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Chasing down profitable traffic sources can be a black hole consuming all of your time and money. The problem is that almost all paid traffic campaigns start off losing money; to build a campaign, you need to spend money collecting data on what works, and then optimize towards profitability from there. But not all campaigns end up profitable either, no matter how much you optimize them. So, one of the marketer's biggest challenges is figuring out which traffic sources are actually worth pursuing, and which ones will never become profitable and will only consume your time and money. You have a limited budget, and you need to make sure you're making it count and not spending it on a wild goose chase. Here's how.

How to Allocate Marketing Spend

The trick to allocating your marketing effectively is implementing some kind of traffic source triage system. When encountering a new traffic source, you want to be able to quickly and consistently categorize it into a low, medium, or high priority group, before spending any time or money testing it. You don't have to be 100% correct for this process. After all, you never know how something is going to work until you test it. You just have to be good enough to set priorities and build up a bankroll from stable, profitable traffic sources that you can use to offset your losses from testing riskier, lower priority ones. A lot of the skills needed to accurately identify traffic sources will only come with experience. But you can get 80% of the way there and avoid the more egregious mistakes by following a few simple rules.

Three Questions You Need to Ask Yourself About Any Traffic Source

When evaluating a potential traffic source, I always ask three questions that let me easily determine how much time and money I want to apply towards mastering it.

1. Is there enough volume?
2. Is the traffic cheap enough?
3. Does the traffic convert well enough?

It's important to remember that the answers to these questions are not binary. They fall on a continuum. They're intentionally vague. There are no hard and fast rules until you test, just guesses. Let's look at each one of them in more detail.

Is there enough volume?

This question is fairly straightforward to answer. Your rep at the ad network should be able to tell you how much daily traffic you can expect from the average campaign. But you should always do your own research too. Look at the Alexa/Quantcast/Compete rank of both their homepage and their tracking URLs to get a sense how much traffic passes through the network. Do the same for any domains you see advertised on the network. Are there mostly new, low traffic advertisers(bad) or established, successful advertisers(good) on this network? If you're evaluating an ad network, take a look at some of the publishers running with this ad network. Are this ad network's banners the only ads on the page(good), or are you competing for attention with a cluttered field of many different ads(bad)? What's the traffic volume of some of the publishers that seem most relevant to your product? Remember, you're only looking to estimate volume for traffic that has at least some chance of converting for you. So if you only sell to the US, inquire about US traffic volume only.

Is the traffic cheap enough?

This question is a bit more fluid, but in general some traffic sources, keywords, and verticals are much less expensive than others. Take a look at who's buying traffic on this network currently. What are they selling? Low margin products like commodity physical goods, or high margin financial products? How much do you think they can afford to pay for traffic? Put their domains into the Google Keyword Tool and take a look at the bids they would need to pay on search to get this kind of traffic. How competitive is this traffic source? That may mean this traffic is higher converting and more desirable, but also more expensive.

Does the traffic convert well enough?

This is the big one. If the traffic converts well enough, it really doesn't matter how expensive it is(as long as you're paying less per click than your CLV). Even the volume doesn't matter as much, because you can use a very relevant, highly profitable but low volume traffic source as a laboratory to test new ideas for creatives and landing pages without fear of losing money. You can then replicate the successes to higher volume but lower margin traffic sources. You may think that it's impossible to answer this question without actually spending money testing, but it's actually easier than you think. You can't answer it precisely without significant data, but you can make some pretty good guesses based on experience and past performance. Think of this a comprehensive due diligence process. To answer this question, you need to start from a broad overview and move to specific details about the competitive landscape. Have you advertised on this traffic source before? What is this ad network's reputation on blogs and forums? Has anyone written a case study about this traffic source? Does the majority of their traffic come from wealthy countries(good) or third world countries(bad)? How do they get their traffic? Are their users incentivized to view ads(bad) or click on them(VERY bad) or do they have other quality content(good)? Then you can move to studying specifics. Who is advertising here currently, big brands(bad) or direct response advertisers(good)? Is the same advertiser buying traffic on here consistently(good) or are new advertisers constantly showing up and disappearing(bad)? Do you see the same creatives used consistently(good), or are advertisers constantly trying new creatives because they aren't getting clicks(bad)? Check the demographics of the ad network and advertisers' domains. Do they match the demographics of your customers? Are there any advertisers with the same business model as you(e.g. sale of physical goods, freemium, etc) running on this network? Any advertisers in the same industry? Any direct competitors?

