequently now.

Greg: How about physical mail? Do you get physical mail?

James: I send a fair bit of physical mail but that’s just the reason I am a marketer and I want to stand out but physical mail? Hardly ever these days. It is pretty unusual and when it is it is a bank statement. That’s pretty much it.

Greg: Now you’ve got to check your mail which is a bank statement. When was the last time you saw a long copy direct sales piece in your mailbox?

James: I am guessing that that would be probably close to 10 years ago.

Greg: Could you imagine, tomorrow you go check your mail, could be a bank statement or maybe a light bill or something, and here is a long copy sales letter. You look at an envelope and you say, I don’t know who that is, let me open it. So what happens is it stands out like a sore thumb. For me I get so much direct mail, I check my mail three or four times a week, I cannot tell you the last time I got a long copy sales letter. As a matter of fact, I got a letter from Aweber and it was just a regular thank you letter and it stuck out and I was like why is Aweber sending me something in the mail? And I actually saved it because it was so weird to save that but that’s the opportunity and that the offline world, it did not stop existing, it’s just that everyone went online. And so it is so ignored right now that if you do send something offline, it sticks out like a sore thumb and it is a great opportunity.

James: Yeah, I will agree with that, I mean one of the things that we do quite regularly in our businesses is just send simple handwritten thank you notes to new customers or people who are doing good stuff for us, be it referrals or something similar. And you would be, I don’t know if you would be surprised but we do get so many great comments back when those little notes go out and it is so simple to do yet nobody is doing it, it’s like we’ve just forgotten about all these great methods to reach our audience and I think sometimes taking a look back to what worked in the past should bring up some pretty good ideas to what you could be doing today.

Greg: 100%

James: Cool! Well Greg, thank you much, as I have said, it has been a blast and I am sure we’ve just touched the surface of some of the stuff that we could talk about with you so perhaps we can schedule another time to dive a little bit deeper soon.

Greg: Absolutely! Anytime.

So there you go that was Greg Cesar and you have been listening in to episode#70 of the Traffic Jam podcast. Now we will of course be back real soon with another episode and to make sure that you don’t miss that show as soon as it is released, subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by following these two links – TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher.

You can also get a direct link to all the bonuses that come with this episode including a downloadable MP3 and full transcript by going to TrafficJamCast.com/70 where you can also join in for the discussion on this show too.

Now we end the show with a traffic jam chosen by Greg Cesar. He’s picked a little bit of old school Hip Hop and it is the Sugar Hill gang with Rapper’s Delight.