Systems

100: Crack the Traffic Code with Lance Tamashiro

My business partner for the past 7 1/2 years, Lance Tamashiro, is going to share with us how he "cracks the free traffic" code on Twitter, Fiverr, iTunes, Amazon... using just a few simple rules:

1. Model what already exists so you can reverse engineer for an easy starting point
2. Know where you're at -- check out your existing rankings, clicks, etc.
3. Login to that "platform" or marketplace once a day so they see you're active and checking
4. Send external traffic whenever possible -- for example, send Twitter traffic to Fiverr or Amazon
5. Know which variable you want to improve and watch that number improving with small tweaks and tests (once per week)
6. Use relevant keywords to give users of that platform a better experience and to "please" the owners of that platform

Resources

• Profit Dashboard (Fiverr course)
• Lance Tamashiro's (Blog)

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: We're going to talk about traffic. Lance Tamashiro has been my business partner for I think about 7 ½ years. The reason why he became my business partner is because some of the things that he was doing both back then and now pretty much blew me away. When I first came across this guy, Lance Tamashiro, he was doing this thing called JV giveaways where you have a product to sell, you go and you sign up for this thing and you get all these leads of these new subscribers and buyers coming in.

Then I saw him doing this thing where he would pay people a dollar per new subscriber that they sent to his list. Then I saw him doing something else even crazier where he would go and contact other Internet marketers, other people in the same niche as us and go and say, "Hey, I see that you have a list. I see that you mail to it pretty frequently. How about I give 300 bucks and then you just copy and paste this message that I give you."

Nothing on the Internet ever happens without traffic. It's really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you just make a really good software product at membership site whatever, it's really easy to think, "Well, I'm just going to build it and then they will come. All these people are going to flood it, and come and buy from me, and see what I have and love what I put out," but unless you're actually actively focusing on multiple methods of traffic, free methods, paid methods, all these different things, then you're going to have a real struggle with your Internet marketing process whatever niche you're in.

The good news is we have Lance Tamashiro to talk about all kinds of things traffic-wise, what's working right now, the strategy of what's always worked. How are things today traffic-wise, Mr. Lance Tamashiro?

Lance Tamashiro: Man, things are awesome. The one thing about traffic that I think is so important that everybody understands right off the bat is that there is no silver bullet. We're doing business on the Internet so it's not like it is if you have a storefront in a mall where there's just people walking by and you're trying to figure out how to get them into your store. You're competing with the Internet. The one thing that I see so many people doing wrong with traffic first of all is they find … And we've fallen into this trap in our business, is we find something that works and then we just put all the eggs into that basket and that's all we focus on. Then a year later we're like, "Whoa, the traffic's not the same."

I think that understanding that there are so many forms of traffic on the Internet that you have to get one set up get it working and then move to the next. The balancing act is sort of maintaining multiple sources of traffic at once. My big message is don't put all your eggs in one basket with traffic. We've seen multiple businesses go down because of that.

Robert Plank: For me, there's a balancing act, 4 different ways. On one hand I'm tempted to try 20 things at once. Let me try retargeting, Facebook, Ad Words, Bing, all these different things, then my focus is split all these different ways. On the other hand we can say, "All right, well let's put all of our efforts for the next couple of weeks into Facebook ads." Then a lot of people that we see they go to slow. They kind of just dabble with Facebook ads a little bit and by the time they actually have a handle on it then it's changed. Either some rule has come down, some slap has come down, all the other evil marketers have gone and ruined it. Yeah, it's like this thing that's always changing, but if you can figure it out even for just a few months then it seems like you're well on your way.

As we're getting started here, can you can you tell us what is your favorite traffic method at the moment?

Lance Tamashiro: Yes, and then I want to say something else to qualify it.

Robert Plank: Perfect.

Lance Tamashiro: First of all I would say today as of right now my very favorite traffic method is Twitter. I know that's crazy, because we've been playing with Twitter for years. We've had dead accounts for years. We've come up with a way where you don't need to have any followers; you can still make it work. They key is to think about it a little bit. Here's what I want to say and then we can talk about Twitter or whatever else you want, with any form of traffic the very first thing, and the focus has to be, is why are you getting that kind of traffic, or why are you focusing on that, or what is that traffic for?

