and life you love. And this is Q&A Tuesday, but it’s a very special Q&A Tuesday. You

know why? BAM! I’ve got a guest here, and my guest is one of my very close friends and

someone who is just so smarty pants. You’re gonna love him, Mr. Derek Halpern.

Hey, thanks for having me.

You’re welcome! So Derek is the founder of an incredible site, SocialTriggers.com,

and he is known for his insanely practical advice that’s also backed up by psychological

research. In addition to his blog, which is read by tens of thousands of people every

month, he’s also got an incredible podcast on iTunes and his own show called Social Triggers

TV. So he is a busy guy. So, once again, I’m so pumped for you to be here because we’re

gonna do a question that we get asked a lot and I’m gonna read it out loud right now

and then Derek is gonna tap that A to that Q, which is kinda naughty but y’all know

what I mean. Alright, so here’s the question. Today’s question comes from Nirvana and

she writes: “Hi Marie. First of all, you rock. Your upbeat attitude is contagious and

you actually make me excited about marketing.” Woo hoo! “Here’s my question, for someone

who is just starting an online business, in my case health coaching for young busy women,

what are some key action steps I should take to generate traffic to my website? I’m not

a fan of blogging, but if you tell me I have to do it, I will oblige. Thank you so much

Marie.” So that’s Nirvana’s question and, again, Nirvana is asking, and I know

you’re gonna answer that, but we get so many people that write in about how do I generate

more traffic to my website. So what do you think? You got some A’s for us?

So I would imagine a lot of those people also don’t wanna blog that much. So good news

is, a lot of people when they start thinking about a blog, they think they have to work

for their blog as opposed to letting their blog work for them and they think they have

to slave over writing content day in and day out. But when you’re first getting started

building traffic, you don’t really have to do that.

Really?

Yeah, all you have to do is maybe write one or two articles a month and then promote the

heck out of those articles. That’s all you’ve gotta do. And then people will start thinking

like, “What do you mean promote the heck out of these articles? Wouldn’t people get

sick of those same articles?”

Right.

But when you’re first getting started, you publish an article, it’ll get, let’s say,

100 readers. And what if that article is applicable to one million readers?

Right.

Why should those other 999... I’m bad at math...

Yeah. No, I get you.

...people miss out on that article?

Right.

So that’s the first tip is to just write less, promote more, and then you won’t get

stressed out about blogging.

I think that’s so interesting and I really, really appreciate you saying that because

I know, for me, when I first started out I certainly fell into that trap. I wanted to

write a lot and even though I consider myself a writer, it was a really kind of heavy thing

to do. And I love that framework of thinking about you created this amazing piece of content,

let’s get it out to as big of an audience as possible. So it’s more about quality

rather than quantity is what I hear you saying.

Yeah, and a lot of people will think, “Well, is it too late to do that? Because there’s

too many blogs out there.” And I just launched my site, Social Triggers, and in about 13

months using that same exact strategy, I was able to attract 27,000 subscribers by updating

an average of 2.5 times a month.

That’s why I love you, because you’re smarty pants and you get it done. Ok, so that

was an awesome tip. What else can we do to generate traffic when we’re first starting

out?

So, the next tip is before you build an audience, you need to know who you want sitting in the

chairs.

Ooh! That was a good one!

And a lot of people don’t really understand that, and to really nail that home I wanna

just share a quick story.

Yeah.

So a few months ago I decided I wanted more massage therapists to read my site, Social

Triggers. I figured they needed tips about email marketing. So, what did I do? I wrote

a story about a massage therapist, hooked it into email marketing, and then I decided

that I wanted to find more massage therapists to read my site. What did I do? I found massage

business communities, I reached out to the people who were in control of those communities,

and I said, “Hey, I’ve got this great article that I believe your people would love.

What do you think?” Turns out that I went viral in the massage business communities.

I got a ton of traffic, I had an email from the editor in chief of a huge massage magazine,

and I actually got offered a free massage in, like, 42 states.

That’s amazing!

Yeah.

So you’re gonna be a very relaxed guy in addition to having lots of business.

Unfortunately I didn’t bookmark those, so... but when it takes it back... let’s take

this back to health coaching.

Yeah.

So a lot of people when they wanna build their blog, they’ll think, “Alright, I’m a

health coach. Let me find other health coaches that blog also and I’ll try to get featured

on their site.”

Right.

But that’s kinda lazy and a little bit dumb because that health coach is competition.

Right.

Why would they wanna feature someone who’s competing with them? So instead, you wanna

reach out to people who you want sitting in your chairs. Right? So in the health coach

example, you’d wanna reach out to mommy bloggers or daddy bloggers or maybe even a

fashion blogger. And what do you wanna tell them? You wanna say, “Hey...” let’s

say you’re reaching out to a fashion blogger. You could say, “Well, I love that dress.

Here’s how to fit into that dress before the summer.”

