Hey there listener! Welcome to episode#57 of Traffic Jam. I’m your host James Reynolds and you’re tuned in to the podcast that helps you increase your website traffic and build a profitable business online.

Now before we get stuck in to today’s content, I want to acknowledge Tabmandoo from the USA for leaving a five star review for the show. It reads amazing, this is one of the best digital marketing resource. Each episode is concise and actionable tips, not bewildering or intimidating. You can get something from every single show. James occasionally answers uhm, yes, great but he has significantly helped my career so I am indebted to him. Keep it up! Thanks Tabmandoo, I am certainly going to keep an ear out for my uhms and errs from now on. Anyway, I am chaffed this show is helping you.

If Traffic Jam is helping you jump ahead in your career or business, please leave a review for the show on iTunes or Stitcher radio. That really is the best way you can show your appreciation to everyone who puts these shows together. It’s not just me, but it’s my show editor, it’s my illustrator and of course the awesome guest we bring together for each episode.

Before we get to today’s guest, I want to let you know that there is a bonus training accompanying this episode titled Six Easy Ways to Build Traffic to Your Blog and you can get your hands on that training by going to TrafficJamCast.com/57 where you’ll also find the show notes for this episode too!

If that wasn’t a big enough clue, today’s topic is of course blog traffic – how to get more of it, how to convert more of it and all whilst working less. Yaro Starak has been blogging for 10 years now and during that time he’s tried a number of blogging business models including affiliate marketing, adspace sales and information publishing. The one where he had most success was the publishing medium where he spent the last several years helping others turn their expertise in to a profitable online business. Today Yaro helps people set up their own blog sales funnel, a system that combines blogging with email marketing to build a platform to sell your own digital training products online. Yaro is going to be sharing on this episode how he drives more traffic from conversion through his blog using the blog sales funnel so listen in and enjoy.

So here we go, it’s Traffic Jam episode#57 and this is Yaro Starak.

James: So hey there listener! Welcome back. You’re listening in to episode#57 of Traffic Jam and of course this is the interview section and today we are joined by Yaro Starak. Yaro, how are you doing?

Yaro: I am great James! Thanks for having me.

James: Stoked to have you on the podcast and as always. I don’t normally give my guest the opportunity to intro themselves, I normally do that for them, but since you’ve got a website called entrepreneurs-journey.com, I thought it might be quite nice of you to give us a bit of an overview of your business and tell us about the journey of how it came to be and what it is today.

Yaro: You know, the longer I live, the longer the story is, James so I will try and give you the short version. I went online in ’98 as part of my university studies, a good old fashioned dial up internet account and consequently fell in love with the internet. My other passion at that time was a collectible card game called Magic the Gathering, which some of your more geeky audience, probably males, will be familiar with – it’s a competitive card game I used to play in high school. It is a bit like poker in a sense that there is a tournament series where you can make big money, not big money on the poker scale but certainly you can make a living from it. My first website was about that game, I had a little e-commerce shop selling cards, and I had a forum and I made a bit of money so it was my first experience online. The dotcom boom was happening at that time and then double burst so I was exposed to all that experiences, I loved that stuff and wanted to do something bigger so I started a proofreading company which is my next business. That’s the one I took over or should I say the one I focused on a 100% after graduation and it became a full time income source, it was a great lifestyle business. I basically forwarded emails from editors and international students who were writing essays at English speaking universities and I acted as a middle man connecting those two groups and it was an hour or two a day of work, made a full time income, had a lot of spare time and consequently had time to think and sort of try other things as an entrepreneur. I was thinking of new ideas and eventually in 2004, someone said, you should start a blog, it is great for traffic, Google was ascending at that time a the big search engine so I thought you know what, I don’t know what blogs are but I will give it a go and see if I can learn it. Bearing in mind, 2004, ten years ago, and I installed a proofreading blog essentially on this proofreading business, really boring subject, crashed and learned within three months because I just didn’t care about that topic but I noticed I liked this blogging thing in particular telling stories about being an entrepreneur and about my business. So that’s when I registered www.entrepreneurs-journey.com January 2005, meant to be a hobby, I was going to tell the story of my previous 7-8 years of having the card business, having the proofreading company and all the other things I had done as an entrepreneur and also to continue to chronicle. It was truly an entrepreneur’s journey and what blogging is all about, I was journaling my story, my experiences, my thoughts, and surprisingly, an audience showed up! Maybe the benefit of good timing there, I did happen to jump on the blogging bandwagon at the start and my blog eventually became as big an earner as my proofreading company but I was loving blogging so I actually sold off everything else to focus a hundred percent on blogging which then eventually led me to, I guess you might call it traditional internet marketing, direct response marketing, email marketing, which I combined with blogging and start becoming essentially an information marketer so I started creating information products, courses, e-guides, group coaching, teaching other people how to make money with blogs, in particular, following that sort of lifestyle model, trying not to create a business that’s so big that you have no free time, getting high leverage but finding the sweet spot where you are enjoying what you are doing and also making good money and that is pretty much what I do today although I am sort of veering more towards pure sales funnel information publishing where I used to do more advertising and affiliate marketing and today it is really all about a blog combined with an email marketing sales funnel selling digital products and services and that pretty much brings you up to where I am today.