It's the why. You talked about Facebook. There's a million reasons to get traffic on Facebook. You can build a page. You can build a group. You can send clicks to your website. You can send them to an opt-in page. You can send them to a sales page. You can send them to a podcast, to a webinar replay, to a webinar sign up. There's a million things. I think what everybody misses, whether you're talking about Facebook traffic, Solo Ads, Google Ad Words, Twitter, is they get too caught up in the method of traffic, meaning the platform the traffic is coming from and they forget why they are getting that traffic.

I think that before you do anything on whatever platform it is be very clear am I my doing this for brand awareness? Am I doing this for sales? Am I doing this for opt-ins? Am I doing this for followers? If you don't do that and stay very clear on why you are getting that kind of traffic the first thing is you have no way to measure your result. You're always going to think it's failed. I know Robert that's been the trap that we have always fallen into. With any type of new traffic sources we just go, "Oh, it doesn't work." The reason it doesn't work is we didn't know what we were judging whether it worked or not on, so you have be very clear on why you're doing the traffic so that you can judge whether it was successful or not. That's going to change depending on why you're getting it.

The second thing is if you don't know why you're doing it you will fall into the trap of going down the rabbit hole. You will start by setting up Facebook ads and pretty soon you're learning about Google analytics, and you're learning about making a video, and you're learning about having a podcast when all you started with was you wanted to make a Facebook ad, but then you heard this, and then you heard this, and you heard this, and while all of those things might be true it might not be true for the reason that you are trying to get the traffic. I think that no matter what your traffic source is you have to understand that one thing or you will fail.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense. I think that when I see you playing around traffic and when I play around traffic it almost seems it's like you get a few things set up and that's half the battle right there. Then it seems like you get almost to 80% to the place you want to get. Like you said, whatever that means. You're breaking even on some ads, or you're taking a little bit of a loss to get some opt-ins. It's almost getting it set up is half of it. Then there's always just a handful of almost like got yous or rules in place where … First you have to get something set up. Then you have to figure out 5 or 6 rules in whatever traffic source you have, whether it's twitter, whether it's Facebook, there's always a couple of little tidbits that you wouldn't have figured out without any kind of trial and error, right?

Lance Tamashiro: Right.

Robert Plank: I've seen that over and over again. I remember back when you used to pay for Solo Ads or do things like that, I would see that … You paid all this money and you just barely lost money, but then you added an extra little up sell and then suddenly now you were profitable, or you joined all these joint venture give away things and it was losing money but then there was some kind of paid boost type of deal to do, and then you made money that way. Same thing with Twitter like we're playing around lately. We play around with Twitter and did the game of following thousands of people, or posting once a day. Then you realized that, "Well, if you post every 10 minutes suddenly the traffic picks up."

It seems like with all these different traffic sources, all the loopholes and stuff come and go, but then there are these almost unwritten rules with all these different places and if seems like it changes based on the traffic source. As soon as you first put up a couple of ads, even in an incorrect way, and then you figure out some of these unwritten rules then you can make money for a little while with this traffic source.

Lance Tamashiro: The way that I look at it is there's the art and the science. Everybody will teach you the science. The science is for Twitter, set up an account, make some tweets, find some hashtags and do it. Your job after all of the mechanics in any type of traffic is to figure out the art of it, which means what's the thing that … I hate … It's such an abstract thing to talk about, but it's like you get a feel and you learn how your audience, and it's going to be different for every niche, responds to things that you're doing on those different platforms, and nobody can teach you that. I guess you could have a mentor that walked through it, but there's some things that you just learn through experience.

Once you have that experience of getting things set up, of understanding the platform, of seeing how things are working, you start to go, "Oh." I can't explain it other than it just starts clicking for you where you go, "Maybe if I do this. Let's see what happens," but you need to understand how to set up your Twitter stuff, how it's all working, what you're doing and then looking at your results. Then you just start going like, "What if I do this. Does my traffic go up or go down? What if I do this?" That's really where you got to know the mechanics to get in the game, but once you're in the game that's where you're just starting. That's where it gets fun and where you really got to start taking it to the next level, which is adding in the Robert sauce, adding in the Lance sauce and seeing what happens. I think that so many people, especially in the niche in the circles that we run in, it's like everybody wants one-size-fits-all. "I just want to set up a Google ad and make it work." Yes, setting up a Google ad involves certain things, but once you have that there that's when the real game starts.

