Episode 10: 13 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Download: Audio File\

Link: On-Page SEO Checklist

00:00 Ken Franzen: Hello everyone, Ken here from Neon Goldfish. Website traffic is the fuel that makes the car go. The more relevant website traffic we can create, the more leads we can generate leading to more new business. Generally, website traffic requires activity. You cannot be stagnant and gain more attention. So what can you do to create more website traffic? Where should you spend your time? In this episode of the Neon Noise Podcast, we cover 13 actionable ways you can generate more traffic to your website. We're not suggesting that you need to employ all 13 of these to be successful. Take the couple you feel align best with your buyer personas, your comfort levels, the time you have available, and of course budget, and run with 'em. We hope our conversation will help you learn a couple new ways that you can generate more traffic to your website. Enjoy.

[music]

00:58 Justin Johnson: Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Neon Noise Podcast. This is Justin and Ken. Hopefully you guys are all having a great day today. It's the new year. Ken, it's 2017. Isn't that crazy?

01:12 Ken Franzen: It is crazy. I was thinking the other day this is gonna be in June, the 10-year anniversary of us starting Neon Goldfish, which is kind of exciting.

01:19 Justin Johnson: 10 years of NGF for all you folks.

01:22 Ken Franzen: A whole decade. [laughter]

01:24 Justin Johnson: I know, it flew by.

01:26 Ken Franzen: That's unreal.

01:27 Justin Johnson: It flew by.

01:27 Ken Franzen: It did, quick 10 years. I hope that the next 10 go a little slower. It seems like things get quicker these days when we get older, but that's all fun. We're having fun. The fun times are accelerating things, right?

01:43 Justin Johnson: Right, you are correct. New year, right? What do we think about when we hear "new year?"

01:50 Ken Franzen: We think about turning the page, starting fresh, doing new things, implementing, exercising.

01:53 Justin Johnson: Starting fresh. Doing new stuff, trying to lose some weight.

02:00 Ken Franzen: Sure, yeah. Most of us.

02:00 Justin Johnson: Make more money, read more books.

02:02 Ken Franzen: Make more money, get more...

02:05 Justin Johnson: Learn more about whatever right?

02:07 Ken Franzen: Yeah. What's on your list this year Justin for 2017?

02:11 Justin Johnson: Pretty much everything that I just said. Loose weight, change my diet.

02:20 Ken Franzen: Eat healthy.

02:21 Justin Johnson: Eat healthy, I guess. It's cool because it's always something you talk about in January and you try to act on it in February, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Hopefully I stay with it and do my New Year's resolutions.

02:39 Ken Franzen: Yeah, I actually kinda threw out the idea of resolutions this year because I think that they're kinda bullshit.

02:47 Justin Johnson: Right.

02:48 Ken Franzen: I decided... 'Cause we all quit our resolutions after so long, right?

02:54 Justin Johnson: Yeah.

02:55 Ken Franzen: We don't all, but the likelihood that you follow through on a resolution is not as good.

03:00 Justin Johnson: So you scrap the whole thing. You just say, "To hell with it. I'm done. I'm not doing anything." Alright man.

03:06 Ken Franzen: I decided to do a series of experiments, rather, with goals in mind and...

03:13 Justin Johnson: Cool. That's pretty cool. I like that.

03:14 Ken Franzen: Yeah, so health wise I'm doing this 12-week challenge, just a weight loss type challenge. It ends in April 9th.

03:24 Justin Johnson: Ends in April? Alright.

03:25 Ken Franzen: Yeah.

03:25 Justin Johnson: Alright, we're gonna track this.

03:27 Ken Franzen: Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's actually...

03:29 Justin Johnson: Let's do it. Put yourself out there man because you know what? Accountability is it, and if you put it out here, we're all gonna be looking on, what'd you say, April 9th?

03:39 Ken Franzen: April 9th, yes.

03:40 Justin Johnson: April 9th is the number. Alright, so what are the goals?

03:43 Ken Franzen: In April, the goals... Well, my goal is one, to complete the challenge 'cause I think that itself is a feat.