James: Love it! Well I’m glad you painted that picture because it does give an overview of your experience which is pretty broad as we were saying before we hit the record button and I am also glad that you touched on email on the end because it seems to me that you kind of built this lifestyle business sort on a pretty cool group, a cool audience and a very dedicated email list following, would that be the case? And if so what tips have you got for developing and nurturing an email list?

Yaro: Yeah it’s definitely a symbiosis of the blog and the email list. The email list is by far the most powerful direct response tool so it is certainly where the money comes from but it wouldn’t exist without the blog. I would really see it as like a linear flow, the blog is attracting the attention, I get my traffic from the blog. It is coming from search engine, it is coming from social, hitting the blog, joining the email list, the email list is more focused, and it’s giving dedicated information to solve a specific problem and I segment my lists, I have various email courses and various reports that lead in to relevant products. It is linear, I do like that, I love the fact that you can write about a specific project in a blog post or probably in a video or a in a podcast which then connects with the specific email sequence which you give away more targeted information which then leads to a logical next step if they want to continue working with you to buy your product and that’s what funnels is all about, that’s the front end of it and that can be quite automated. My dream has always been and I have been working towards this for a long time actually trying to find a model that works, a situation where you can write once a week because you want to. You enjoy blogging, you enjoy podcasting, you enjoy video, whatever it is you enjoy exploring content ideas and then you have these email content machines behind the blog where people can opt in at any point in time, they get this evergreen content that teaches them something and then they buy your products and also they go on to buy higher priced products so you can have multiple six to seven figure business that is quite elegant, quite simple, not necessarily requiring any employees and you still get to do the fun part which is jump on podcasts like this to teach people, speak onstage if you want to, just sit in cafes and write blog posts which is what I spent doing in my life in the last 10 years, and it takes a bit of setting it up. That’s the challenge here. All the content, all the emails you have to write, the free information you give away and not to mention the products you create as well so there’s things that you can do to speed up that process but that’s probably where I spend most of my time right now – product creation and email writing.

James: Yeah, got it. I mean it’s all that big, heavy lifting at the start that has that payoff over and over again, I guess it’s that clichéd example that all these internet marketers like to speak about of making money in your sleep but it is kind of the road that you’ve gone down right? You are now an information publisher, you have the systems in place that send out emails and follow people up on auto response rules and all that stuff while you can just be kicking your feet up in the beach having a cup of coffee in a local coffee shop or digging your teeth in to some content writing that you really enjoy doing eh?

