What Is Your Comfort Zone? (Traffic Generation)

Your comfort zone will often hinder your success. During one of Dean’s Monday posts, he commented about being anti-social. He made the mistake of letting that personality trait prevent him from doing what would have been better in that area of his business. I am the same way. If someone invites me to a party, while they may gracefully travel the room talking to friends and being social, I prefer to stand or sit in the back, just observing and taking it all in. So the thought of not only having a social media presence but actively promoting business on multiple platforms is waaay outside my comfort zone.

How about you? Are you an introvert like me and the thought of being active on social media is intimidating to say the least? If you are not then kudos to you. If you are then you’re in the right place.

If you recall from my March 19th post, What Is Affiliate Marketing, affiliate marketing is promoting other businesses’ products or services (marketing) in order to receive compensation in the form of commissions (affiliate) for the sales you generate. There are four critical steps to affiliate marketing, the first of which is Traffic Generation – getting enough of the right people to see the offers you are promoting. Sounds great. How do I get enough of the right people to see my offers?

The first thing I did was unlock Dean’s Beginner’s Advantage program and initiated my Owned Asset – this Voyage to the Top of the Sea Blog. This is my asset, owned by me. It cannot be suspended or deleted by Facebook or Instagram or any other platform for not following their “rules.” It is my solely owned online presence. It is my piece of real estate on the Internet where people will get to know me and hopefully, eventually like and trust me. This greatly reduced any worries about me losing my “real estate”, which increased my comfort level.

The second thing I did was determine who I most identified with. My Targeted Traffic. I explained this in my March 26th post, How Do I Start. Although I offer hope to anyone, as a retired Veteran I relate the most to Baby Boomers, Veterans and Gene X’ers. The right people for me. You will attract who you are. Thus my posts are oriented towards those demographics, but do apply to anyone. You are most comfortable promoting something to those you identify with. They can see and sense you are genuine. That builds trust and trust is essential for them to want to purchase what you are offering.

The third thing I did was make weekly updates to my Blog about my voyage. You’ve seen this in my weekly posts. It may sound odd, but I am not doing this for me, I am doing this for YOU. I am documenting my online Voyage in the world of e-commerce so you can learn from what I have done and am doing. I wish I saw something like this when I first started out. If I did, I would not have wasted a year of my life. I want my blog to be valuable to you.

What value am I providing? If you have been with me from the start on February 20th:

• You know the different age demographics and the one most relatable to decide if you want to focus on that or be general.
• You know the 4 critical parts of affiliate marketing: Traffic Generation, Capturing Traffic, Following Up, and Sales System.
• You determined your Why for launching your affiliate marketing business.
• You established your Goal for being an affiliate marketer and calculated your desired income number.
• You had/have the opportunity to join my Newsletter, which would have included a weekly time management calculator for your own use and how I calculated my dream life number.

If you subscribed to my Newsletter, you are part of my Voyager email list. You received two free gifts when you joined and the opportunity to get Dean’s free book The Iceberg Effect. You also receive weekly updates from me and insider information I don’t post publicly.

The email list is my single most valuable asset to my business. It allows me to send content on demand to my subscribers they will get value from. Emphasis on sending them valuable content, not crap. I will not waste their time. Through consumption of my content and exposure to me, my subscribers will get to know, like, and hopefully trust me. I want to emphasize a key point. I am not creating content to sell; I am creating content to share. Everything I have posted on my Blog and the products I have created for those in my Newsletter email list are free. My content is created so others can benefit from it.

So that is where I am today, and thus far I have felt within my comfort zone. However, it is just the start of my voyage to success. My next step is to launch my primary and secondary platforms that will fuel traffic to my Blog owned asset. Now I go outside my comfort zone. Through the Beginner’s Advantage training, I’ve decided that Facebook will be my primary platform, and YouTube will be my secondary platform.

Building an audience on one primary platform can fuel your entire business. It is not about becoming an influencer. It is about leveraging a third party platform in the same way because they already have lots of people. Why Facebook? It is the most popular social media worldwide with about 2.9 billion monthly active users (https://statista.com). YouTube is the second most used social media platform with about 2.49 billion monthly active users (https://sproutsocial.com).

Fortunately I will not do this alone. I will have the support of Dean Holland and his incredible business team and mentors, plus our Beginner’s Advantage community. I believe this will help me turn fear on itself. As Dean said – “Would you be happy for letting fear stop you from doing something in life? Be more afraid of not doing that. At some point in life it will be too late to do something about it. That is terrifying. The more you put something off the scarier it gets.” Yes, I have procrastinated some on this next step but there is no better time than the present to start. We all start somewhere.

I welcome you to continue my voyage with me on this next step.