In a hyper competitive market online are there ways to generate traffic that don’t cost you an arm and a leg? We are pleased to reveal the answer to this question is YES! This revealing case study shows how to generate traffic to your sites without forking out on unnecessary, extortionate PPC advertising costs.
The Client: A Nutritional Supplements Retailer that Wants to Move Online but is Being Killed by the Highly Competitive Cost of Advertising on Google
The Solution: How We Uncovered a Low Cost Way to Gain a Competitive Advantage and Out Do the Competition Using Micro-Sites, Blogs and SEO
The Company – Nutrisite (name changed for confidentiality)
The company we spoke to earlier this week wishes to remain anonymous, so for the sake of this article we’ll refer to them as Nutrisite. Nutrisite is a retailer of all kinds of nutritional supplements for medicinal purposes. Tony, the founder of Nutrisite, has been running the company for over four years now and until recently he only had an offline presence.
Using only offline tools he’s acquired a database of 39,000 clients of which 13,000 are regular customers. Products are generally bought from them using a catalog and a newsletter sent out through direct mail. They have a solid profit margin per customer of around 25% on its products.
Getting Online
Tony’s goal was to develop an online presence which means the potential to expand the market he could reach out to, WHILE increasing leads and sales on a truly exponential level.
They have already finished their website and the next step is to get it fully operational. Here’s what it looks like.
The Website
Nutrisite clearly has a lot to offer – but they are new online – have virtually no natural search rankings and were losing money on PPC.
How could they get affordable traffic while building a competitive edge?
The first thing we told Tony was that to be a success he needed to concentrate on 3 things. . .
3 Things To Optimize For a Successful Web Business
1) Getting Traffic
2) Getting High Conversion rates
3) Getting Great Average Value Per Customer
Vishen suggested that Tony Focus Solely on these metrics so that he keeps his eyes and attention on the key things that can make or break his online presence.
Tony knows how to monetize his value per customer and has a good average value per customer already.
His problem was #1 and #2. He’d studied the Mindvalley e-commerce labs and had a fair idea about #2 – we’ll cover how to get high conversion rates in another case study at a later date anyway.
So. . . #1 ( TRAFFIC ) is where the problem lies – in such a highly competitive market how can a marketer generate traffic without spending a fortune on Google AdWords?
2 Most Common and Usual Ways To Generate Traffic
Google Ads - The competition on Google Adwords is so intense in the industry, for example just for the keyword prostate there are 10 ads there to compete with. And there are 12 advertisers already for keyword phrase digestion disorder. To compete on this playing field there is likely to be a bidding war for the top spots. The only winners in this case will be Google. (I’m still kicking myself for not buying their stock when it was $100 a share , %#$@!)
SEO Optimization- It’s possible to find yourself high up Google if you find niches in markets and target these keywords. But Tony’s site is new – how could he rapidly get good keyword placements?
Multiple Traffic Tactics
Tony had also been introduced to the idea of co-registration as a way of increasing his email list. This has worked for marketers in the past but we do have some concerns over this tactic.
Our Response:
“What we discovered from experimenting with this in the past is while co-registration does build your mailing list, what happens is sometimes these clients don’t recognize you – they signed up on site A and they get an email from site B, often you get treated as a spammer and you get extremely low conversion rates. Being seen as a spammer is not a good thing if you’re looking to build a long term business”
What we advised Tony to do was this: MICROSITES
Our Tactics To Generate Traffic In A Highly Competitive Market – Use A High Level Microsite Strategy
Build A Microsite
When people type in a keyword in Google, virtually all the time they are looking for information. By building a microsite it’s possible for anybody to develop credibility, an air of authority, excellent content and vital information.
In this case if we target a specific niche you’ll find sites, such as constipation advice below (sorry for the choice), with information that features highly on Google. This example is one of a good site with content, however it doesn’t truly fit into the category of a microsite. The site has been over-engineered and would have taken a long time to develop.
The beauty of a microsite is that it can be designed and launched with a lot of content within the space of a day hassle free.
We suggested that Tony should start using Microsites as the strategy to get better PPC conversions AND over time, build his keyword rankings so he begins to get search traffic.
His competition on PPC was fierce – but none were truly experienced and we think a targeted Microsite strategy might help him dominate his niches.
Take the keyword “constipation”. Rather than sending traffic to a simple landing page showing NuriSite’s range of constipation products, we suggested Tony directs the traffic to a Microsite focused on NOTHING but constipation advice.
What does a Microsite Look Like?
Here is a sample microsite we created. It’s running on a WordPress blog so it’s really easy to update. There are 3 areas to note.
- The Signup Form.
- The Blog Articles
- The Ads
The site was setup on February 1. By the end of the month we were getting 5,000 impressions per week and were showing up on the first or second page of Google for several keywords.
For example – this is one of the keywords we were targeting “John Assaraf” (He’s a motivational speaker and entrepreneur). Within 2 weeks, we were on the 2nd page of Google for that keyword. While other advertisers were bidding on the keyword, we were getting free traffic.