Yaro: Yeah, and we’ve all been exposed to that idea right? I remember seeing that even before I was blogging because I was running these other companies that while these are lifestyle companies, they weren’t information publishing services and I did not like the idea of selling my own creativity, that’s what I think drew me to blogging and content publishing in general because there is something lovely as a creative person, almost like an artist where you can almost get creative and get paid for your work and for your writing or for your teaching whatever it is. The challenge though is it takes a while to figure out to make this work in evergreen also in a way like you’re talking about it. I spent a lot of time doing launches in my early days of blogging and I have made most of my big success financially from launches but they were not evergreens, they come from things that I had to do a sequence of things that was manual and I had organize affiliates. It was something that I didn’t set up to be evergreen and it felt like I could do it but I was so hooked to the launch thing that I spent a couple of years just doing that and I think that was what sort of showed me why evergreen is better because doing launches you burn out, you can’t keep doing that, you can’t keep promoting to your list in the same way you can’t keep expecting affiliates to keep supporting you so I have really been studying a lot of that sales funnel business models to combine what’s good about launches but make it though so that it’s not time dependent so it’s basically launch techniques tapped in to something that hopefully fingers crossed will work next year, the year after, and it keeps helping people and to do that you have to change the way you think about content production because especially as a blogger we often spend a lot of time being news reporters or in the moment content which is not evergreen and that’s a different blogging model. I did dabble in that and I tried to cover what was current and that turned you in to a reporter which is nothing like evergreen sales for business which is essentially being a journalist and you are getting paid for having up to date content and delivering advertising which makes money from advertising so I had to change and see myself more as making content that isn’t that transient, it’s that solid value in two years’ time, that’s the shift in which you produce content and it is difficult to do in some industries; I’d hate to try and do that in for example, search engine optimization because that industry changes every week –

James: Tell me about that! We try.

Yaro: Exactly! Right?

James: It’s a challenge, yeah.

Yaro: But if you are doing something like losing weight or getting rid of acne or some of clients’ subject areas like book publishing or like a few guys who focus on sports meaning these types of subjects, they talk about the fundamentals that don’t really change and that’s nice if you are in an industry where you can do that. I have managed to do that in my space although I can see already a good example, you can feel this as well, I wrote about Google authorship as a good SEO technique a few months ago before they went ahead and killed that process and it has been one of my products and I was like, have got to go and change my product now and that is frustrating so there is definitely a mind shift here you have to make thinking evergreen.

James: Yeah absolutely! Well I’ve been wanting to ask you about that. I am glad that we have touched on it. Really you came about on this evergreen model because you’ve dabbled in advertising, you’ve done the big one, I think you have probably done a few other things in between so what are some of the pitfalls with the other way of doing it versus where you are at now and perhaps we’ll sort of fast forward from there and really talk about the mechanics of how you got your systems set up and what’s involved in producing an evergreen funnel as you’ve got right this moment?

Yaro: Well I think a lot of it ties back in to the personality types and your strengths and what you personally want to do and how you want to spend your time married with the right business model to leverage that. That’s really important so there’s the strategy and your own personal strength so there was a time where I was following all the other bloggers which was about writing lots of content to increase page views and make more money from advertising, I was selling banners basically, I also started my email list and I was trying to get as many people on to that list as I could thinking that time was going to make more sales or affiliate products whenever there are other launches to promote or even just selling things to promote an email responder or some other software tool. And that’s a model that can work. If you don’t want to create your own product that’s fine. Some people just like to review other people’s products, some people just want to report the news and not really worry about customer support, product delivery, setting up a membership area and all that sort of thing, I guess my evolution of desire, as I was always there but I sort of danced around it and try to find different ways has been a true lifestyle business. I call it three main things, it’s really just actually the father, the son and the holy spirit here but it is similar. It’s been that important to me as an entrepreneur and it has taken me my entire entrepreneurial career, you get all three of them in alignment. So those things are, number one is finding something that is obviously going to make money. That, from the early days, that was actually the first goal, you have to make money, right? And then also, beyond that, to kind of reach a point where money is not an issue so at that time when I first started I saw a thousand dollars a day, it was actually my initial goal but if I make a thousand dollars a day, I can’t spend much money but certainly that was a lot of money as a 21 year old kid. So that was my initial goal, secondarily, I noticed a lot of my entrepreneurial friends were doing long hours and people were doing startups and they had all these clients and I was thinking it was great to get all these money but if I had to spend my entire time in servitude to clients sitting in an office and dealing with all these little fires popping all the time, that’s not the life I want to live so that sort of four hour work week or a couple hours a day kind of lifestyle was what I was after and then the third thing was actually the hardest thing to get right and it was finding something that I was personally could see myself doing long term so it’s really a strength to develop and get satisfaction which often falls on the wayside because one can get too busy trying to get money first and then you try to work less because you’re doing too many hours and then finally you’re making enough money and you’re not working too many hours but do I actually want to do this for the rest of my life? Am I tapping in to something that’s a passion? So for me, I initially had this card game website, not enough money, I was passionate about it until I got in to the game, my proofreading company, good money, leveraged on time, it took an hour a day for me to manage it but I did not really care, I was not doing anything that had tapped in to my inherent strength. Blogging initially looked good, I had something I cared about, I discovered I enjoyed writing and wanted to be a content creator, they looked like there was flaws in the sense that it might be hard to get leverage because if you have to sit there and write blog posts every day and do promotions and things like that to keep the money coming in. it felt like eventually a job, it could turn in to one of the 12-hour day situations and so I had to find a better model, there was a higher investment, higher margin and that’s when things like the 80/20 rule for me became really important. That’s when I started studying email marketing and I started looking at how much leverage was there compared to traditional blogging and that allowed me to get the three rights. So once I had these sort of business funnel sales with the blog, the blogging taps in to the thing I enjoy, the money is good, and because you are using a sales funnel, you are getting more time and once it’s set up and running, it’s really 80/20. You focus on 20% of things to give you 100% of the value. It’s not really 80/20 to be honest, it’s probably 20/100 and that’s work but I spent 15 years as an entrepreneur to find that combination that I run with today.

