TJ63 – How to Buy Traffic to Your Website That Is Predisposed to Buy All That You Got ~ Jonathan Mizel

What’s up there listener? Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is episode#63 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online.

I am your host as always James Reynolds and in just a short moment from now we are going to be joined by Jonathan Mizel for a talk all about paid traffic among other things as well so that is coming up in just a moment.

Before we get to the interview, just a reminder that will all Traffic Jam episodes come a bunch of bonuses and today is no different so head on over right now to TrafficJamCast.com/63 to get your episode bonuses which today include my own personal notes from my discussion today with Jonathan Mizel plus a downloadable MP3 and a full transcript of today’s show also. So head on over there right now, download your bonuses, grab a drink, put a notepad to one side and let’s get ready for the show.

So as I mentioned at the top of the show, today’s guest is Jonathan Mizel and he’s been marketing online literally since the birth of the internet itself. He’s a true pioneer of the scene with a wealth of experience in both paid traffic, organic traffic, and offline and we are going to be covering each of those topics in today’s session. You’re in for an absolute treat especially so because this is the one and only interview that Jonathan is going to be doing in 2015. I’m extremely honored he’s chosen Traffic Jam.

So on that note, let’s welcome to Traffic Jam Jonathan Mizel from Cyberwave Media.

James: Welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#63 of Traffic Jam and joining me today we’ve got Jonathan Mizel. Jonathan, how are you doing?

Jonathan: I am great.

James: Awesome! Stoked to have you on the call today. We’ve had to move agendas and literally had to get you up at the crack of dawn so appreciate you taking an early morning off and tuning in for Traffic Jam. Let’s get stuck right in to the questioning. I think this is going to be quite interesting, you’ve been online for a long, long time, perhaps longer than most of my previous guests, I thought what we’d do today is talk about some of the things that perhaps worked in the past that no longer work today with some of the newer opportunities where we should be focusing our attention going forward. To kind of set the scene for the conversation and I guess it may surprise some listeners, when and how did you get started online?

Jonathan: I think my very first online experience was 1991. 1991, 1992 we had Compuserv, AOL. This was before the commercial internet actually rose up. When we first got online, in terms of the internet, I think there were maybe several thousand websites and here’s an example of where we were at, Yahoo did not have their own domain. They were located on the subdirectory of Stanford University and it was more of a links list with a little function to it and those were back in the very exciting days of the internet because you could do almost anything and you could dominate almost anything. But, on the other hand, there was almost nobody on the internet so that was a very, very different time and of course things just exploded and grew rather quickly from there.

James: I guess we are in two extremely different scenarios, before there was a different opportunity but perhaps a smaller market and now there’s massive markets but maybe less opportunity because it is overcrowded. Which scenario would you opt for it you are given the choice between 1991-1993 where you first got started and 2015 where we are now?

Jonathan: I would opt for today. One of the things today that is so different is that it seems to me at least, there’s an unlimited amount of traffic back then. It was easy to get traffic but you just did not have a lot of visitors, you did not have a lot of audience and the audience that was there was no real way to segment it and no real reason to either. If they were online you’d be selling them something that related to online like software would be one of the big things that was sold back then. Now because the audiences are so big, you just have tremendous opportunity to sell anything and everything. And you’ve got sites like Facebook or any of the big networks that have segmented things so well and know so much about the audience that no matter what you’re selling whether it is software or something to do with woodworking the audience is there and is ready for you. And also today there is so much more traffic, yeah you have to buy it, yeah, you just can’t throw a website up and everyone would sign up. This was back in the day when you could put a squeeze page or an opt in form up and people just didn’t know any better and you would get 70-80% opt in rates. The audience is more sophisticated now but now you have a real opportunity for segmentation and for real target marketing.

James: Yeah, those were back in the days where it was kind of a novelty to receive an email, right? So I am sure people would want to subscribe to email lists like wow, I got another email today, something to tell their friends about.

