Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 238

Visiting the Traffic Store
Imagine that you and your sweetheart are browsing through recipes, deciding what to have
for dinner tonight. You settle on a rice dish that you’ve been wanting to try for a while. The
only issue is that you have no rice on hand.
How should you proceed? Should you grow the rice for your dinner tonight? That would
be ridiculous, right? Instead, you head to the supermarket and buy a package of rice.
Rice is a commodity that is bought and sold every day — and so is website traffic. If you
want traffic, you need to go to the traffic store.
After you understand paid traffic, you can quickly test content and offers by turning traffic
on and off like a water faucet. This capability is important because it allows you to quickly
test new offers, landing pages, and content without waiting on slower traffic sources like
SEO and social media. When you start treating website traffic like the commodity it is, you
finally have a predictable and reliable source of website traffic.
No perfect traffic store exists. For instance, your audience may not use certain
platforms or your brand may face advertising restrictions on certain platforms
(industries such as electronic cigarettes, dating, and dieting encounter such situations).
To determine the proper store, you must do research, as we discuss. Also, the strategy
and the system we examine throughout this chapter apply to whatever traffic store
from which you choose to purchase.