Awesome.

Now you’ve connected health to fashion. Fashion people will love it, they’re gonna

wanna feature you because it’s not competition. You’re helping their readers buy that dress

that they just promoted and you’re gonna be able to benefit.

Another extra smart tip, you are just full of them Derek. I love that one. Do we have

anything else? Because you gave people... I mean, if they follow these two tips alone,

their traffic would skyrocket. But I know you, you always got something else.

This is my favorite tip and I tell everyone to do this tip and it’s so simple. People

are always shocked that it works. When I give a presentation at a conference, I had people

come up to me after the presentation and were like, “Derek, I can’t believe I never

thought of that before.”

Love stuff like that.

So this tip is what I call The Drafting Technique. Now, before I tell you what that is, let me

just give you a little back story. In racing, like NASCAR racing or bicycle racing, you’ll

find that the person in first place is often trailed by the person in second place. They’re

right on top of each other, you think, “Oh my God, what if he hits a bump. He’s gonna

crash.”

Right.

And so they’re so close. Why do they do that? Well, turns out the person in first

place is breaking air friction and that air friction creates a slip stream, which means

the person in second place can slip in behind that person and maintain the same speed while

expending less energy and less fuel. Right? Now what does this have to do with getting

traffic? Right? So what you do is, instead of finding someone who has never talked about

what you’d like to be featured for, find a blogger that has never talked about that

before, what you wanna do is you wanna reach out to someone who has a history of covering

what you want to be known for. So let’s say you’re a health coach again.

Right.

And let’s say you wanna be featured on a fashion blog. Find a fashion blog that has

given weight loss advice in the past and reach out to them again with a follow up. And what

you’re doing is you’re taking advantage of what I call the link slip stream. They

already have a history of linking it, there’s no friction, linking to weight loss advice.

Right.

And now you have the ability to get featured for the same thing.

So incredibly smart and I remember watching a particular presentation about PR and it

was similar advice and I thought it was, again, so, so wise. If someone covers a particular

kind of story, it doesn’t mean that, oh, they’re done with that. It actually means,

oh, they’re more likely to cover that again, which is good news for people like you and

I.

Yes. Exactly.

Really, really smart.

And I’ve got a bonus tip, actually. About 8 years ago John Stone went on his journey

from flab to fit and he documented every step of the way on his website. John Stone Fitness

actually. And he took a picture of himself without his shirt on when he was a really

flabby guy and he documented what he ate, his workouts, and he took a daily picture.

And after about 3 months, as he started losing weight, as he started getting fit, he started

to blow up in the bodybuilding community. Why? Well, because people like to watch and

join in on other people who are going on journeys. And the reason why they like to do that is

because it makes them feel like they’re going on their own journey. So even though

John Stone was getting fit, they felt like they wanted to get fit. It was inspirational

for them, so they wanted to also join in and also get fit just like him.

Right.

And to really think about that, you could think back to Forrest Gump when he started

running across America and as he started running, as he started going and made it halfway or

whatever, and then people started joining in with that trail that he was running on,

then more people joined in, and more people joined in. Before he knew it, he’s got an

army of people following him as he’s running across America.

Right.

The same can be done online. Now, you might think, “Well, aren’t these weight loss

stories a little bit overdone?” Not really, because people always need that inspiration

to keep losing weight. So, in the health coach situation, let’s say you’re already extremely

fit so you can’t go on that journey yourself. You could take one of your clients on that

journey, you could even offer one of your clients free health coaching in exchange for

ongoing feedback and progress that you can then publish on your site. So it’s a way

to reenact that in today’s times.

Love it. Derek, you are so incredibly smart. I just wanna say this, Derek has given me

advice on my business and every time you give me a little piece of feedback and we implement

it, it always works and we always make more money and we always reach more people. So

I really, really appreciate your insight and thank you for A’ing the heck out of Nirvana’s

Q.

Thank you for having me. It was fun.

Now Derek and I would love to hear from you. So you’ve got a little choice on this one,

there’s two challenges. Pick whichever one you want. The first one: if you want more

traffic to your website, you’ve gotta go out there, take a look at a blogger who has

an audience that you wanna reach, and send a simple email. It’ll take you two seconds,

go send an email to that blogger right now, then come back and let us know that you did

it by leaving a comment below. The other option is this: you might have some ideas that you

wanna share with us about traffic generation. Ideas, tips, strategies that you use that

have worked. As always, all the action is happening back at MarieForleo.com, so go there

and leave a comment now. If you like this video, subscribe and share it with your friends.

And if you want even more great resources to have a business and life you love plus

some personal insights from me that I only share in email, get your butt over to MarieForleo.com

and sign up for email updates. You’re gonna love them. Stay on your game and keep going

for your dreams. The world needs that special gift that only you have. Thank you so much

for watching and I’ll see you next time on MarieTV.