Jonathan: Right! I used to tell that to my girlfriend like, look at all the email I got! That’s amazing! Where are those people from? I don’t know! But isn’t that cool?

James: Yeah, times have severely changed. Anyway, I know you’ve got colorful views on certain sources of traffic, one for instance is SEO which you describe as bullshit! Why do you say that?

Jonathan: Again, when we started, you can go to search engines like Yahoo or Excite, most of the search engines aren’t even around anymore and you could make a page, you could submit it, and within 5-10 minutes, you can see it in the index. Back then, take a term like weight loss or lose weight or some very popular term today, something like has a hundred million plus searches, you only had a handful of people trying to optimize for that particular phrase. So it was you and ten other guys so of course you’d be able to have a lot of wins. Nowadays, you’ve got you, you’ve got the ten guys, then you’ve got the guys in the next town, then the guys in the next country and I would say the competition has really killed SEO. It hasn’t killed the long tail. There’s still, four, fix, six word phrases that you can get optimized for but that is not really scalable isn’t it James? You can’t build a business on that even if they are 50 highly targeted clicks a week, the way that we discovered paid media is we had some issues with Google and once you’re making a lot of money with SEO and Google decides they don’t like your pages or your sites, or whatever anymore, they turn you off! And there is nothing more depressing than going from a thousand to two thousand bucks a day down to twenty, thirty bucks a day and so that is how we discovered paid media and that’s where we really determined that the most important thing, at least for us, is salability. For a local business, it’s going to be different. I mean if you are a pet shop, you don’t want a million visitors to your website that are going to burn your servers down and they are just going to destroy your load times. You only want as many people as are in your local town to visit your site, but if you are selling something that has true scalability, something in a large consumer market, scalability is where it is at. You want was many visitors as possible so that you can really maximize your audience and then start working on your conversion.

James: Yeah, I guess it is becoming a smaller and smaller window with Google, right? Not only is that restriction of 10 spaces set, you’ve also got the issue that the fact now that there are so much content now online, I think the statistics now are that it doubles every seven to twelve months or something. You’re only increasing the nature of that competitive nation, it just gets harder and harder right?

Jonathan: And also you have – well we don’t call it web 2.0 anymore because when the social hit, and the user generated content, now there is such a great opportunity for advertising. Imagine being the advertising manager for Facebook, and I don’t know if this is true but I heard someone say that they got something like almost a trillion views a month. Now whether that’s page views a month or page views a quarter, there’s a heck of a lot of inventory out there. And then there is also the Pinterest and all the other social sites so there is such an easy opportunity to buy advertising now that you know, why would you spend your time trying to get SEO? You optimize a page and then three months later you figure out if you actually have something there.

James: It certainly is an interesting point, I mean whereas the opportunity perhaps narrows for SEO, it does widen for paid media because it does more and more are going online, they are surfing more and more places and there is more places to put advertising, right? And be more and more targeted in the process so I can certainly see why that would be the case and why you’re perhaps slightly vehemently against SEO as a traffic source.

Jonathan: Yeah and listen, if it works for you, I absolutely optimize your page for Google and I think you should have your address at the bottom and your name and you should have a relevant title tag but I wouldn’t rely on that to be the be all. I think we only spend about 20 minutes a month thinking about search engine, we want to make sure we are findable. But in terms of really getting a new audience, and really attracting the tight kind of people on to our site, we almost rely exclusively on paid media, PPV, PPC, email, some sort of search that is paid search, because it is something that we can control and it is something that we can scale and yeah, you have to pay for it. But you know, there is this thing that I learned a while back, traffic goes where it is respected. This is going to sound a little weird but if you are buying your traffic, you’re going to respect it a lot more than if you are getting it for free. If you are paying real money from your pocket to get visitors in to your site, you are not going to give them a crappy page and you are not going to say, oh, look, they were more engaged today than they were yesterday. You’re going to have a solid strategy, you are going to try to engage people, but in the right way. You are going to try to capture their information so that you can follow up with then later and you are going to give them information that’s relevant and that means something to them. And that is really the benefit of switching over to a paid strategy, it’s that you start to respect your audience so much more and conversely they start to respect you.