So really, the Microsite is pretty much a blog. With one key difference – you add a signup box to capture leads.
Let’s take a closer look at all 3 areas.
The Three Most Important Areas of a Microsite.
A Blog
First, we suggeted Tony put up a blog and add around 20 articles related to the search term “constipation”. Finding articles with republishing rights is easy. We’ll cover these in more details later. We showed Tony how it takes a mere 10 mins to get 1 article up when you use the right free tools. The articles are important for several reasons:
- They will help with Search Engine Marketing – especially if Tony pays attention to keyword optimization within the articles
- Tony’s Google Landing Page score will likely improve. Google assigns a “score” to landing pages based on content among other factors. When you’re bidding on a keyword like constipation – having a domain with tons of rich content related to the keyword can theoretically boost your Google landing page score and allow you to underbid competitors for the same position.
- The articles help lend an air of credibility to the site – this means that any ads Tony displays on the site will be seen as a trusted recommendation and should have a higher CTR.
A Signup Form
Alongside the articles we recommend Tony adds a signup form requesting people to signup for a special white paper on “Top 10 Ways to Ease Constipation” – or any related topic.
THe signup form should ask for ONLY the firstname and lastname. The second page of the form should then ask for the address. In Tony’s case the address is critical as he makes money via catalogue marketing.
Ads for Tony’s Products
Along the signup form and articles – he should display ads for his products related to easing constipation. The CTR on these ads will be MUCH higher because to the average browser, they are now on a informational site on constipation – they feel like they’re seeing recommended advice rather than blatant ads.
Now we suggested that Tony repeat this process for 10 – 20 of his top selling products. For each, build a targeted Microsite around the niche and push the products via the site.
Is this hard and time consuming? Nope. Takes us 5 hours per Microsite once you learn the right way.
It’s SO Easy
Tools such as WordPress and Windows Live Writer make it incredibly easy to develop content and make it stress free to manage your information.
WordPress is a free publishing platform that has great usability. We firmly believe in its mission statement- it delivers:
“WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.”
Windows Live Writer is a free, downloadable program that will help you include rich content in your blog posts and know exactly what your blog will look like before you publish it to the Web. It’s one of the easiest programs I have ever used.
I’m a Mac user. Yet I keep a PC next to me – JUST SO I CAN USE WINDOWS LIVE WRITER. Sadly, Microsoft has yet to release the Mac version 
Screenshot below:
Getting Free Quality Content For Your Microsite
This is remarkably easy as well – no surprises there . You can use Google Advanced Search to get free, quality content that you can put up on your site in a flash.
Here’s how:
Google Advanced Search is located just to the right of the search bar on the main page. Once you’ve selected advanced search you can find information on a certain subject, in this case constipation ( sorry once again). You can make sure this material is available to use by selecting information that is ‘free to use and share commercially’ located on the right hand side.
So there it is, it’s really that simple. You can start a microsite today!
The Final result can be a WordPress blog with XXX number of pages and articles. In our tests we have found that when you keep in mind search engine optimization you can very rapidly get the blog top rankings in a short space of time.
BUT IT DOES NOT STOP THERE – THERE’S MORE. . .
OK we’ve shown you the value of building a microsite, BUT this is not going to conquer a highly competitive market like nutritional supplements on its own.
Why not create your own advertising network by following a multiple microsite high level strategy?
Here’s where it gets extremely interesting. If there’s any part of this case study that you should pay attention to it’s this. I’m going to reveal how to get more and more traffic without using PPC advertising.
Build Your Own Advertising Network with a Multiple Microsite High Level Strategy
Think Big
An interesting strategy Tony should pursue is not to settle for one of these microsites but to develop his own network of microsites. He could buy 10 to 20 domain names which focus on different niches in the health and vitality industry, say constipation, anti aging, prostate problems, digestion disorders.
These microsites could form a complete blogging network, he could then brand this umbrella of microsites all together into one site and call it something imaginative such as Health and Vitality or Healthy Living. Each microsite would link to the other microsites in kind of a circle and would sell the company’s products.
The beauty of this is that you’ll see your Google landing page scores rise rapidly within no time. Another plus of this is the way you’ve built up your email lists from every single microsite. This leads on to our next bright spark. . .
Newsletter
This multiple microsite strategy is guaranteed to improve your mailing list. It makes email marketing such an important tool as it’s now so easy to direct so much traffic to your own advertising network selling your own highly profitable products.
Tony could do this my publishing a newsletter featuring the best 5 or 6 articles from the Healthy Living umbrella of networks he has set up. He would feature a brief snippet of each article to entice his readers in, then the readers would have to click on the links to read the rest of the articles that they are so hooked on.
The Newsletter of course will be a digital complement to his catalogue and will allow him to sell more of his health products.
Proven Results
This kind of tactic has delivered proven results time after time for some of our clients.
We like this idea because it helps you establish a long term brand and allows you to break your dependency on Adwords.
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