I think that's what's missing in so many traffic things, and it's such a hard thing to teach without one-on-one mentoring or somebody going through with you. That's the skill that you have to learn is how to go beyond Robert and Lance said, do step 1, 2, and 3 and I did it. Yes, that's going to get you some results, but the real magic happens when you take it to that next level that you can only get through having that experience of getting the initial set up going.

Robert Plank: What you're saying is it's really important to basically put those repetitions in so that you can look at whatever campaign you have and course correct.

Lance Tamashiro: You can't learn it before you do it. We see so many people where they're like, "I got to plan this out. I got to build the map. I got a do all of these things." They spend a year or 6 months or however long planning out this perfect traffic strategy and then they start implementing, then they get into it and find out they just wasted time because they didn't know what they didn't know. You got to just dive in, get your feet wet, get it set up and go in because you'll figure out the next step once you've got the step behind you in place, if that makes sense.

Robert Plank: Yeah, it does. As you were describing it what was going through my head visually was I was just thinking of if you're driving down the highway or whatever and there's someone in front of you who's driving super crazy, or super weird, you don't quite know what's off, but we've all been there … We're like, "There's just some crazy driver on the road, and something's kind of off," just because we've done X number of hours of driving a car. Everything's kind of orderly, but then if there's just something that's not working we can just somehow tell. If it's your first day driving a car you can't tell because everything's new to you. You have that experience. I look at this, either it's something's good, something's smoothly, and something's not quite working smoothly.

Since we're talking about Twitter, could you give us maybe 3 or 4 quick bullet points for someone who wanted to get some traffic with Twitter?

Lance Tamashiro: Yeah. I'm going to say first of all, and you know this, I had a dead Twitter account for years. Had a totally dead Twitter account. With my podcast, revived it, built it up. I think I'm at 18,000 followers now, like something crazy. All I do is just tweet over and over on my podcast; I never tracked any … Back to why am I doing the tweeting? Well, I don't know. I really didn't know. It was like, "Well, I guess I'll just do tweaking. My podcast seems to be ranking," but I never tracked what that actually meant for ranking or for traffic or for anything, and so I was just judging it by, "Well, I'm getting new followers, so great," but that doesn't really do anything for my business. It makes me feel good. I was tracking the wrong thing.

I took that whole idea, and we've got this course where we teach about how to build a business on Fiverr, it's called Profit Dashboard. We were talking to some of the students with that and they're saying, "Well, how do I get more traffic with it?" What I started doing was going, "Well, I got these Twitter followers, let's see what happens if I send out my tweet to this group." I started getting traffic. I was getting 200 visitors a day to my Fiverr gig from Twitter, which is pretty awesome. Here's the problem, I can't teach that. I can't to go to somebody and go, "Well, here's how you get traffic to your Fiverr gig, or to your sales page," or to whatever, because what's the first objection they have. The first objection they have is, "Of course you can do that, you got 18,000 followers."

I'm like, "Dang it, they're right. Step 1, get 18,000 followers. Just do that and then send a bunch of traffic from Titter." What I did was I created, in front of this group, a brand-new Twitter account. I actually set it up right in front of them. Brand-new, from scratch and within 24 hours I was generating 700 to 800 visitors to traffic with no followers. What I found out was Twitter has this thing called "hashtags." What's great about hashtags is if you use them correctly you have an audience without having an audience, if that makes sense. I can start with nobody following me on Twitter and I can send a targeted tweet out to a hashtag … Let's just say, "hashtag explainer video," for people that make explainer videos. I can send out a tweet from a brand-new account that says, "I can make you a great explainer video. Check it out here."