James: Yeah it kind of helps you raise your game somewhat when you’ve got a little bit of dollar in the game, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely!

James: You mentioned weight several times, I know you’ve got an agency called Cyberwave Media where you buy media placements in behalf of clients. Tell us a little bit of what you guys have going on over there. What do you do day to day?

Jonathan: Well, day to day we’ve actually really scaled that back and now what we do is we like to work with one or two clients or captive offers. These are offers that we either have a vested interested in or that we own ourselves and really start to do media buying and really start buying traffic strategy for those offers as opposed to being just a general agency. And a lot of that has to with the specialization in the industry. You have so many people out there – whenever I see the competition, I move in to a different space. And so when we were the only game in town in terms of media buy, then we started to do more captive offers or offers where we can make more money from them. And whenever we saw more people getting in to a strategy, we started to do away from offering strategy and teaching our stuff, and really start implementing our stuff. Now we still do teach stuff, we’ve got a course called Traffic Evolution, we teach people about email marketing, but in terms of the one on one stuff, with just a couple of exceptions, we like to limit that to stuff that we own, or control, or have an interest in. And I recommend that to everybody listening to this. If you are an agency or a CPA network or a media buyer, you probably have already figured out if you’re going to make more money, have more control, have more reliable income selling something that you have a vested interest in, and something that you own or control, or have at least some degree of control than just working for a client, because if you put yourself in a position, you hang your shingles out saying hey I work with clients that will come my way, you know, you can get fired. But when you own the business or have a vested interest in it, it’s impossible to be fired because it is something that you are a part of. And also, you really start to become an expert on one thing, we’ve really worked in the health space and it is something now that we are so good at not because we say we’re good at it but because we’ve done it so many times for so long that we’ve got our top stand and now we can really focus on that stuff, if you’re beginning or when you’re new, a lot of young copywriters ask me how did you learn to write ad copy, or media buyers, and I said, well bring on a bunch of clients, figure out who you want to serve, and then get hired by people. There is nothing higher than getting deadlines and and work that you have some accountability for. But over time, I would recommend moving from being a generalist to being more of a specialist role, whether you are the owner of the company or you are an agency serving a particular niche.

James: Nice! Good advice. Which traffic sources are either you or your clients having most success with right now? We’ve talked about some of you disfavor, which are the ones that you favor most at the moment?

Jonathan: I think my most favorite one at the moment and always have been is email marketing. It is shocking to people out there, a couple of things: it is shocking that email still works but this is a real big surprise that people think that with all the span out there that people wouldn’t really be any life in email but a lot of people, when they get their spam, they get mad. When I get my spam, I get excited and I look at it and I am like, huh, I keep getting spam for this thing. I wonder what this thing is. I wonder what this product is. I wonder who owns this list. I wonder if I can contact this list owner. I’ll wonder if they’ll mail for me too! I wonder if they are canned spam compliant and so doing a lot of reverse engineering has really helped me discover not only new traffic sources but new channels to really help me discover not only new traffic sources but also funnels. And then the other thing I really like about email is that we were one of the first people to use the squeeze page and we’ve been using it since 1998. And I think a couple of guys may have been using it longer but in terms of what we’ve been doing, we really love squeeze pages and the reason we love them is because it allows us to build a list, and when we look at all the different kinds of traffic sources out there and we throw that traffic in to multiple pages, the pages that you know you like the most as squeezes and the traffic source that works best with that is email traffic. and that is because those users and behaviorally predisposed opt in list. They opt in to the list that you are renting, or that is doing the list or JV and now they are coming to your page and they are going to opt in to that as well. So email is a huge one for us, we’ve also found that there are a lot of commercially available lists out there you can rent legally, ethically, honestly, and then also, our biggest strategy is finding list owners that maybe have a small list, five or ten or fifteen thousand people on it who have never even considered doing a joint venture or doing their list and when we were hearing a funny story about a guy that just rented a list and apparently the list owner was saying oh my god you want to give me a hundred dollars to rent? Oh my god, I can’t even believe. Maybe I should go in to the list rental business! And my friend was saying, yeah, you should. But only for me. Don’t rent it out to anyone else. I know Charles Kirkland was on and he was talking about PPV and we really like PPV. It is probably our second favorite traffic source because you can literally pop up a squeeze page or a web page over your competitor, if you are selling a weight loss product you can target weight watchers and you can pop up a web page and say, hey, weight watchers visitors, check this out! And so you can create all this fun contextually relevant bridges and almost sneak in there and really target people at the point where they’re about the make a decision like when they’re on the page of your competitor. And then PPC is still fantastic as well and we also rank native advertising which is more of a content based PPC along in the content based bucket but any sort of pay per click where you are getting people to click, you are sticking ads in front of them, either ads that are relevant to the page they are on or ads that are relevant to the keywords that they search for, all of those continue to work to bring people in to your funnel and those probably are our three favorites. Email, PPV and PPC.