[laughter]

03:50 Ken Franzen: You laugh but that I think is a feat in itself is actually going through all 12 weeks. I look at a 52-week resolution which is a normal New Year's resolution and saying, "Alright, I'm gonna be good all year long." Well I decided, "You know what? I'm just gonna give myself a small win and say I'm gonna work out and eat clean for 12 weeks and see what type of results I come through." And we'll see. Weight-wise, I don't know how much weight I'm gonna lose. I'm gonna do my best. I think that I could drop...

04:22 Justin Johnson: I love the goal.

04:24 Ken Franzen: I could drop 30 pounds. And then my second experiment that I'm going to do, and this one I'm more nervous about throwing out there to the public than others, but I'm gonna run the... In October, I'm gonna run the Detroit Half Marathon. Yeah, 13.1 miles.

04:41 Justin Johnson: 13.1 miles.

04:43 Ken Franzen: I'm gonna start training for that immediately after this 12-week challenge is over. I figured maybe if I got rid of a couple spare tires it'll make the running training a little easier, so yeah.

04:55 Justin Johnson: Nice, I like it.

04:56 Ken Franzen: But enough about us, enough about what we have going on. Let's talk about our listeners and what they have and what they wanna hear. Ideally yeah, new year means that we have...

05:10 Justin Johnson: Change.

05:11 Ken Franzen: Yep, change on the horizon. We wanna look at new things and we thought maybe one great topic would just be coming up with ways to drive traffic to your website. I think we have 13 of 'em today we're gonna discuss. Does that sound right?

05:23 Justin Johnson: 13 ways. Yeah, it sounds about right.

05:25 Ken Franzen: Awesome. Let's get started. We're basically gonna touch on these. We're not gonna dive super deep because most of these are... We're not gonna be presenting you with something you never heard of but these are things that you are cognitive of, but we'll talk about the ways in which they can help drive traffic to your website. Traffic is that first step of getting customers is getting more people that don't know who you are or maybe people that do already know who you are, are current customers, back to your website to learn more about what you're doing. Try to get 'em through that buyer's cycle again or that buyer's journey. What do we have on the plate for number one, Justin?

06:08 Justin Johnson: Alright. Number one, Ken, would be blogging. If you're not already doing this, this is probably... I don't know. Wouldn't you say this is probably one of the easiest ways to start driving new traffic to your site simply by...

06:26 Ken Franzen: Absolutely.

06:27 Justin Johnson: Getting out there and start figuring out what your customers are looking for and develop your content around that. It's not that difficult. Talk to your sales reps and just say, "Hey, what are people asking about?" And go back and if you're not already creating that copy then look at it and say, "Alright, this might be an opportunity for us to get some additional exposure to our site."

06:52 Ken Franzen: Yeah. Answer the questions that the customers are asking the most. That's the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit for blog copy. Blogs are great tools for driving traffic. Why? The search engines, they love new content, and blogging is the most natural easiest way to add new fresh content to your website outside of rewriting your company history everyday, which is never gonna happen. We wanna write good, quality content. It's gotta go past the idea of just any copy. Obviously, we want to make these posts that we publish engaging and answering questions that our target audience is looking for to be answered. But yeah, the blog is a real easy way. It's a low barrier of entry. Most websites these days, I would say most, have some type of blogging component already built into them. If yours isn't active, talk to your web developer and have them activate it.

07:58 Ken Franzen: But talk about questions your customers ask, talk about industry news. Positions you as a thought leader as well, adds credibility so that you're gonna be seen as the expert in... There's nothing better than getting into a competitive situation with a prospect and pointing them towards some resources you created that your competitor likely lacks. It just really makes the difference all-in-all. But from the traffic standpoint, you're gonna attract more traffic by writing blog posts, answering customer questions, or talking about industry-related items because the search engines are gonna pick that up and index it. And that's probably going to have a more compounding effect than just that.

08:44 Justin Johnson: Right. 100% agree with you. What about writing kickass headlines for those blog posts? That's a big one. Give readers...

08:58 Ken Franzen: It is.

09:00 Justin Johnson: You gotta give those readers a reason to click on your headline. [chuckle] Don't be the same as everybody else. You just have to step out of the box and look at your competition, look at what your competition's doing, and figure out ways to wanna engage that person and get 'em past that first step which is what they see. They see the headline and that's all they see so they have to wanna be able to click on it.