If I do "hashtag explainer video," now anybody that is on Twitter searching for something, basically Twitter categorizes everything, so if somebody goes to "hashtag explainer video" I now have an audience with all of those people that are searching for "hashtag explainer video." What I did was I research my niche. I found where there's a lot of traffic, where there's a lot of people using these hashtags and started tweeting to those hashtags. Just from doing that, in whatever niche that you're in, you can generate a crap load of traffic fast with no followers.

The key is, like you said, tweet a lot. We use automated tools to do that. Make it targeted, and make sure you understand why you were tweeting. For example, Big Brother, the TV show that I watch, they have a hashtag called "BB18." If I tweeted, "get your explainer video at hashtag BB18" with my link nobody's going to give a crap. A bunch of people might see it, but it's not targeted for that group. Can you get a bunch of irrelevant traffic? Sure. The key is how do you get targeted traffic that's interested in what you are. That's the little bit of research. You got to find the hashtags where not necessarily your competitors are looking, but where your potential buyer is looking or your potential customer is looking. If you do that you'll be shocked at how fast you can generate a huge amount of targeted traffic to whatever offer why that you have.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense. Just to make sure that we're all on the same page, you keep using this term hashtag or tagging. This whole thing of a hashtag that's where you might have a tweet and then like you said you have like #BB18 … What do you do … Hold down the shift key and then hit the number 3.

Lance Tamashiro: The number sign, right?

Robert Plank: Yeah, the hash mark. Let me know if I'm correct here. It seems like on Twitter you can you can do a search across all of Twitter, right?

Lance Tamashiro: Yeah.

Robert Plank: If someone mentions the term say, "Big Brother," since that was our example you can search the term "Big Brother" but you don't know if they're talking about the TV show, or Edward Snowdon or the NSA. You don't know the context. It seems like by having this hash mark and then some kind of abbreviation that everyone agrees on that basically categorizes it so someone who is looking for all the discussions about Big Brother or wants to get alerts about anyone talking about Big Brother they can just basically search for this pound sign, hash mark, whatever and then some kind of abbreviation that people are either using or looking for. Is that right?

Lance Tamashiro: Yeah. The key is to figure out where your potential customer traffic that you're looking what they would be searching for, or what they would be following.

Robert Plank: Okay. Go ahead.

Lance Tamashiro: I can tell you a couple of easy ways to do that. The easiest way to do that is find somebody that is your target market. Okay, so let's just say voiceovers. Let's say you want to sell voiceovers to people that make whiteboard videos. What I would do is I would go to the hashtag and go to the Twitter search and put in "hashtag" and just start typing in "whiteboard video," because those are the people. That's a good starting point, but that's not a good ending point, because most of the people using that in this example, if you go look at and probably the first thing that comes to your head, whatever your niche is Word Press whatever, is going to be people that are talking about marketing, not necessarily marketing about it.

My target is not necessarily let's say for the example, it's not necessarily people that are interested in them, or looking for them, or trying to figure how to make them, I want to target even more specifically people that already make them and might want a voiceover for it. What I would do is go to their hashtags and start looking at all the people that are tweeting on whatever came to my mind first, so whiteboard video. Then I'd start looking at them and clicking through their profiles and going, "Oh, this guy actually makes whiteboard videos. Oh, this guy's looking to buy one. That's interesting. That means the right people are here, but I'm looking for people that make them." Then I'd click through and find 4 or 5 profiles of people that are actually making whiteboard videos. Then I would look at their profiles and see what they're tweeting about and what hashtags they're using to promote their services.

Then what you do is you start making tweets that are targeted towards … Again, it's all targeted marketing. You can't just throw it out there and hope somebody finds it. Then I'd figure out what hashtags they're using and I'd say, "Are you a whiteboard video maker that's looking for a pro voiceover? Check me out here." It's taking it to that next level and actually making a targeted message to a targeted group. If you do that that's how you'll generate a lot of great traffic.

Robert Plank: What it sounds like you're doing is you're basically like modeling what it seems is working. Even by doing that it seems like you can do better than everyone who's already marketing on Twitter, because some people who are marketing on Twitter, some of them are using hashtags, some of them are tweeting the right things, but like you said they don't really know what the goal is, they don't really know what it is that they're doing. It seems like what you're telling people to do is go out and check out your competitors and your potential buyers and check out a lot of their tweets and Twitter profiles, and specifically look for the hashtags that they're already using that way you can basically ride that wave of traffic, right?