James: Yeah it does take some fine tuning doesn’t it but that’s the journey right? That’s the second part of your domain name coming through in your story. So it seems now it’s really an information business that you’ve got. You’re selling paid infoproducts I think and you’ve got a community on the backend and you’ve got this evergreen funnel that’s driving it all. Tell us a little bit about what you are promoting and how this blog sales funnel as you describe it is set up.

Yaro: Well it is a traditional sales funnel so there is nothing different from even before the internet where you have low priced front end products and then midrange products and higher priced products and you don’t have as many people buying high priced products and your business is really run off that small group who buy everything you produce. The difference with what I have done is that I have tapped on blog at the top of it so it’s where the funnel begins, it’s where I track my audience, and it’s where I build trust and credibility. So in principle, it is quite simple. You write the blog, you share information, you market the blog, you have to get out there and build your audience, and then you make offers through opt in lists and that sort of thing. You can download a free report to get information on how to solve your problems, you can learn how to do something, then as an email sequence, most of my sequence at the moment are between two weeks and a month although I have plans to do a couple of longer ones but essentially those sequences deliver information and the beautiful thing is to deliver my blog post so I send people back to my blog post but they’re all about the one subject. So for example I’ve had a sort of a side project investing websites, I’m buying and selling websites with the money I was making from blogging as an investment strategy. I don’t do that now but there was a period of time I did that and so that was something that I felt was worth teaching as well. I knew buy and sell websites, I had some success stories to tell and I have written quite a few blog posts about it so I decided to let’s create a front end product and let’s put in an email sequence which is basically an email course that points people back to the relevant blog posts on how to buy and sell websites that have a passive income strategy that leads to selling a roundabout $150 front end product and that’s set up now automatically so you can go to my blog, you can join that email force that teach you the fundamentals of buying and selling websites as an investment strategy, if you want more information you can buy the guide and that ties in to the product on the line though if you are really serious about it and you buy a blog and you want to grow it in to something substantial, that’s when you might invest in my flagship course which is called blog mastermind. Obviously it’s a higher priced and it’s also more intensive and you spent some time with me as well and it’s that linear flow of what the funnel is about and what I love about it is, it allows you to service the people that benefit the most from you and make money doing it. The people who do buy it think that they are getting the result. They won’t buy from you if they want everything down to the intensive wires and the ones that we spend more time with them if they were really serious and really motivated in getting something in return so I think it is a great model because part of its automated, you can just keep selling these e-books and courses and people can just stay at the front but those who are serious at the right situation who are your best clients, it will find them automatically. That’s what the funnel does, it isolates the best customers and allows you to do that automatically so you do spend your time with the people who benefit most from your work and there is nothing worse than being a teacher or an information product creator teaching people who just don’t get value from your content. Anything that you can do to get the higher people to the best products you have, the better. And if it can be automated then it’s brilliant so I haven’t actually formulated my funnel and I am halfway through building the big machine. The front is finished, I am working on the middle and the back at the moment but so far it is working quite well and as I said it is the most enjoyable model that I’ve used so far and there’s not many bloggers who do it very well so I am looking forward to helping more bloggers helping more experts, coaches and trainers really use this model because I think it is the perfect model for anyone who use the opportunity – subject matter expert, or a trainer or a coach or speaker or an author because the blog is the platform, it is how they can build their email list, their content producers so they can understand blogging and then they can build up the machine behind it if they can just understand how to do effective email marketing and create great products so it is a beautiful model for those types of people.