Decide Fast

This may seem like an unnecessarily lengthy process when the key to traffic triage is making snap decisions. But spending a couple hours studying a traffic source is well worth it compared to the months of pain chasing low quality traffic will cause you. Besides, with experience, you will come to internalize this process, and it will become second nature. That's when you can start raking in the big bucks as a marketing consultant :) By the way, we're working on software to automate answering many of the questions above. Leave your email below and you'll be the first to get an invite to our private beta.

I recently had the pleasure of assisting over 150 Hacker News members with marketing their startups. I was surprised to learn that I was giving the same advice over and over again. I'm collecting the most specific, actionable and useful marketing advice for startups in a 3 part series. This is part 2. Last time, we discussed marketing fundamentals you needed to get right before beginning to drive traffic to your project. I hope you've implemented some of those suggestions into your product marketing. I don't want this blog to consist solely of vague textbook marketing advice. This week, we're going deeper and diving right into specific methods you can use right now to generate a stream of interested customers for your startup. Let's get started.

Test and Track Everything

...advertising is traced down to the fraction of a penny. The cost per reply and cost per dollar of sale show up with utter exactness. One ad is compared with another, one method with another. Headlines, settings, sizes, arguments and pictures are compared. To reduce the cost of results even one percent means much in some mail order advertising. So no guesswork is permitted. One must know what is best.

Can you guess which AdWords guru wrote the words above? That quote is from the seminal work Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, written in the 1920s. You would think that, 80 years later, people would realize the importance of tracking, especially with how easy modern analytics software makes it. And yet, startup after startup is creating ads that link to their homepage, without any tracking variables appended. They can only guess if their ads are effective, and they're collecting exactly zero data. Any ad campaign, even if it's set up by an expert, will probably start out losing money. When you launch an ad campaign, you're not just paying for customers, you're paying for data about what works and what doesn't, tested in the marketplace. As you collect data and optimize, the campaign will eventually pull into the black. But if you're not collecting click and conversion data, you'll never know what you need to optimize, and you'll continue bleeding money forever. Don't just track based on which campaign gets the highest CTR. You need to drill down to the individual ad and keyword level, and track both CTR and conversion rate for each ad. This is done by appending a unique id to the URL of each ad variation. If you can't tell me exactly which headline is bringing you the most loyal customers, you're doing it wrong. If you track everything down to the ad level, you'll be able to know exactly where your most profitable customers are coming from. This is especially critical for recurring billing/subscription services, which many startups are. Again, optimize for CLV. Setting up tracking is super easy. Google Analytics has a simple URL Builder you can use to append tracking variables to any link. You'll want to focus on the utm_term and utm_campaign variables. If you want even better, more customizable, real-time data, my friends at MixPanel are happy to help. If you remember nothing else from this post, remember this: Track Everything Now. Every second you're not tracking, you're losing money.

Search Is Just The Tip of the Iceberg

Here's an example of what the typical startup founder told me about their marketing campaign:

Out startup sells time tracking software for dog walkers. We're already advertising online. We're bidding on "dog walker time tracking" on Google Search and getting 3 clicks and 0 conversions a day. How do we get more traffic?

It's not surprising that you're not getting lots of traffic, because you're stuck in a search-only mindset. You can thank Google's excellent branding for that, because they would love to have you believe that the only way to get customers online is through buying search keywords. Here's the truth about advertising online: most of your traffic and customers will not come from search. They will come from social networks(more on that soon) and other sites- and I don't mean just the Google Content Network. Want to know a cheap, high volume traffic source your competitors aren't using? Two words: media buys. Yes, I'm talking about banner ads and yes, they still work. You don't have to have a big budget to start buying banner ad space. Start approaching smaller blogs in your niche, and offer to pay them a fixed amount to paste your ad code into their site for a month. Again, track everything. When you do a simple media buy, you don't have to worry about maintaining a high CTR or relevance between ads and landing pages, you just need to get enough clicks and conversions to stay profitable. I'll have a post exclusively about media buying coming soon, but for now, start looking around and negotiating. You'll be amazed at the great deals and cheap traffic you can find.