Lance Tamashiro: Yeah, because you want to know where they're looking, and where they're looking is where there tweeting to. You got to figure out who that target market is. Be very clear. Write messages that are very targeted for them and put them in front of them.

Robert Plank: Cool. That makes a lot of sense. I want to switch gears a little bit, not the whole gearshift. You mentioned a couple of times that we have been using Twitter to send traffic to the site called Fiverr. We've been playing around the last couple years with not just getting traffic to our own websites, but also using some of these other big marketplaces; using iTunes, using Amazon, using Fiverr. I think that the big reason for that is that these sites have all kinds of existing built-in traffic. List something on Amazon, list a book or a product; you're going to get tons of eyeballs on that. What's been really cool is that we've been getting the best of both worlds.

We've been listing our stuff on say, for example, Fiverr where you can provide services for whatever price you want so that we can get paid whatever amount per hour that you want. Fiverr on its own sends a lot of traffic built-in, but it's kind of fickle. Just like how Amazon's fickle, just like how Google and Facebook if fickle. They give you some traffic, but it's kind of hit or miss. It seems like by combining a site that already brings you a lot of traffic, with this Twitter stuff you can have more control over it. Is that right?

Lance Tamashiro: Yeah. I think the whole thing, whether you're using Amazon, or Fiverr or iTunes is the benefit of it is you get going right away because there is built-in traffic, but you don't want to rely on them, because nobody knows how their ranking engines work. If you're starting to get some traffic it can be gone the next day. My thought is, whether it's iTunes, Amazon, Fiverr, whatever I want to be sending as much traffic as I can. Free traffic is good for a couple of reasons. One, I'm not dependent on their ranking system, which I don't necessarily know how it works and it could change tomorrow.

The second is they see that I'm sending traffic. Again, why are you sending traffic? Well, if you're iTunes, or Amazon, or whatever and there's 2 equal products in the same niche and you're trying to decide which one to rank higher, I'm not saying that this is how it works but I'm saying it makes sense if you look at from their perspective if they're the exact same, they have the same reviews, they look like the same products or competitor products, who do you rank higher? Do you rank higher the guy that is riding your coattails just waiting for you to make them money, or do you rank the guy higher that is putting some skin in the game and some extra effort and sending outside traffic, which they all track? I don't know this for a fact. I'm just saying if it was my site I would be rewarding the guy that is helping me out.

A lot of what I'm doing is for that purpose. Yes, it's to get some new buyers, which does happen, but more importantly it's because I want them to see that I'm putting effort into it.

Robert Plank: It's getting those extra clicks and buyers is your secondary goal, but your primary goal is to impress Fiverr, Amazon, iTunes, whoever?

Lance Tamashiro: Right. Remember, these are search algorithms are machines. What it means is they're looking at some set criteria for the most part. They're looking at how many people look at you, how relevant you are, how many sales you make, what your conversion rate is. My thought process is with these other marketplaces is I bet you somewhere in their search algorithms there is a waiting for are they promoting and sending traffic. It triggers that and you move up in the rankings, and I have. On a couple of these sites I've moved up in the rankings as I've sent traffic. Now, is it coincidence? Maybe, maybe not, but my guess is my gut feeling is I move up in the rankings because I'm triggering something in their search algorithm.

Robert Plank: Let's talk about that. Seeing what you've done the last couple of years with whether it's Amazon, Fiverr or iTunes, it seems like even if you don't know their exact ranking factors and stuff, it seems like there's been a handful of things that you've been maybe checking on a daily or on a weekly basis and a handful of actions that you've been repeating in order to get more eyeballs in order to increase your rankings. Could you talk about that? Maybe off the top your head, could you list just a couple of things that you're looking for and a couple of things that you do to climb those rankings, whether it's Fiverr, Amazon, whatever?