09:26 Ken Franzen: Yeah. What we're kinda honing in on here with as far as the headline, the blog topic or the blog title is typically the page title that shows up in the search engines as well. And so whenever someone conducts a search on their favorite search engine, they are delivered a search engine results page or a SERP. And we've all seen them. We've got lists of results that have a large link at the very top, and then a description below and then the URL. We're talking about that link, that main page title there. We're competing for clicks on this page. Let's assume at this point that we've done our duty in getting positioned on page one, near the top, at the top, number one. We're now in competition with...

10:22 Justin Johnson: With everybody else.

10:23 Ken Franzen: Everybody else on that page. Who's gonna get the click? And so this kickass headline we're talking about is going to be that convincing, enticing, engaging hook that gets someone saying, "Hey, that seems to fit what I'm looking for, and it looks like I wanna invest time in it. I'm gonna click on it." And there's a lot that goes into getting that click, and user engagement's something that Google is using now to even further indexing for search signals. And so the more you can get those people to click on your link and then ultimately stay on your site for some duration, the better you're gonna position. Take time and invest in writing a great headline or a page title because that's gonna get you that's extra traffic basically just through adding click-throughs off the SERPs wherever you're showing up.

11:28 Justin Johnson: Right. You, my friend, are correct. What about paid ads?

11:38 Ken Franzen: Yeah. Paid search is number three on our list.

11:42 Justin Johnson: Paid search is number three. Any time that you can have an ad which you can create in probably about 10 minutes, have it running in front of your targeted audience in probably about 20 minutes, which is usually the amount of time that it takes to get your ads approved. As long as you have a budget, you can have your information being presented to your visitors within a matter of a half an hour. I don't think that there's really any other way that you can do that with any other copy that you're gonna create aside from a paid listing. Just do me one favor, when you are creating these... I see this, this is probably one of the biggest mistakes that individuals make is they create their adds and they're running these ads and they're sending 'em directly to a homepage as opposed to a landing page that you create with your offer or whatever it is that you've... Whatever you've got the ad set up for. Send 'em to that landing page in order to try to get those folks to convert and eventually get into your funnel.

12:56 Ken Franzen: Yeah, that's one thing there. And so you made mention of getting 20 minutes up and running, and so what you're talking about there with the landing page, that'd be a little bit of extra time on the front end but...

13:05 Justin Johnson: Yeah, a little bit of extra time.

13:06 Ken Franzen: Get the campaign going on the platform that you want, yes. It's immediate or nearly immediate, but it's very controllable traffic as well. And you did make mention this one does require a budget. You need to spend some money. And what your budget is, figure it out. Give the campaign a chance to work and measure it and visited often though because there's some fine-tuning that'll go into this. But you could find some diamonds in the rough as far as keywords that are low cost that do deliver visitors' conversions. And once you find that, ride that wave as long as you possibly can because whether it's on Google AdWords or if it's on Facebook or any other paid platform, it's only a matter of time before the competition continues to increase, and that's going to drive costs up. But yeah, if you can find a sweet spot where your marketing acquisition cost is awesome and you're able to generate those leads, AdWords or a paid search is a great option for driving website traffic.

14:22 Ken Franzen: Next on the list, we have one of my favorites which is interview influencers or thought leaders in your industry. And so unless you're already at the top of the mountain looking down on everyone else, there are likely others in your industry that are more known, more recognized, you seek or maybe they are an unknown mentor to you. You follow them and learn from them. Getting them on the phone, sitting down for a cup of coffee, getting in on a podcast recording, meeting them at a conference, videotaping, whatever it might be, reach out to them and see if they would be interested in allowing you to interview them. And where this comes in great is you're now taking someone who is known, who is searched for on the search engines likely, and you are having a one-on-one conversation that you are going to position on your website through a blog post or on your YouTube channel, which in turn you'd put that video on your website. But you're having content, unique content being created by this industry influencer positioned by you, which makes you look great. And let them do the talking, ask, prepare great questions, let them do the talking. It doesn't have to be a two-hour segment, it could just be a five-minute clip that you ask them two of the most burning questions your customers have that they would be able to answer with a complete attention from everyone else.

16:17 Justin Johnson: They're likely going to probably share that information out with their audience as well, too.

