what is the best traffic source for you and your online business in 2024 and Beyond now the truth is that there's no one best traffic source for all businesses no matter what the gurus are trying to sell you on their traffic system you are a unique individual you have a unique set of skills talents abilities and experiences and when you mix all of that together you're going to find that your traffic strategy is going to be different than the next viewer of this video which is why we're about to go through five specific questions that I've got here to help you identify the absolute best traffic strategy for you so you can blaze forward with confidence and the first thing I want you to think about is your personality your DNA now here's an example from my actual business my wife started out blogging and we've created a very successful business together through blogging so when I wanted to start teaching under this miles Beckler brand that you're engaging with right now I forced myself to blog because I thought I had to blog to become successful like my wife but here is the part where we mix in a little bit of the miles Beckler DNA I don't really like writing that much at this point in my career I'm actually a lot more fond of writing than I was but back in 2016 when I made my first YouTube video I had an aha moment and that aha moment was like wow okay now it's not exactly easy to create content but creating a YouTube video and communicating an idea right here in this moment with you on video is and was a lot easier for me than writing was and that is what kind of opened the door for me to put in enough reps to really build this channel out to hundreds of thousands of subscribers and well over 10 million views at this point in time when I was trying to force myself to do what I saw work for other people but it wasn't in alignment with my DNA I never followed through long term to create enough reps to get that momentum I needed to experience true success with driving traffic online but when I switched over to a platform and a media that was more in alignment with my DNA I'm I kind of got a gift a gab right I'm a talker I'm naturally a talker this is really my truth and when I leaned on that everything started to work better and better better for my business and today I've put together over 800 videos here on YouTube and that body of work of publishing 800 videos over the last seven or eight years here on YouTube that's why I've been so successful and had I been trying to push myself to blog to create all that content in the blogging platform well this is what I was doing before and I'd get 10 12 15 blog posts done and then I just wouldn't do the work because it was too difficult now I've got some friends down in New Zealand um they run a seven figureure Niche site in the horse Fitness Arena that is their Niche is in the kind of horseback riding Niche specifically focused on Fitness and they've got a phrase that I've always loved which was what would it look like if it was fun and easy so I want you to think for yourself what would it look like for you to create that content that you're going to have to create in order to drive traffic what would it look like if it was fun and easy and you can really break it down to just a few media types there's images there's text there's video and there's audio and maybe you're thinking like miles I'm a talker I got The Gift of Gab but I do not want to have to get go shower and get ready and get prepared and do my hair and do my makeup every single time I want to do a video because that's going to slow me down and that's going to be my limiting factor then you might want to choose podcasting and go with an audio only this is where we're just trying to structure this in a way that it's going to be in alignment and a match with your lifestyle with your personality type so you can actually get momentum down that long path down that journey of building your body of work online um because the truth is no matter which uh traffic method that you're going to choose you're going to have to pay your dues right it takes hundreds and hundreds of repetitions with every single potential traffic source and traffic type so which one is going to be fun and easy for you to move forward with number two where are your people Gathering so at this point I'm assuming you know who your audience is okay you've gone through the whole Niche selection process you've targeted your underserved Niche audience you've got a sub Niche that you're ready to blaze forward with if you don't have all of that figured out yet be sure to go through my Niche Navigator video the link to that will be in the description but once you know who they are you're going to go figure out where are they all Gathering and it's different for different personality types now sometimes we can split this on a spectrum between business to business and consumers what I mean by this is people who are in marketing and they want to connect and gather with other marketers they're probably going to be on LinkedIn connecting with each other in LinkedIn groups whereas someone who is excited about knitting and they want to go down the path of knitting or crocheting or quilting they're probably not going to be meeting their other people they're not going to be connecting ING with their tribe and having discussions on LinkedIn right they're probably going to be in Facebook groups or on YouTube for example in that scenario so how do you know where your people are just go look around you go find who the most advanced marketers are you find who's doing the best in your Niche there are always going to be leaders in your Niche that you're going to be modeling and