James: Perfect! Well let’s talk about some specifics. The first question I want to ask you is around actually acquiring a subscriber. So what do you do? Do you have sort of generic offers or do you go with the model where you’ve got post specific opt ins that drive people on to the list. What are you working with?

Yaro: When I decide to begin this process, I actually looked in to my archives. I was thinking, I already was blogging for a good eight years before I decide to fully commit to this model so I look at my strengths in terms of subject matter so as I said, buying and selling websites, I already had already had following in terms of people who were searching my content in Google and reading these articles I already had. Same with things like mindset and productivity and I also had one on traffic and you know, people want to know about traffic, everyone loves the subject of traffic, I had a 90% finished e-guide on how to increase traffic to your blog that I just hadn’t released so it made sense as well to focus on that. I knew it would sell and frankly as a teacher you have to have some traffic because everyone needs it so those are the three things I have decided to test as my funnels one at a time of course and there is a lot to go in to and some upsells and backend products that I want to be available straightaway but to answer your question that’s how I did it. I identified existing needs in my audience based where they are going within my blog and then I built funnels behind that so I added specific audience, specific email sequences, free email courses, the information is of course targeted to each of those different funnels and the way I did it is essentially through content. I don’t do any paid advertising at the moment. I have done a bit before but I realized that I was underutilizing traffic that I was already getting from my blog so I want to make sure I maximize that first then they’ll go back in to paid so it’s the benefit of blogging. You do build an audience if you do good blogging, which is what I have been doing for ten years now. You build this audience, you get search results and it is targeted because each article is about a subject, it is classic long tail so every blog post can have a targeted email sequence behind it, the trick is making sure you’re picking the right ones because I could have 50 different sequences, I just can’t make them all. That’s too many email sequence written. Maybe one day if I decide to go big and hire content creators, hire email writers, hire copywriters then turn into something like Agora, the information publishing business then I can have all those funnels and that’s probably the path to becoming an 8-figure business. Not sure I’d want to do that because it would complicate things. I like simple elegance, a few core funnels, a simple blog that’s me, a few contractors running it all, but to answer your question, blog content, that’s how I get people to opt in.

James: Yeah, I got it and I think from what I have sort of read of how you set things up, one of the sort of core concepts of what you are doing is what you describe as pillar article where you create a piece of content that is evergreen, it stands the test of time and it draws organic traffic in, so I’d love to ask you a question around that and really uncover what your process is for creating this core content pieces, researching them and then promoting them from your site.