16:22 Ken Franzen: Oh, that's the hidden gem here, yeah. They have an audience that's much larger than yours likely, and what you just said is spot on. That's the bonus in all this is getting them... They may not, but likely they're, "Hey, I was featured." Everyone likes to be flattered or likes to promote their, especially an influencer or thought leader, they're gonna take advantage of that piece of content and promote it out. And you're gonna receive the added value of viewership from their audience which is awesome.

16:55 Justin Johnson: Yeah. Number five is guest blogging. Just take the time to do some research and go and see what's showing up on the search engines currently and take a look and see, "Okay, we've got X, Y and Z topics that nobody is talking about." Maybe reach out to that individual and see if there's potential for you to go on there and write about whatever that copy is that they could be missing on their site.

17:32 Ken Franzen: Sure. Yeah. No, it's a great tact. It's very close to the...

17:37 Justin Johnson: It's kind of similar to the...

17:38 Ken Franzen: Interview, correct. But what you're doing now is your content's being positioned on their website. And people scratch their head when you say this like, "Guest blog on somebody else's website? Okay, why am I to create content on somebody else's website?" Well, you get your name out in front of a huge audience. Again, we're leveraging exposure, trying to gain exposure to their audience. Also, typically, you get to link back to your site, where that comes in handy.

18:07 Justin Johnson: That could be helpful, right?

18:09 Ken Franzen: Yeah, back links are something that are helpful in search engine optimization. They're highly coveted and if it's coming from a industry influencer, it's probably gonna carry a little bit of extra weight than if you got a back link from your aunt Edna's knitting blog.

[laughter]

18:28 Justin Johnson: Hey, Edna, she might have a huge list, you never know. [chuckle]

18:32 Ken Franzen: She could have.

18:34 Justin Johnson: There's a lotta knitters out there.

18:35 Ken Franzen: I'm not dogging any knitters either. Knitting's hard. But at any rate, guest blogging, it always helps when you go into a guest blogging situation where you're trying to pitch someone the idea of being a guest blogger on their platform. I have a couple pieces of copy ready to go, probably your most visited blog posts. Just a little bit of a brag sheet and you can put it out there. That gives 'em an idea what you can do and what type of content you're gonna produce before they say yes.

19:08 Justin Johnson: Yep. Absolutely. Alright, so how about on-page optimization? Let's make sure that this is something that I think that people overlook a little bit, but just having the topics and the keywords and everything that you're trying to focus on positioned in your title tags and making sure that you're using images on those pages, and ALT tags, and your copy and content is all focused around whatever those terms are that you're trying to optimize for.

19:43 Ken Franzen: Yeah, on-page optimization's low-hanging fruit for as far as SEO goes. Going through, if you can't do it yourself, talk to your web developer and do a check down. But each page should have unique page titles.

19:58 Justin Johnson: Don't we have a checklist for that that we could probably publish in the note?

20:02 Ken Franzen: Yeah. We will include that checklist on-page optimization. That way you can double check what needs to be done or go over that list of to-dos with your web developer and make sure you're not missing anything there. But yeah, if you probably let the search engines know specifically what your pages are about, that's really just gonna help you with indexing and showing up, which is going to drive more traffic. The better positioning you get in search engines is a no-brainer on where traffic can come from.

20:38 Justin Johnson: Super low-hanging fruit. Easy to do. Check out the checklist. Remarkable piece of content. We talked a little bit about remarkable content and the advantages of creating remarkable content. Take some time and come up with something that is going to be valuable for your users, right?

21:04 Ken Franzen: Yes. For those that didn't listen, episode number seven covers remarkable content into some great depth, and also even goes how to even create research and create a piece of remarkable content, so check that episode out if you want more detail. But yeah, if you create a remarkable piece of content and promote it, your customer base or people that find you, they find value in that, they're gonna share that and link to it, which shares and links lead to traffic. You're gonna get more search engine visibility from the links, you'll get visits by people clicking on those links. Being shared on different social media platforms will obviously put you in front of more eyeballs. The fact that the content you're creating is remarkable makes it better than anything else out there.

22:00 Justin Johnson: Everything else out there.

22:02 Ken Franzen: Correct. So go outta your way, spend some time making...

22:07 Justin Johnson: 10X that content.