then you simply go pay attention to where are they most frequently publishing and also where is their cont content getting the most engagement because a lot of people are publishing and repurposing their content across all of the different platforms but when you go analyze the reach by simply looking at their last 5 10 15 posts you might see that their YouTube videos get a lot of reach and their Instagram posts get a lot of reach but their Pinterest pins aren't getting very many reaches and they're not really getting much traction at all on LinkedIn and this is how you can start to understand where your target audience is and where they are actively engaging with the creators like you because the truth is when you publish content that actually is on the platform that your users are already using it makes your kind of process and Pathway to creating that lifechanging amounts of traffic much much easier versus trying to kind of gather your tribe on a platform where they aren't all at so one of the ways I like to think of it is again the businessto business LinkedIn versus kind of the the general consumers or on the Facebooks and the pinterestsubmit Act of actually creating and showing someone how to build all of that out really does need some screen share technology and some visual follow me click here take that step follow me click here take that next step I couldn't actually put together a step byep how to build a funnel on WordPress series on a Facebook fan page for example it just does not fit on that platform and users aren't actually searching for that kind of content on that platform but when I created that nine videos series here on YouTube showing each and every step in the process of building out a sales funnel on WordPress it got a lot of traction because a people are searching for those kinds of how-to tutorials here on YouTube they're also searching for it on my blog and after seeing that do really well and growing that over time here on YouTube I did actually go through and transcribe those pieces of content and publish it to my blog as well because I knew that it was a search based piece of content people search for how to build a sales funnel on WordPress and they're either searching on Google or YouTube and when my content shows up for them I get the click I get the engagement I then get the clicks on my affiliate links and so on and so forth then to go a step further I think it's important to look at what's going on on Amazon because a lot of bloggers who are using their writings to meet people on Google through kind of search engine optimization and a search-based platform they also could be repackaging repurposing their content into Kindle books and there are tools that will allow you to get search volume inside of Kindle but generally speaking you can just go look in the Kindle bestsellers list to see are there a bunch of books with lots and lots of reviews I'm talking hundreds or thousands of five star reviews if so you know that your audience is engaging with content on Kindle so you can start to think all right now I see there's a large part of my audiences using Google I can see search results from keyword research I know that people are searching on Google I go look on Amazon I can also see over here on Amazon there are several books with hundreds or thousands of good reviews on them Bingo this tells me that my audience is actively searching for written content so I could start writing all of my blog posts on a Blog and then I could repackage that same information over there onto a Kindle book and now I'm getting multiple kind of uses out of that same content that I create similar to how I said that I started by publishing my content on YouTube and then I turned it into blog based content because I saw that my audience was consistently searching on both YouTube and Google for the how to tutorials that I was teaching so I was able to kind of take what I was already putting out and repurpose it and reformat it into different ways uh so you need to really focus in on where are your people Gathering um if you're looking and you think okay I see them they're on Pinterest and they're on Instagram that is a great observation but I wouldn't go all in on social media only I would use social media as a way to back up either my YouTube videos or my blog posts meaning I would cover a topic like we're doing here today and then I would cut this video up into a little short segments that I would then run as reals on Instagram because you need to have traffic sources that are going to give you long-term traffic for the effort that you're putting in Instagram posts are going to disappear within 24 to 48 hours but a video like this may very well bring in video uh bring in traffic for me for years on end ultimately I want both of them but don't neglect the long-term traffic strategy for the short-term social traffic hacks is kind of the big idea there the third question is do you have more time than money or do you have more money than time and this is ultimately the paid traffic versus organic traffic question now at some point in your business's growth you're going to have both of these working for you is the ultimate goal to get to when my wife and I both started both of our Brands I still had $50,000 in student loan debt I was still working a $20 an hour customer support job um I did not have extra income to begin investing in paid ads immediately so we knew with the very first brand we knew for sure that we were going to do a big organic content marketing push because you can earn your traffic instead of paying for traffic so our lifestyle and that the the fact that we were struggling to pay rent and we were