Yaro: Pillar content is something that really caught on and I was quite surprised. I wrote about that many years ago too, 2006-2007. The way I describe pillar content, it is more about outcome as much as formats. You’re going for the outcome which is a pillar outcome and the reason why we use that label is when I was first creating my blog I felt like I was creating pillars which were the substantial blog posts that answered the more pressing questions that my audience had and then the outcome is things like rush of traffic to the post so nowadays is that would actually mean a lot of social media shares, a lot of people talking about your article and getting instant attention to it and then the runoff effect down the line is that all that link building brings in search traffic every time and that is really important because it is nice to have a rush of traffic at the end of the day if you want sustained audience growth without needing to constantly produce content, you need that search traffic coming in or some way to bring in traffic from old content so the first thing to do though is actually pick formats that work to create pillars. Sadly, there is no guarantee on this, it has been a hit and miss thing, you pour your heart in to an amazing article, it doesn’t take off, and then you write something that wasn’t as big a deal and then boom! Everyone is just tearing it but you can certainly can do things to encourage the effects of a pillar and it is simple stuff, it is like using formats like breaking your content down with dot points and lists, writing pieces about definitions of the core topics in your subjects and defining them for the beginners. If you are writing about SEO, what exactly is long tail? Write a definition piece on that in your own words. Things like how to articles obviously a staple format is so teaching the steps visually. It is about creating extreme value that taps in to the actual raw needs of your audience. To make this work though, you have to know what the need of your audience is, I actually teach my students now, especially for those just getting started, spend a lot of time understanding your audience first like you have to establish true empathy and I think one of the best ways to do that is to actually be your audience. So ideally you’ve gone through the process, you’ve solved the problem that you’re now proposing to help people with, you will have true empathy because you’ve experienced it. So if you have lost 10 lbs. after having a baby and that’s what you want to help other women do, that’s true empathy. If you’ve gotten out of a $100000 within 18 months, that’s true empathy. You can help people do that and the empathy comes from knowing what it feels like. The feeling is one of the most important things. You know the situation you experienced, you know the language you used to describe your problem. It allows you to just be that much better a content creator so you can think inside all of that empathy and put it in to blog content and really solve people’s problems. I think pillar content is one of the most – the reason why it works is you’re actually giving a result before you even ask for anything in return. That’s the best form of content, Jay Abraham talks about that. His concept is pre-selling. There’s other guys like Kevin Pagan talk about the concept called moving the freeline which is essentially again increasing the value you offer up front for free and for me I love Jay’s concept of giving a result before they buy. If you do that, that’s more likely to become a piece of pillar content which in turn will get all the effects we want, the viral distribution, the incoming links, the long term search traffic which then can tap in to those email funnels so you do have to build this in a logical order and that is the area where I had to develop my knowledge and skills because no one taught this stuff to bloggers when I growing up with blogging so it is something I’ve only really got full grasp in the last two years now that I have properly been implementing it and that gives you the power to see the right order to build this in because back when I started I threw a blog post in the wall and hoped that traffic would come and then once they showed up you just sort of hope by putting advertising they’ll give you money. There is a lot of hope in there. Nowadays, you can completely flip it around and you can do research, you can set up funnels first but you can do it quickly, you can make sure that the content you produce is very targeted and hits on the paying points that your audience has from day 1, be focused be linear, solve problems and much quicker build that traction and start making that money which is something that I couldn’t do at the seat but I think you can do it now when you know how to do it.

James: Yeah, definitely and I think you touched on a very good point. You can now assure the likelihood of your success to a much greater degree because there’s tools out there that help give you that analysis right? I mean there’s various SEO tools, things like Buzz Sumo will tell you exactly what type of content in your market is actually driving results for people and if you can just see what is working within those pieces of content and adapt them to your own scenario then you’ve got a pretty strong likelihood of success yourself,, right?

Yaro: Exactly and even making the conscious choice to go find the answers to those questions, whether it is using tools like that or even having a conversation with your target audience of observing the behaviuor online, that’s one of my favorite ways to do it, just to see where the people are flowing in and what they are responding to because the answers are on the internet already. People’s behaviors are being tracked. They openly show you what they like because they share it on social media, they leave tons of comments, they buy stuff, they are pretty motivated so the answers are out there.

James: Yeah, I know you’re a big believer as we all should be in content distribution. What strategies have you got to get your content published in front of other people’s audiences?

Yaro: Well, there’s so many ways to do it, but my favorite way is to get famous. Once you’ve become a big fish in the small pond, people will automatically invite you to share your content.

James: Do we get ourselves in American Idol or what’s the story?