22:10 Ken Franzen: You got it, you got it.

22:13 Justin Johnson: Alright. This is a big one that I think that everyone, not everyone but majority of people that we talk to, they miss. Email your database. You have a database that you built and you worked so hard to get all these people into it, and then it just sits there. And nobody does anything with it. [chuckle]

22:34 Ken Franzen: Yeah.

22:37 Justin Johnson: There's just so many ways that you can get in front of people by... You wanna create additional traffic to your site just get in front of your customers. Whether it's a new offer or a new blog post, just anything that you have, this new piece of content that you can put out in front of those folks. Anytime that you do that, your traffic's gonna spike. And I think that this is big one that quite a few people miss out on. They've got thousands of people that are sitting there in this list that are just waiting to be talked to. How often do you see that, Ken?

23:12 Ken Franzen: A lot. In email marketing, emails out to your CRM or your database is by far my most favorite thing because we're not fishing for someone that...

23:27 Justin Johnson: Those are people that already know you.

23:29 Ken Franzen: They already know you. They've already...

23:30 Justin Johnson: They already want your information, you're just not giving it to 'em, right?

23:34 Ken Franzen: Well, yeah. We're stating all this under the assumption...

23:38 Justin Johnson: Assumption you have a clean list too, by the way.

23:40 Ken Franzen: Correct. It's not a purchased list, right?

23:42 Justin Johnson: Right.

23:43 Ken Franzen: So let's get that outta the way.

23:45 Justin Johnson: Sorry, sorry, sorry. [chuckle]

23:45 Ken Franzen: Nope, nope, nope. And it's important. Purchased list work a little bit different than opted-in lists or lists of your previous customers or those that you've interacted with. But yes, these are individuals you've already had some type of interaction, you built some type of rapport, and they likely wanna hear from you. And if they don't, they'll unsubscribe. But no, this is that low-hanging fruit. Every time you put out a piece of content, every time you post a blog or publish a blog...

24:13 Justin Johnson: Put it out there. Give it to your people.

24:16 Ken Franzen: Exactly. Obviously if you're publishing daily then batch those into maybe a weekly or biweekly, but what we're trying to state here though is leverage those individuals that you've already had an encounter with, that you've likely impressed or satisfied through your business interaction. That email database, leverage it, leverage it, leverage it.

24:39 Justin Johnson: Big, big, big, big, big one. Number eight... Or was that number eight? Number nine, just participate in conversations. It kind goes back to the same thing we talked about with interviewing influencers in your industry. Just make sure that you're communicating with people about what you do, and I see this a lot on forums and stuff along those lines where you've got individuals that are asking questions about specific things that maybe you guys do, and participate in those conversations, get involved and provide feedback. You are now the industry expert and that's gonna drive additional traffic back to your site.

25:32 Ken Franzen: Absolutely. In your participation of these forums, be helpful. Don't always be pitch-y.

25:38 Justin Johnson: Yeah. You can't be all salesy, but...

25:40 Ken Franzen: Correct.

25:41 Justin Johnson: Right, 100%.

25:43 Ken Franzen: You can sell though, but there's this clout or credibility that you need to establish a little bit before you can begin to pitch. And so we have one particular client who's very active on one of his industry forums and it's amazing. He will speak nothing but great things about the benefits he's received to his business by his simple activity of just answering questions and being helpful. He's been recognized on the forum. People are like, "Oh, that's great. I remember you from answering that question." It passively drives traffic to the website. He's looked at as an industry leader. He's now a speaker at a lot of conferences because people recognize and see this, but participating...

26:31 Justin Johnson: 90% of his conversations are helpful though. He's not promoting the business.

26:37 Ken Franzen: Yes, and that makes a difference. He's truly doing it because he enjoys helping others and indirectly he receives traffic from it.

26:47 Justin Johnson: Honestly, I don't think that he spends probably more than a couple, two, three hours a week doing that.

26:55 Ken Franzen: Yeah. It becomes part of your routine. You go in there, log in, see what questions are being asked, which ones do you feel...

27:02 Justin Johnson: Yep, answer the questions and...