had to move back in with my parents and we were trying to move out on our own and I had to go buy another Jeep and I had uh a lot of bills a lot of outlay in my life okay my lifestyle was costing more than I was bringing in in that moment so I knew I had to build a brand that could double triple 10x my income which is what we went on to do but I needed to do so in a way that it wasn't making me feel like I needed to put like ads on a credit card because if you aren't comfortable spending that money investing in paid ads if you're not comfortable spending hundreds of dollars per week for six seven eight weeks straight you're going to really feel the stress of the outlay and you're not going to be able to really dial in the value that you get from the early phases of running paid ads which is understand what works and what doesn't work in hours instead of potentially weeks or months so when you use paid ads it can act as a shortcut in your business because you could put up a landing page you can make a lead magnet you can run traffic to it and within 24 to 48 hours you can get hundreds and hundreds of clicks and you can have statistically significant data that tells you does my audience like this thing or does my audience not like this thing and that allows you to iterate your minimum viable funnel your minimum viable offers it it allows you to iterate more quickly which is the fastest path for you to really figuring out what works right you're searching around for product Market message match and the more times you try something new the faster you're going to get to that point where you have Market message product match but if you're in a situation like I was where I didn't really have a choice to go spend five bucks a day 10 bucks a day 30 bucks a day in advertising which is what I recommend people start with is those kinds of numbers um then it's all about content organic content marketing so in in that same Theory every video that I published here on YouTube is my test so instead of putting together uh a lead magnet an opt-in page and running ads to it to see if my people like an idea or if they don't like an idea I'm putting together the best video I can with a great thumbnail and a great title and that's how I'm going to analyze whether people like that idea or whether people don't like that idea and the truth about business online is as you help people get more of what they want as you really dial in those things that they're looking for and you create the solutions that they're looking for that's the fastest track for you to actually achieve the material financial success that you desire so how do you get there well it's through a lot of testing and if you've got some extra money if you can spend $10 a day for the next several months and running ads and watching your click-through rates and watching your opt-in rates and watching your conversion rates you are going to get more valuable business data more quickly but then if you don't have that ability to run those paid ads uh because you don't have the cash flow for that then you want to go down an organic content marketing uh direction and you just know that it's going to take a few months of hustle of grit of work of paying your dues to build that body of work to get that traffic and once you're getting that traffic you can display your opt-in lead magnet from a popup you can display that opt-in lead magnet on your end screens of your video you can optimize your bio and your link and bio to promote it etc etc so really it comes down to your personal situation whether you should go for organic traffic or whether you should go for paid traffic and ultimately it's a question of do you have more time than money or do you have more money than time and you want to follow that if you are going down the paid traffic method I do recommend Facebook ads still to this very day it is by far the bulk majority of where my advertising dollars go with that said I think YouTube ads are number two and from there you want to just kind of like look at where your people are and when I say Facebook ads I definitely mean Facebook and Instagram and threads because they're all kind of one big thing at this point in time the number four question that you want to answer for yourself is more about your monetization strategy okay so if you already have products to sell if you already have offers that are out there in the wild you're doing coaching you have a course you've got things that you're ready to offer to the world and you just want more eyeballs on your offers go down that paid advertising strategy now it's important for you to have great sales copy that follows the traditional sales sales letter structure that has worked for 50 60 plus years from the direct response gurus back in the 1950s and the 1960s to help you with that I have put out my breakthrough salesletter template the link to that is in the description below here and it just walks you through a PDF step by step for you to write out a sales letter that has a high likelihood of converting more clicks and more leads into sales for you because if you have an offer already if you've got coaching if you've got a course then all you need is a wonderful sales letter and some traffic so if you're selling things if you've got your own products and you're ready to roll please please please focus in on at least a little bit of what you're doing on writing great sales copy and then running ads to that sales copy because you might find that you start to drive two three four five additional sales per week per day it varies based on your business based on how high of a ticket of an offer that that you're offering but it's this concept of