Yaro: Well, if that’s your market then why not but seriously the thing with any sort of marketing today, I call it getting published, to me that is what online marketing is today. Ironically enough, that’s nothing new because that’s what PR is all about since old school PR business, it’s been about getting your name and getting your content out to other platform whether it’s getting yourself interviewed in to someone’s podcast, appearing in some popular YouTube channel, getting your article written in another popular blog, someone with a large social media following circulating your content. All of this is about your content circulating other people’s platforms. My opinion and my strategy, especially if you’re new, to get that outcome, is to actually spend a lot of time on the packaging of your message. So this is where people struggle often because if you are going to get out there trying to get that effect trying to get other people to share your content and you sound just like everyone else, no one is going to pay attention to you. You’re just another person who is doing weight loss, you’re just another person who’s doing dieting or another person who’s even making money online or SEO or whatever your subject is. Unless there is something about the way you deliver your message that makes people go wow, you will not get that result and you won’t be able to start building that thing that you need which is really about traction and you know the momentum because one interview tends to lead to another one and leads to another one. Once you get successful it is easy to get more successful. What’s hard is at the start so for me the best marketing technique I have heard in a long time is one that Rich Schefren taught to me which is called counter intuitive marketing, which is simply looking at whatever the accepted practices are in your industry today and finding a way to have a counterintuitive message to present to people. His example is quite simple. If you’re teaching weight loss, imagine you’re going to the weight loss industry and you say I have a way to lose weight where you actually eat more food and do less exercise. Now that’s counterintuitive to what people accept as the practice to lose weight here. It is more accepted to do more exercise as opposed to eating less. This guy is doing the opposite so that immediately cuts through the noise, you sound different to everyone, if you want to know, the curiosity angle there, how does this work? Now obviously you have to be able to back it up. There has to be validation and credibility to the claims you’re making but usually you can find some sort of story that that you’ve got in your own experience or maybe with your clients that can be turned in to a counterintuitive angle and that’s where you need to spend time because the better a message you wrap what you are doing in and then if you go out and try to get the coverage on all the people’s websites to bring traffic back to you, the more likely you are going to get a yes when that message is compelling, it is different, when it is counterintuitive and that’s the challenge and this is where people don’t spend enough time. They just sort of think, well, I know how to increase traffic to your blog. I am just going to tell people I am good at getting traffic and they’ll want to interview me. Everyone says that if they’re traffic builders. Well you have to say well, I know a way of getting traffic where you don’t need any links. And they’re just like, what? How do you do that? So you need that special message and that’s where you spend time to begin with, then it’s just good old fashioned hard work, knocking on doors, building relationships, and pushing that message out there and start building some traction.

James: Awesome! Well Yaro I think we should leave it on that point to be respectful for your time and for our listeners and not to keep you from the free time which I am sure you are enjoying today being a lifestyle entrepreneur so let’s wrap things up and send people off to somewhere online where they can find out a little bit more about you, I am sure www.entrepreneurs-journey.com is one place, anywhere else we should connect with you online?

Yaro: Yeah well I tell people to Google my name. I am going for the Oprah or the Madonna claim to fame and that’s if you google that I’ll be the first result, I recommend if you like what I am saying here, you can download my free report Blogs Profit Blueprint where I sort of cover a lot of what we’ve been talking about in this interview and in more depth and it’s free.

James: Awesome! So to you the listener, make sure the link to the resource there, the Yaro sites and you’ve also got google to rely on as well, will also be mentioned in the show notes for this episode so head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/57 where you’ll find all of those listed. So thank you to you Yaro, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I didn’t get to near where anything I’d like everything done on today’s interview because there is so much to cover but I thoroughly enjoyed today’s session and maybe we can do it again sometime soon.

Yaro: Lovely! Thank you James!

So there you have it that was Yaro Starak and that almost rounds out another episode of Traffic Jam. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve learned in this episode and want to discover more blog traffic strategies, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/57 where you can download six easy ways to build traffic to your blog. It’s half a dozen actionable traffic building strategies from Yaro Starak with notes from me so go visit TrafficJamCast.com/57. Grab your bonus traffic training and also join in on the discussion for this episode.

If you’ve not done so already, make sure you are subscribed to the Traffic Jam podcast by clicking through to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher and hit the subscribe button.

Join me back here for episode#58 where we’ll be joined by the founder and CTO of Portage; it’s going to be a cracking episode and you’ll not want to miss it!

Now we end episode#58 with a Yaro Starak chosen traffic jam; it’s called Pulsar by the trance DJ and producer Armin van Buuren, so enjoy the track and I’ll see you back here real soon!