27:04 Ken Franzen: Exactly. But the conversations to participate in, it's kind of similar to if you were at a barbecue and there was a group of people in a circle and talking about your industry and you walked up, would you not say anything or would you pipe? And obviously you're gonna pipe in 'cause you know likely more than they do about what you do. And so same type of thing, people on these forums, blog posts, their comments are being made on each blog post, comment on blog posts even if it's a suggestion or an answer to the question. Maybe you can note a praise for the author and just participate. Be present, make some noise, good noise, but make some noise.

27:53 Justin Johnson: Cool, alright. Another one that I see often missed is share everything that you create on social media. There's Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on. Obviously your target audience is gonna be different on different social media platforms, but you're gonna be able to go in there and say, "Okay, these are the platforms that I wanna be active on." Just share your content. You worked so hard to put this together, and all these platforms are all just different avenues to get people back to your website. Take advantage of that and share your copy.

28:45 Ken Franzen: Yeah, leverage everything that you can. Get it out there. You have eyeballs waiting to see and people are searching, looking for things on those platforms as well. It's not only gonna be in front of the eyeballs that you already have in your audience but also potential new ones.

29:03 Justin Johnson: Yes sir, a video is huge and it's going to just get bigger and bigger and bigger in 2017. What are your thoughts on shooting video, Ken?

29:18 Ken Franzen: Videos, you just nailed it. It's getting huge. It is gaining steam. It's not going away. You look at some of these social media platforms like Facebook with Facebook Live and Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter. All these platforms are positioned for video, and we're gonna see more and more video. My Facebook feed's riddled with videos upon videos moreso than just regular photos. And this makes sense because as consumers, we'd rather consume a video than we would a photo and read. It's our time. If you look at a two-minute video...

29:54 Justin Johnson: Yeah, you can watch a four-minute video, two-minute, four-minute video, and consume so much more than you're gonna have to read three, four pages of information. I'd rather watch a video, right?

30:06 Ken Franzen: Yes. The only complaint I ever hear from anyone about videos versus text is the people that like to scan. "I can't scan a video." No, you can't. But you can consume a lot more. A lot of times, the videos are not visually a necessity for it to be watched. I'll click on a video and just listen to the thing while I'm doing other work and listen just to the audio. If it's someone that's speaking at a conference, a TED Talk, I don't need to see the person on stage with the microphone. I'll throw the TED Talk on and let the audio play in my headphones while I'm jamming on some emails or whatever it might be. But the video itself is getting bigger and bigger. And video, shooting video's never been easier. I don't wanna say everyone, but we all likely have a smartphone within 3 feet of ourselves right now.

31:02 Justin Johnson: Everyone has a video camera in front of them. [chuckle]

31:06 Ken Franzen: Exactly. You have a video camera on that.

31:07 Justin Johnson: It's too easy. [chuckle]

31:09 Ken Franzen: You don't need a $1,500 camera with a tripod and lighting and a microphone boom and a sound engineer to do this. Was that nice? Yes. Will that produce a better video? Absolutely. But the thing is, is there's no need for that.

31:23 Justin Johnson: It's the message.

31:25 Ken Franzen: It's the message. It's just getting it out there, so shoot video and screw it up, and do it again, and screw it up.

[laughter]

31:32 Justin Johnson: Just do it again, and just do it.

31:34 Ken Franzen: Just do it again. Yes, and get it out there. Talk about same things you would in your blog post. Take your last blog post...

31:40 Justin Johnson: And do a video on it.

31:41 Ken Franzen: And talk about it on a video. Simple. You already have the content there, created, spelled out. Go for it.

31:47 Justin Johnson: Stick that on YouTube.

31:49 Ken Franzen: Exactly.

31:51 Justin Johnson: Awesome. We need to shoot more video. [laughter]

31:54 Ken Franzen: You are right. We do.

31:57 Justin Johnson: We need to shoot more video. [chuckle]

32:00 Ken Franzen: We're going to shoot more video.

32:00 Justin Johnson: Hey, that's gonna be the... Alright, so that's a resolution for us. We're shooting some more video this year, how 'bout that?

32:04 Ken Franzen: Can we call it an experiment? Can we call it an experiment instead of a resolution?

32:07 Justin Johnson: Oh, let's call it an experiment, 'cause yeah. [laughter]

32:09 Ken Franzen: Alright. Perfect.