like if you've got something to sell just sell the damn thing right like get to it let's not build all this elaborate dozens and dozens of videos and then you got to build your email list and you got to do all this work before you ever promote your offer no not at all the fastest way for someone to build a really successful business online is to find that message Market product match how do you know when you have it well when you can run ads to a salesletter for an offer and you get enough conversions that pays for the ads and leaves you with a little profit on the back end you're there right that is the promised land so if you can start testing even if it's $5 a day with your advertising be sure that you have a great sales letter right go through the Breakthrough sales letter template which works for clickfunnels or system or all of the different funnel Builders right you can use that my templates with any funnel Builder out there I don't care what you publish it to the key is for you to have great sales messaging and then once you have the great sales messaging just run great Facebook ads to it and start to measure do enough people purchase to cover the cost of the advertising with a little profit left over if yes you're in the money you have yourself a real business right then and there now if you don't have offers yet if you're like miles I'm new to building a business online I don't have any offers yet I'm thinking affiliate marketing is where I'm going to be able to get my offers what you can start to do is monetize the content that you're publishing while you're building your traffic and this is YouTube right here this video that I'm running I am adding advertisements onto this video right here so I'm getting paid through ad Revenue to create the content that grows my traffic and grows my audience and already you've probably heard me mention multiple of my different offerings that are down in the links to my description so as I go earn my traffic from organic content Marketing in video format here on YouTube I'm getting paid from running display ads but I'm also driving traffic to my offers and bringing allowing people who are ready for that next step to take another step in my direction which can open me up to additional um affiliate offers it can open me up to additional sales of my own offers it can open me up to additional Revenue so if you don't really have a great monetization strategy I think YouTube and blogging are really the place that you should focus and that brings us back to the question number one what's most in your DNA because both of those games are relatively easy to succeed with once you just put in enough reps and all traffic is monetizable if you're getting traffic to a basic how to um post on your blog that doesn't have any great affiliate programs in it start throwing ads put Google AdSense on there get on media Vine if you have enough traffic coming in and you will literally start to earn income for every single visitor who lands on one of your pages and look looks at one of your ads and it's a great way for you to start to monetize your actual efforts in creating the content that ultimately turns into your traffic machine once you have a bunch of traffic you can start to grow your email list with popups you can grow your emails with mail list with landing pages and optins you can add affiliate links offer links inside it there's a lot of things you can do once you have your traffic but if you don't know how you're going to monetize from day one if you don't have any offers yet focus in on either YouTube or blogging as your main traffic strategy so you can earn from the simple Act of creating content and then number five is the concept of having a core strategy that you're going to work for the next 3 to five years no matter what and then giving yourself the freedom to have an experimental strategy so you could be testing things which might allow you to either a replace your core content strategy or your core traffic strategy or B just get a second traffic strategy working for you driving in twice as many leads twice as many clicks and twice as many sales so what do I mean by this how does this work well for me in this brand YouTube has been from day one my core content strategy and if you go all the way back to my first video you'll hear me say in that video that I knew I was starting on a three to five year journey and all content marketing and all business building online the truth of it is it's going to take three to five years for you to build all those little skills for you to pay your dues for you to build your body of content for you to build your understanding of product Market message match before things really start to click and the cash flow starts to hockey stick that's just the truth of the nature of business so one of your content strategies one of your traffic strategies should be a core long-term traffic strategy that can give you traffic for years and years and years after you do the work for me this comes down to blogging or it comes down to YouTube and the truth is my wife wrote blog posts back in 2009 and 2010 and 2011 that still attract visitors to our website to this very day over 10 years later think about it work we did 10 years ago is still bringing traffic and leads and customers to this very day that is a core long-term traffic strategy the same is true here on YouTube with the miles Beckler brand and with these videos I have videos that I published in 2016 2017 that have all still still rank they still show up when people search they still get um displayed to people after they watch my competitor's videos and I'm still getting clicks and visitors and subscribers