Here's the background story...
Back in 2009 I returned to Australia from traveling around the world for 8 months.
I circled the entire planet visiting 25 cities, starting in Fiji, then Hawaii, up through Canada (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal), down to some big cities in America (New York, Vegas, Chicago), through Europe (London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Athens), Dubai, Singapore and then home.
I blogged my way throughout the trip and came back with more money than I spent, which never happens - overseas holidays usually put a big dent in your bank account balance!
As much as I enjoyed the travel and was able to run my blogging business, I was itching to sit down and work without the disruption of hopping from city to city.
I was also sick of...
being sick!
I've never had as many colds, flus and fevers as I had during that year overseas.
Instead of sitting on the beach in Fiji, I spent five days in a hotel bed with a fever.
I repeated the same experience again later that year on my first ever visit to London.
...And I couldn't believe it when I found myself coming down with a cold on the final stop of my trip in Singapore.
It might have been all the time spent inside airplanes, or perhaps the variety of new germs I came in to contact with in so many different countries that took me out of action.
Needless to say, I was ready to just stay put, stay healthy and get some work done when I returned to Oz.
I Made An Unexpected Decision
In 2009 I was healthy, living in Australia and ready to focus on something new.
What may surprise you is that "new" thing I spent the majority of my time focused on was NOT my business.
I decided instead to grow my
social circle, meet new friends, and find more people
like me.
In my early twenties I didn't do a lot of partying. I've never done drugs, I've never been drunk in my life and I basically skipped that whole going to clubs and bars phase.
That was until I hit 29... Well, sort of.
I didn't suddenly go on a bender, hit the drugs and party every night, but I did start to go out more.
I organised parties at my apartment, went to every networking event I could find, and enjoyed live music.
I collected an odd assortment of new friends and found myself having a social life.
Throughout this new "partying" phase I was still blogging and teaching others how to make money with blogs and digital products.
My income was good, my coaching members were starting to get results with their blogs and my life was well balanced.
My Secret Side-Project
I made a deliberate choice not to start any big new projects during this time, but I did have one secret project that almost no one knew about.
It was a traffic resource called "
The Definitive Guide To SEO For Bloggers".
I started to write a blog traffic ebook way back in 2006 as my first ever product, which I never finished.
I decided in 2009 to pull up my old draft and complete the book.
I know how important traffic is to bloggers, we all need it, and I figured my audience would appreciate having an
all-in-one starting guide to solve the traffic problem.
As I began re-writing the guide I felt it would make sense to focus on search engine optimization, which turned out to be a mistake.
Traffic from Google is free and had been the foundation of my blog during the early years. I knew that most of my successful blogging peers also relied heavily on Google.
That year I spent many sessions writing away at my local
3-Monkeys cafe finishing up version two of the ebook.
I hired someone to edit it and design a cover for it.
Once it was finished, I went to work to create a sales video and short sales page for it.
Here's a picture of the ebook as I put it up for sale originally (to the right)...
I made the sales page live and sent a small amount of traffic to it to test it out.
I might have made about five sales.
For some reason I held back doing any major promotions of the guide, which is probably why you never heard of it.
I now know clearly why I never pushed this product...
I had titled my guide as an
SEO solution, when really what works is
content marketing.
Content marketing simply means creating valuable resources like blog posts, audios, reports and videos that you distribute online.
Ironically, as a blogger I was a much better content marketer than SEO expert. Plus if you do content marketing well, you end up ranking well in Google anyway.
By this point I had no desire to go back and rewrite the guide again.
As you may know if you're one of my long time readers, I spent a good chunk of my time from 2010 to 2013 looking after my mother who had a stroke, was in a hospital bed for two years, then passed away.
During that period I also co-founded a startup blog advertising company, which was a wild ride, but closed down in 2013.
They were a tough few years.
As a result of these experiences I came to realise how incredibly lucky I was to be a person who can make a living from their creative output (and just to be healthy too!).
As a blogger you make money selling the words you write and speak. It's a truly beautiful business, one that in the past only a handful of top authors, musicians and other creatives could enjoy.
Today, thanks to the internet, it's so much more accessible to normal people like you and me.
You Must Release What Is In Your Head For The World To Enjoy
Next I made an important choice...
I committed to taking what is in my head and releasing it in the form of digital information for others to benefit from.
I decided I want to teach everything I knew from my experiences as an entrepreneur and professional blogger.
I began this process with a big "brain dump" session, writing down all the blogging and business problems I could help people solve.
As I scribbled out my plans I thought back to my blog traffic ebook...
It was clear that no matter the direction I decided to take next, traffic was a big part of it.
Every method you use to make money online must have traffic strategy attached to it. There is no avoiding it.
Marketing is a fundamental part of business. You need a means to get in front of people who buy what you sell.
Bloggers and information marketers are the same, we need an audience.
Take This Email For Example...
As a case in point, there's a reason this email was sent to you.
This email is part of my
Blog Traffic Fundamentals series. I have a
traffic strategy to attract people to subscribe to it, which you were exposed to somehow.
These are just some examples of my overall strategy, which traffic is of course a huge part of.
You must have a traffic strategy too.
I would wager money that any problems you have right now with your blogging business stem from a traffic problem.
This is why I decided to go back and once again re-write my blog traffic guide.
What Is The Right Traffic Strategy For Today?
The internet has changed so much since I first wrote the early version of my traffic guide, yet the core fundamentals have not.
At the heart of traffic is a simple exchange of value...
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