32:13 Justin Johnson: Alright, number 12 is host a webinar. If you haven't hosted a webinar yet, that's a great way to get in front of a handful of people. And you can be driving those individuals back to your website, you can be sending them to the videos that you just created. There's all kinds of opportunity for webinars, right?

32:40 Ken Franzen: Oh, for sure, and platforms to host webinars are simple, easy to use. You're gonna have some promotion getting people gathered for your online event, and you'll likely have a slideshow or some type of presentation that takes them through some type of educational item maybe it's showcasing how you did X, Y and Z. And all those participants likely you'll gather their email addresses, which allows you to communicate with them further. But as you mentioned Justin, for the purpose of driving traffic to your website, you're getting your brand and you yourself out in front of them, and through the webinar itself have some added value, some content pieces that you can position via links, the slide deck that you send to them after it's over, with some follow-up items that they would retrieve from your website. And obviously once they're on your website, they likely can look around and see what else that you do. But in the same sense, you'll also have that email address which can provide follow-up messages to them all with links back to your website. You're gaining their interests through the event topic, the education, the giveaway, the freebie of teaching them how to do something. And then in return, you're getting the email address and giving them some links to your website.

34:06 Justin Johnson: Which is our goal. Number one goal when it comes to that, right?

34:11 Ken Franzen: Absolutely.

34:12 Justin Johnson: Alright. Number 13, hang out with your buddy on Wednesday and create a podcast. [laughter]

34:22 Ken Franzen: That's right.

34:24 Justin Johnson: We did it, so can you!

34:26 Ken Franzen: We did it.

34:27 Justin Johnson: That's right.

34:27 Ken Franzen: Do it. Do what we did, start a podcast. It's a lot of fun. I'm not gonna lie. We have a blast doing this. And it's really easy just to hit the record button.

34:39 Justin Johnson: And just talk.

34:39 Ken Franzen: And start talking. Justin and I, we are far from the professional top-level podcasting that you're gonna get from some of the more polished venues. But we like that because I don't know, it's just the way we are. So if you're listening to this and you haven't ran away yet, you got this far in the podcast, likely you don't hate us which is good.

35:03 Justin Johnson: I love it.

35:03 Ken Franzen: But yeah, it's so easy to hit the record button and just start talking about what you do. And the barriers of entry are minimal. There's some equipment cost, not a lot. There's actually lots of platforms, software platforms out there that make the actual recording and editing pretty easy. It just provides, like video, it provides your customers...

35:25 Justin Johnson: Just another channel.

35:27 Ken Franzen: Just another channel to consume your content. So take the blog post that you just wrote, that you just shot a video on, and also talk about a podcast because different people like to consume content in different formats. I listen to a ridiculous amount of podcasts. And now I'm starting to listen to history podcasts, so I don't know where I'm headed. But it used to just be business related items and now I'm listening to stories and history stuff. And there's this one on Genghis Khan that I'm looking forward to listening to. Why? I don't know. But it's better than listening to the same songs on the radio over and over.

36:00 Justin Johnson: It's how you like to consume it, right?

36:01 Ken Franzen: Exactly.

36:02 Justin Johnson: There you go.

36:04 Ken Franzen: But in the podcast, you're gonna have a set of show notes much like we do where it'll contain valuable links, or links to things that are referenced during the podcast, and that drives traffic back to your website.

36:21 Justin Johnson: Awesome stuff. Well, that's 13 items. I think that we could probably come up with a list of another 50 relatively easily.

36:33 Ken Franzen: Sure. Well, that's a great start for 2017, right?

36:36 Justin Johnson: Yeah. It's an awesome start. I think that hopefully you guys took a little bit away from that today. We're gonna put the show notes up for our on-page optimization, white paper, and what else do we got Ken, anything?

36:56 Ken Franzen: No.

36:57 Justin Johnson: Nothing. Alright. We don't have anything else. Alright guys, we just went over 13 items that will drive traffic, additional traffic, to your website in 2017. Hopefully you guys all get a little bit of a takeaway from each one of those items. Until next time, this is Justin and Ken with Neon Noise. You can check out the show notes for today's episode at www.neongoldfish.com/podcast. Make it a great day! We'll see you next time.

[music]