and traffic from videos that I published five six seven plus years ago so you need to have one of those two core long-term strategies and from there what are you going to experiment with if you've got a little extra cash flow and you're like miles I could do five bucks a day I could do 10 bucks a day 300 bucks a month is not that scary for advertising cuz I've got my offers and while I'm building up this YouTube machine over here to drive traffic into my ecosystem to my offers I might start testing some YouTube ads as well driving people to my breakthrough sales letter to make sales immediately and what you can find is a little bit of what you've learned from running your YouTube ads might actually help you create better long-term YouTube videos and you get this kind of symbiosis of those two strategies working together bloggers may find that driving traffic from Pinterest to their blog can get them a lot of advertisement displays opt-ins and sales or driving traffic from Facebook groups over to their blog might actually get them additional traffic that can turn into additional Revenue as well so how do you know which ones you choose well it's about your DNA it's about where your people are hanging out it's about your monetization strategy it's a lot about you and your personal plan for your long-term success so what I recommend you do now is you write down what your core content marketing strategy is in order for you to drive traffic and maybe it isn't a Content marketing strategy maybe your core strategy is I'm going all in on ads I've got great offers I've got a high ticket coaching product I've got a low ticket or a mid ticket course that I sell I just want to get 3 four five new sales each and every day the fastest path to that is absolutely advertising especially once you have a great piece of copy written if you don't have your own offers if you don't have your own products but you want you're just you know that this lifestyle of building an online business is for you get into the content game figure out which content strategy is most in alignment with your DNA and where that overlaps with where your audience where your Niche is actually hanging out and then go all in it takes putting in hundreds and hundreds of Reps for you to build those micro muscles to make it fun and easy to produce the content and when you stick with it long enough you become one of of the de facto authorities within your Niche and anyone out there who's watching this video right now you specifically you can rise to the top of any Niche it's just a question of how many wonderful pieces of content how many great offers is it going to take for you to achieve the success that you desire which is why when I published my first video back in 2016 I knew I was on a journey of publishing a thousand or more videos and those early videos were difficult and they were awkward but now today I'm enjoying the process I'm able to record a 20 plus minute video with no edits with in one take and I've built this skill through the sheer repetition of doing it over and over and over and over again and yet this video will then bring thousands of people into my ecosystem just like the last videos did and the YouTube algorithm starts to work for me I earn income from the ads I'm displaying and I also earn income when people find their way onto my email list and when people buy my other offers and on and on and on and this has all worked for me because I found the traffic strategy that was in alignment with where my audience was and it was in alignment with my DNA and what I was willing to do and then it was just about putting in the work put in the Reps and for me today YouTube is my main core content strategy and then Facebook ads is number two and I'm running people directly to my opt-in offers directly to my sales Pages for my paid offers and that one two punch has elevated my brand and helped me bring in millions of dollars from this brand that was all bootstrapped with me putting my phone on a tripod and just starting my wife on the other hand she started with blogging and Facebook organic and she grew that organically to tens of millions of visitors landing on her website and hundreds of thousands of email list subscribers today we also run advertising for that brand but she is mostly focused on social media YouTube at this point in time last note here your path to your success is going to evolve over time give yourself the freedom to come up with your best guess based on what you learned here today jump in go all in and start at some point you might pivot you might start running ads something might click on your ads and you might do a little bit less YouTube and a little bit more advertising there was a time when I published a new video every single day there was a time when I published three videos per week but today I have so many wonderful things going on with my paid advertising that I only need to do one video a week to keep my momentum here on YouTube and my business is growing faster today than it was three years ago I'm making more today than I was three years ago and it takes less of my time and energy and I want you to get to that point and you just need to remember that to get to that point for you it's ultimately about putting in the Reps paying your dues finding that market message match with the right product you'll be amazed at what you create I hope video has been helpful if you have questions for me about the right traffic strategy for you get at me in the comments below please give this a thumbs up like it do what you do I appreciate the algorithm love and I look forward to connecting with you on the next video till we meet again be well