Knowing where your traffic is coming from can help you put the right offer in front of the right person and increase your conversions and sales.

There are 3 types of traffic in online marketing.

Knowing where your traffic comes from is where your marketing efforts can really shine. This allows you to speak not only in their language, but to what position on the sales cycle they are. This is the secret to increasing your sales and conversions.

When you know how each type of traffic works, you can put the right offer in front of the right person at the right time. When selling your course or program online, this is where the real list building success can be found.

The 3 types of traffic are:

• Traffic you own
• Traffic you control
• Traffic you don’t control

Let’s dive into identifying each type and how to optimize for maximum effectiveness in your online marketing.

Traffic that that own

What if social media disappeared tomorrow? How would you reach out to your audience? If you couldn’t rely on whether or not you could reach your audience, what would it do to your business? Traffic that you own belongs to you and you only. You don’t have to rely on a platform to reach out, you can directly communicate with these folks. How?

Your list, of course. You can send out an email and speak directly to them, send them to your website or funnel and direct their journey. Once someone gives you their email address and are added to your list, you own that data. You can direct this traffic source where you want to – you have full control over where they go.

List building should be your #1 priority in the online environment. Turning traffic into traffic that you own is how smart marketers get results. Your goal should always be to turn traffic that you can and cannot control into traffic that you own.

Traffic that you control

This is of course my favorite as a Facebook™ marketer, but it’s still not as important as traffic you own, it just keeps me in business …not even going to try to hide that from you. It’s what I do.

Traffic that you control is control of where your audience goes, the destination. Facebook™, Google or banner  ads as well as affiliate marketing is all traffic that you can send where you want. Paid, controllable traffic keeps me off the streets, but it’s not still not the best type of traffic. This is advertising traffic. You create a campaign and direct where they will land when they click on it, totally controlling where they are going to enter your funnel. Your objective here should be turning this traffic that you control into traffic that you own by getting them to jump on your list.

Traffic that you don’t control

This is just traffic that comes into your funnel without being able to control where they come in. They just show up from wherever they are and you don’t have the ability to really direct them.

They’ve found you through SEO, an internet search or even a post that a friend shared. People like to research so if you’re mentioned in a group or in a social media post, a lot will go look you up on Google or Facebook.

YouTube is another place that generates this type of traffic as it’s so easy to watch a video, then the next, and the next so you lose where they started.

All traffic is good traffic, but you want to try to turn this traffic into the type you own as well but controlling the journey is harder. Ideally, we want everyone to enter the top of our funnel and get to know, like and trust us so traffic coming in like that may miss your marketing strategy.

The key is to always be sharing value so that no matter where they come in, they’re getting your best.

Now that you know what the 3 types of traffic are, how does this relate to the temperature of your audience? We’ve all heard the terms cold or hot audiences, but how does traffic correlate? My next post is all about audience temperature and why it matters to your marketing and sales. Knowing the type and temperature of your audience is the first step in planning a sales funnel that converts, so stay tuned.