James: Nice! I love when you spoke about list rentals and it reminded me of a piece I was reading prior to this interview where you said you have been influenced a lot by Jay Abraham and his concepts of doing host beneficiary types relationships that he spoke about in the offline world, gosh, I don’t know 15, probably 20 years ago now but it is very true to the point that there are people whit assets, with customer lists, inquirer’s list who have never, ever thought of actually emailing those people or making that available to someone else so outside the main channel, there are still opportunities that exist, right?

Jonathan: Right! And listen, that particular talk that Jay gave which I think I heard from a Gary Halbert letter which maybe I heard two decades ago, it blew my mind. As what Jay said, you need customers. They are a particular type of customer that you can either dig them out of the ground and it is great to do that by the way, I dig a lot of leads and a lot of prospects out of the ground. I dig them out fresh and they’re mine. I am not buying leads from someone. When you run your own lead gen campaigns, you get those leads and they are exclusive to you and that is a fantastic way of getting leads and bringing traffic and prospects in to your business, but it can also be quite expensive because the more targeted you want those persons, you know, when you want someone who wants accounting services, and they have got to be local and they have got to have a business that has to have at least 10 employees, and so you start to look at all this double and triple demographic qualifications that they need, you can pay $30, $40, or $50 a lead or you can just go to a business that targets that same kind of lead. If you are an accountant and you are looking for those kinds of business owners in your area, you contact a lawyer and say maybe I can share those leads with you. And I am already going to pay $40- $50 for those leads by digging them out of the ground, I will just give you the $50 or $50 and I am not even going to compete with you. And so a lot of it has to do with figuring out not just who your competitors are because first of all, your competitors will most often give you your data and give you your list. I mean, look at Click Bank or any of these affilitate networks out there. You contact these guys and they sell a weight loss pill or something like that and you call them up and say I sell a weight loss pill, and they are like, okay, I will mail your offer. I mean, how often before the internet would you see a direct competitor say oh you sell something? I sell the exact same thing and I would love to give you my customers. It is almost bizarre but you forget that there are also a bunch of other businesses that are not necessarily competitors for you, they’re not just selling the exact diet pill but they are competitors for that exact same traffic or they are competitors for that prospect or for that demographic and that’s where the real opportunity lie especially for small businesses and local businesses. It is almost like the Chamber of Commerce meeting and I don’t know if they have them where you are but in the US there are a lot of Chamber of Commerce organizations and the idea was traditionally, 20 to 30 years ago, the accountant, and the lawyer and the contractor, they would all get together and they would all be getting the same prospect but they would be selling something different. Same prospect but different products and different services, and they would share those services amongst themselves in order to further their businesses and that is all that Jay is really talking about and that is how we have made a ton of money over the last 20 years.