Lance Tamashiro: Yeah, I would say the first thing is know where you're at. Know where you're at before you start. Are you not in the rankings, are you number 300, are you number 10, because that way you can see what happens. The other thing that I do with all these … First of all know where you're at. Second of all, login at least once a day. If it's iTunes, login to your iTunes account and look at your thing one time a day. If it's on Amazon, login and look at it. If it's on Fiverr, login and look at it. Why? Because my thought is these marketplaces they don't want to promote you and then have you disappear. That happens all the time on the Internet. My first thought is I'm triggering that they know that I'm at least checking, that I'm active. That's very easy for machine to be able to tell. I want them to know that I'm active, so login at least once a day.

The second thing is send external traffic. Make sure that you're sending external traffic. Then the third thing is make sure that you're watching your numbers and improving whatever your listing is with small tweaks. If it's on Amazon make changes to your description that make it easier to understand. Add pictures, add videos, add things that make it easier for the customer to make a decision to buy from you. If it's on Fiverr, same thing. Tweak the way that you word things. See how people react. Change your video, change your offers, change your pricing. If it's on iTunes, change that description at the top, change the way that you do your show notes.

Change things constantly for improvement purposes. My reasoning for doing that, and I do that about once a week so I can just test it out, and my reasoning for that is the same thing is that these sites want to know that you're improving their customer experience. Even on Amazon, I'm sure you've gone to listings and you're like, "I'm confused. I'm not really sure what I'm buying. It's not answering the questions that I have. This is laid out funny." Just make small, incremental tweaks. I like to do once a week because I can look at it with fresh eyes. I'll go back to my video on Fiverr and I'll go, "Oh man, this would be cool if I did this," or I go look at my gig and go, "Man, it would make more sense if I changed this based on the feedback that I'm getting."

These sites, remember they're all about their customer not about you as a seller. They're about the buyer. If they see you making changes that are making a better experience for the buyer, my thought is they reward you. Obviously, then you do the normal SCO stuff, like make sure you're relevant, make sure that you use the keywords, all of that stuff. What I think is happening as a trend in general across marketplaces is the focus is not so much on the SCO part, while that is important, the focus is on the user experience. The better user experience that you can show to the marketplace the more that they will reward you.

The only way that you can do that is by being active, which they can measure, making changes to make it better, which they can measure, and sending outside traffic, which they can measure. Everything else everybody's doing the same thing. They can't programmatically measure those things. Those 3 things they can measure programmatically and say, "Lance is doing these 3 things. Robert isn't. Let's increase his thing." Otherwise it's all the same. I'm looking at a way to what they could look programmatically that I could do that my competition isn't.

Robert Plank: The best thing so far about your mindset of all this is the side-by-side comparison. If there are 2 people and they're very, very identical, like the Fiverr gig is almost identical, or the Amazon product listing is for just about the same product, has just about the same number of reviews, about the same amount of traffic, the same ranking, if they're almost identical then they're going to be ranked about the same. If one person sends an extra 20 clicks a day, that's 1% more, but all you need is 1% more to be ranked higher than that other person.

The other thing that sticks with me is that, you and I have a saying that you have to separate the forest from the trees. What's coming in my head as were talking about this traffic stuff is that I think a lot of people get frustrated because they see a magic trick, they see someone say, "Check this out." I've got my Facebook fan page. Here it's at zero followers. Then a day later 100,000 followers. Then they buy a traffic course, but the course only shows how to get set up, or, "Check out my Amazon ranking. Check out all my sales," but then the course only talks about how to get it set up. They don't talk about the course correction they've unpacking in this call.

What they makes me think back to is all these people, especially copywriters, people making webpages, they say, "If you're not making sales, what you should do a split test." Usually when someone says you should split test that they just mean you should just go and get lost. Let's say you split test it. They don't really know what advice to give you. I think what you're basically doing on Amazon on Fiverr, especially is, like you said you're looking at where you're already ranked, and you say, "Let me just tweak one little variable. Let me take out some of the text on my listing. Let me add a picture. Let me add a video." Then let it sit for a week to do its thing. Then you eyeball it later on and say, "Well, that one change I made, did that lead to more sales or less sales? Did my ranking go up in the rankings or drop?"

That's a pretty easy way of more or less split testing. All those people who don't know what advice to give you they say, "Split test it," that's basically what you're doing there. You're making your best guess, taking a stab at it, change one thing, see what the results are.