Competitor Bidding Works, Take it To The Next Level

Bidding on the names of competitors on search is an effective tactic. You're reaching customers who are at a later stage of the buying cycle. They already know they need your product or service, and now they're just comparing the alternatives and reading reviews before committing to a purchase. Let your competitors spend money educating the market and finding qualified prospects, then snatch the customer from their grasp when he's about to buy.[pullshow] Competitor bidding is a good start, but it's only a start. Here's how you can easily and inexpensively outfox your competitors on most traffic sources: [pullthis]Don't stop at search. Follow competitors' ads around the web.[/pullthis] Search for competitor names, features, products, etc, or get their keywords from a keyword research tool. Look at the search results for their name and main keywords. Are there any sites there that have AdSense? Any blogs that have written reviews of a competitor's product? Those are all prime advertising opportunities. Approach them directly and offer to buy banner space, either on the whole blog or just on that specific post. Prospective customers searching for information about competitors will instead come across ads for your product, and some will inevitably convert. If you see a competitor's ads on an AdSense block on a page, you've found a fantastic traffic source. Approach the webmaster and offer to buy a banner ad to replace the AdSense. You'll be able to pay the webmaster more for the space because Google isn't taking their 30% cut, so it should be a no brainer for them to accept your offer. Now not only have you cut off a competitor from a lucrative traffic source, but you've also uncovered a proven source of converting traffic. Repeat this enough, and you'll be able to completely dominate your competitors outside of search while spending less than them.

Start Retargeting Right Away

Retargeting is the practice of showing ads to people who have already visited your site(but probably didn't convert). Retargeting is very cost effective, and delivers incredibly high-converting traffic, because you're only paying for impressions shown to people who have expressed an interest in your product. When building a retargeting campaign, create banners that prominently feature your name, logo, and color scheme. People who have seen that design before will notice and click. There are two easy ways you can use retargeting right away: AdWords has a retargeting option you can turn on for a campaign. Or, for greater reach, AdRoll has an easy self-serve retargeting system that ties into major ad networks. You just add their pixel to your site, they leave a cookie, and show banner ads that follow your visitors around the web, gently yet firmly reminding them to sign up for your site. There is so much involved in getting traffic online. I've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible. If nothing else, I hope this post has inspired you to explore other traffic sources with tracked, tested, creative campaigns. Next week: I show you how to easily increase your current traffic tenfold, discuss advanced optimization tactics to squeeze more out of your current campaigns, and finish with a little-known traffic tip I've never told anyone before.

About a week ago, I made a post on Hacker News offering free online marketing advice to any startup that asked for it. I had over 150 startups emailing me, selling everything from enterprise software to scheduling tools to pet food, and I tried to answer every single one with specific, actionable insights they could put to use right away. This took a lot of time, but not as much as I expected, because I would frequently find myself giving the same advice over and over again. I'm going to collect the most useful and common advice I've given into a three part "lessons learned" series. In this post, I'll focus on broader marketing strategies which are critically important if your startup is to succeed. Next week, I'll delve into driving traffic and specific tactics startups can use to immediately begin growing their customer base. These suggestions may seem basic or common sense to some of you, but you would be surprised at how few startups are actually executing on these. I'll write about more specific tactics and methods for driving traffic and customer acquisition in my next post, but all of those will be useless unless you get these fundamentals right. By the way, if you're an affiliate and you don't think these apply to the landing pages you're building, you're doing something wrong.

Articulate a Clear, Specific, Compelling Value Proposition

For many of the startups I looked at, I had to kind of scratch my head and think for a few minutes as I tried to figure out exactly what benefit they offered consumers. The value of your product or service, your unique competitive advantage, should be clear within 5 seconds of visiting your site. I'm sure you've heard the old copywriting mantra of "list benefits, not features". Take that to the next level. [pullthis id="1"]Take the single most important benefit of using your service, and make that your headline.[/pullthis] [pullshow id="1"]If you could only have one feature in your app, what would it be? Your "killer app" can lead to your biggest benefit, and that's how you need to introduce yourself to customers. I could write volumes about writing headlines, but a simple statement like this is a good place to start. Especially if you're selling a B2B service, as many of you are, you need to make the immediate benefit or ROI of using your service crystal clear. If you're building a B2B app to manage payroll, "Cloud hosted SaaS payroll for your business" is not a good headline. "Spend less time worrying about payroll" is a better one. "Cut payroll management costs by 37% instantly" is even better.