James: That’s a fantastic strategy! I actually build up a small photography company prior to doing what I do now pretty much based on this host beneficiary type sort of set up. We did family pictures and we did weddings and we literally went out the very best wedding seller, we went to the jeweler, we went to the bridal shop and we handpicked all of the businesses with the same target audience as us that we premium in our area and we incentivize them to introduce us to their customers and it was phenomenal, one because we are getting the right target audience but the second reason was that they were essentially endorsing us and introducing us to their customer base which made us toward a sale much more fluid. It works extremely well as you say for local businesses for sure.

Jonathan: Yeah, a lot of people don’t get that when you rent a list to that list owner and you mail on their behalf, they’re actually endorsing you. They’re saying hey I have checked this guy out and he’s solid. And even if they haven’t, I wouldn’t recommend taking advantage of people, I would recommend always doing a solid job with whatever it is you are doing, but remember whenever you have people who are working with you and unknowingly they are putting themselves on the line by recommending you. And you said something that was really powerful. A lot of business owners don’t get this, you incentivize those businesses, you don’t just ask them. You don’t just say hey mail for me, you don’t just say hey, recommend me or refer me or put my business cards on your counter or your flyers on your window. You say, I will pay you to do this, I will give you cash money. When you have someone coming in, the ring seller, and you know they are going to be married because you sell the engagement ring, now there is a three to six months window before the wedding starts getting planned. What a perfect time for that ring seller to say, have you found a wedding planner? Have you got a place yet, a photographer? And now the person is not only highly receptive because the timing is right, but this ring seller has just sold them a $5000 ring and so there is a bit of trust and a degree of connection there.

James: Yeah absolutely! How else are they going to make more money beyond that ring sell so it is certainly worthwhile for them too! Let’s get back to talking about online stuff. You’re a big fan of PPC and it seems to be that Facebook is the big flavor of the day now in terms of pay per click marketing, what do you see as the next big trend though, who’s the next one to kind of rival Google adwords and the like?

Jonathan: I don’t think Facebook has even started what they are doing to any big extent. Facebook last year launched their network which is an adword network, I think it is Fbx the Facebook Exchange, it is something that we had a lot looking at and what’s so great about Facebook just demographic is psychographic and behavioral information. I mean, we know that this guy is interested in woodworking and we know that he’s 44 yrs. old and we know that he likes BMWs but we also know that because Facebook knows that he clicks ads. I was talking to a large agency a while back and these guys do a ton of banner ads and they have started to aggregate information that is behavioral in nature. And the number one thing that they learned is that their action takers and there are looker list and what they are looking is that out of all the people in the internet like only 13 of them click ads. These is only 13% and out of the 13%, only about 25% of the 13% or 4% opt in to the ads and out of the 4% only 1%-2% regularly buy stuff. Now, we are not talking about Amazon, we are talking about, because we are not going to be competing with Amazon, we are talking about people who are selling a product, an e-book, a widget, or a physical thing off their website. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be only able to target those people and what he had done first of all is just eliminated all the non-clickers. Why would you want to show your banner impressions to people who don’t click ads? And in that case, why would you want to show banner impressions to people who don’t click ads or opt in to forms? And I think what Facebook has is this behavioral data and I did not really see them at first because I don’t think any of us had a clue how much data they were collecting. But now that they are able to aggregate that data in to a huge database and really big data as they are calling it and move that off of the Facebook environment and out of the Facebook site. I think that is going to be really the killer app and if we want to look at something that is not Facebook, it is being done off Facebook as well in native advertising which is native advertising in things like – there are a lot of hypey stuff there but there are also al of stuff that have proven interest type of thing. The videos, the viral stuff, anything that people come in to. You have a viral video of a cat and a hundred million people go to that website and when you’ve got a hundred million people to the website and you are cooking everybody and you have MAC addresses of everybody and you’ve got backend bases for everybody and there’s this giant machine running behind the scenes. Now you can say, oh out of a hundred million people here are the four million and five million that click on the ads. And out of those four to five million that click on an ad, here’s the conversion data on them. Google also does this and Facebook does this too. Facebook had a lot of issues with their conversion tracking at first and I think they even took their conversion tracking off for a while and they did not really understand. Hey here are the people who convert and the offers who convert so I think big data has been talked about in the last few years but it’s not really turning in to something. One thing we saw a couple of years ago was people talking about and last year we finally started to see this and this is really something for Fortune 500 people but it is quickly becoming for us too and that was for people coming to google.com. Google would like Ford to target them and Mercedes.com target them. It was all “anonymous” stuff so Toyota couldn’t say I want this person and this person and this person. It was all aggregated. But it wasn’t anonymous for Google, they knew exactly who those were and it is not anonymous for Facebook either. They know who is online and who is buying and who is clicking and what they are interested in and I would say that the biggest change that we are going to see in affiliate marketing over the next few years is people going to compete with Google and people starting to compete with Facebook. I remember talking to a guy, a great marketer and he said, why does Google hate affiliates? And he said, oh they don’t hate affiliates, they love affiliates. How can they love affiliates? They ban them and they shut them down and stuff, they are not allowed to do case affiliates. And he said, oh no, they love affiliates because affiliates taught them all the verticals and they show them all the profitable ads and they taught them all the profitable landing page strategies and they taught them all the profitable sales funnels and now they don’t need them anymore. And I see if you are an affiliate, now this is bad news, if you are a merchant, this is good news. Facebook and some of these large networks, the out brands, because of the conversion data, I see these guys getting in to the affiliate base and saying if you want to sell supplements, don’t hire 50 affiliates who will rip you off and send you crappy traffic and so on, just hire us. We’ll send you good traffic and we’ll send you real conversions and we know exactly who you want and we know exactly who will buy and we only have to annoy the 4% of the people who buy supplements online. That’s what you’re selling.