Find Your Target Market, and Segment the Hell out of Them

Another issue I ran across rather frequently is a distinct lack of marketing focus. When asked who their target market was, many people responded "small businesses" or, worse "anyone". Alright, fine, you sell your SaaS products to small business in the US. But what kind of small business owner converts the best for you? Which customers are most likely to be profitable customers? Who is most excited about your product? You have been tracking these things, haven't you? You don't have the budget to target all small businesses, so start with a specific niche or industry you think your product has particularly strong appeal for. Selling time tracking software? Start positioning as time tracking software for accountants, or dentists, or landscapers. How about targeting a specific task or feature and finding people looking for that feature only? Or what about people who already use a particular competitor's software? I'll go into competitor bidding at a later time, but it's a fantastic way to get motivated early users. Build super niche landing pages or, even better, microsites targeting each specific market segment you want to go after, emphasizing the specific benefits of your product to that group only. Not only is this a very strong SEO play, but it will increase your quality score and relevance in AdWords, as well as greatly increase conversions. If you have a landing page targeted to doctors, test putting a stock photo of a smiling doctor using your software on your landing page. It's cheesy, but there's a reason companies use it- it works. Similarity is a very powerful principle of persuasion. Tech people respond well to screenshots of software. Local small business owners may not. By the way, this applies to ecommerce startups as well. If you're a clothing company build pages like "Top products for new moms" or "Tshirts for fans of __", they will do very well.

Optimize Aggressively for CLV

If you're running a subscription service of any kind, customer lifetime value(CLV) is by far the most important metric you need to be thinking about. More than conversion rates, burn rate, SEO, or anything else, CLV will determine whether your startup lives or dies. Try to determine this number, at least an average for your entire customer base, as soon as possible. There are so many ways to increase CLV that fall outside the scope of this post, but just remember that effective monetization of the backend is where many online businesses live or die. Effectively upselling or cross-selling once you've acquired a customer could mean the difference between outbidding your competitors and capturing more market share or falling behind. You don't have to be spammy or annoying to upsell well. This can be as simple a showing a notification when your customer is close to reaching a usage limit, urging him to upgrade to the next tier of service, or emailing your most loyal customers with special discounts. Start measuring engagement, churn rate and attrition, visit frequency, etc, loyalty and so on. If you're selling a $20 a month service but you know that you will net $400 over the lifetime of an average customer, suddenly you have a lot more options for marketing, not to mention some great metrics to show investors.

Start Marketing Early and Validate Your Idea ASAP

You don't need a product to start marketing. Let me say that again. You don't need anything to start marketing. All you need is a vague idea and a landing page where you can collect email addresses from prospective customers. It's called dry testing, and it works, at least for gauging initial interest to see if an idea is worth pushing further. It pains me to see so many startups emailing me who have already spent months or even years building a product without thinking about promotion or validating their idea at all before launching. "Launch first, then figure out marketing" is a recipe for disaster. You need to be able to answer at least these questions as soon as possible, ideally before you write a single line of code:

1. Is there a target market for my product and how big is it?
2. Who are the current players in the market? Is it controlled by a few big players or dominated by many smaller companies?
3. How much market share can I realistically expect to capture, and how well can I monetize them?

[pullthis id="2"]Remember this: A startup is a business.[/pullthis] And any business requires basic market research. If you were thinking of opening a coffee shop, would you jump right in and start building it? Or would you first see if there are any other coffee shops nearby, how many customers they have, how much they charge for coffee, etc?[pullshow id="2"] Marketing isn't just emailing bloggers and driving traffic. It's everything- product, price, placement, and promotion. Start thinking about these things before you launch, learn from them, and iterate quickly before wasting a lot of time and money. Next Week: Exactly how to find exactly where your most profitable customers are, where to get cheap traffic to validate your idea fast, and how to easily dominate your competitors on most traffic sources.

Welcome to the insight.io blog. The content of this blog will be concentrated around one main topic- how to quickly get lots of traffic. I don't claim to be an SEO expert by any means, so the focus will be on paid traffic sources like PPC ads, media buys, etc. Don't worry- it's very possible to successfully test a traffic source with as little as $50-$100. Even though anyone can learn something from the content presented here, most of the content will be of a more advanced nature and may not be suited for complete beginners. Although, as any affiliate marketing guru blogger can tell you, newbies are an easily targeted and very monetizable demographic, I'll mostly ignore this demographic at my own peril. There are lots of excellent newbie and introductory type guides out there, and I don't want this blog to become another one. I'll be sharing advanced, high level strategies for quickly scaling up and optimizing online marketing campaigns. Most of these strategies have been used by me successfully for my own campaigns, so I know they work. There will invariably be people complaining that I'm outing their tactics and wondering why I would out my own successful methods. To them I say I don't care. There are so many niches, startups, and markets out there that a few people learning a method the top guys already know about won't really make any difference in the grand scheme of things. I've got plenty of tricks up my sleeve. I think sharing a few with the readers of this blog will do the marketing industry more good than harm. That said, if you don't have much experience driving traffic, don't be intimidated! If you're a reasonably intelligent individual, you'll be able to easily grasp the strategies I describe and apply them to your own marketing efforts. One more thing: I'll be posting roughly once a week. Check back soon for the first series of guides.