James: Interesting stuff. Well, thanks Jonathan. It has really given us a sneak peak in to the future and also a good look back in the past. I think we should wrap things up there because we’ve covered so much ground. Where should we send our listeners off to as a result of this show just to find out a bit more about you and see what else you’ve got and offer?

Jonathan: I would say the best place is trafficevolution.com. That is our main site, it is our course on all the different ways to get traffic on your website, all the different paid traffic sources, so Traffic Evolution is our main site at this point. You can opt in and there are some free lessons, some great content and that will help you get started.

James: Awesome stuff! Well to you the listener, the link off to traffic evolution and some of the other resources mentioned by Jonathan in today’s show will be included in the show notes for episode#63 which you can go to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/63. So yeah, let us wrap things up Jonathan. I am going to leave you to a morning, it is probably 8:30 where you are now so you got up super bright and early for today’s session so I am going to leave you to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and scenery in Maui and I hope to you see again soon.

Jonathan: Thank you very much. What an honor to be on your show and to talk to you too. Really appreciate it!

James: Thanks Jonathan!

So there you go that was Jonathan Mizel from CyberMedia.com. Got to say, super honored and delighted in fact that Jonathan chose Traffic Jam for his only podcast recording for 2015. And also extremely grateful to Jonathan for waking up at the crack of dawn to record that session, so thank you to you Jonathan.

To you of course the listener, the interview itself is not the only bundle of goodies you get on this episode when you head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/63. You’ll also get my personal notes from the show plus a downloadable MP3 and a full transcript of today’s training as well. So head on over there right now, it’s TrafficJamCast.com/63.

If you haven’t done so already, just a reminder to subscribe to Traffic Jam via iTunes or Stitcher radio. There’s direct links to find your way to the subscription pages which are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher.

We of course end the show with a Traffic Jam chosen by our special guest Jonathan Mizel who’s chosen The Wind Cries Mary by Jimmy Hendrix, a classic track. I hope you enjoy it and I’ll see you back here again real soon!