Lance Tamashiro: Again, back to how we started … That one change I know why I'm making it. Sometimes I'm making the change because I want to see if it increases conversion rate. Sometimes I make that one change because I want to see if it changes my placement in the search. Sometimes I change something because I want to see what the click through rate changes. Again, you can't just make a change. You have to know why you are sending traffic, why you are making that change, so that you can judge if it's successful or not. If you aren't really clear on why you're making that change then you're going to find yourself in trouble.

Robert Plank: What's really good about the way you've explained this is not only know what you're changing and shy you're changing it, but know what metric you're trying to hit. When we set up something on Amazon, we're not looking to make money from it for a while. We're looking to maybe get ranked, looking to get some reviews. For a while we're fine taking that hit. On Fiverr, ranking is good and stuff like that. Maybe for one month we're only focused on getting ranked. We don't care too much about the traffic, number of sales, but once we get ranked then we can shift our focus to making some sales. Maybe not even at that point making some money, but making enough sales where we can get those repeat buyers, and then jack the price up.

It seems like there's a lot of little bits of strategy there. What I think is cool about the way that you've laid this out is that this can pretty much apply anywhere. If you're looking at Twitter, you figure out like you said first what is my goal, and then I get it set up. Then why am I trying to improve this one little piece of my Twitter? Am I trying to get more followers, more clicks, better ranking, whatever? Then if I know what I want and I know why I'm changing what I want, then I can change one thing and see if that gets me to where I want to go, if that make sense.

Lance Tamashiro: Yeah, it makes it measurable. I think that's the problem with everybody in traffic is they don't do things that are measurable. They just go, "Oh, I need traffic. Great." They're counting the amount of traffic. They're not counting something that actually matters to their business.

Robert Plank: If you do that then now you're not being a mindless Joe. You're not just following someone's instructions for the heck of it. You're actually being a real business owner. It seems like there's a lot of cool things that you mentioned today. The best part about our discussion today is I think there's basically 5 things that people need to keep in mind. Number one, whatever marketplace you're at you need to look at what people are already doing and model what it is they're doing. If it's Twitter, Amazon, Fiverr, even just a regular webpage you have to start somewhere. It helps to look at what's already there and kind of reverse engineer, and figure out, "Okay well, this looks good enough. That's going to be my starting point."

Then the 5 things you listed as far as just what to do once a week to increase whatever it is you're trying to increase; sales, clicks, ranking, whatever. Number 1, know where you're at. Know where you are in the rankings, because if you miss that very first step and you play around with sending clicks over Fiverr, or Amazon, or your webpage, or whatever, you don't know if those clicks actually helped you. Number one, know where you're at.

Number 2 that you said was login once a day. It seems like all these different websites, it doesn't even matter if it's a search engine, if it's a marketplace, or anything like that it seems like they all reward some amount of activity. They want to reward you for at least logging in and you seeing how well your own kind of stuff is doing. For example, on the site called "Fiverr" logging on the web browser, they have a mobile app. Do whatever it takes just to show this website that you've taken it seriously enough to at least just check your own stuff once a day.

Number 3, send external traffic because you don't know if you're going to get Amazon slapped with Kindle books or whatever it is. Send your own traffic.

Number 4 is watch those numbers so that you know what it is that you're trying to improve. That means for a webpage track your clicks. For a site like Amazon if you have Kindle books see where you're ranking compared to everyone else. That way you can make those small little tweaks.

Finally number 5, have relevant keywords, because all these sites the way that they are all headed based on what you said is that they all want a good user experience so that if someone is searching for, for example, if they're searching for someone to provide them with a voiceover. If they're a person who provides explainer videos as a service, they want to hire someone else to dub in some audio. Well then that whiteboard provider might search Twitter for your hashtag, for hashtag voiceover, for whatever and then if Twitter sees that someone searched that, clicked over to you and didn't come back, then they say, "Well hey, this must have been a relevant search result. This person has a pretty good Twitter account."

Same thing with Google. If someone searches Google for "American male voiceover," they click over to your site, they don't come back, then Google says, "Well hey, these are some relevant search results." Whatever marketplace you're in, then you do whatever is specific to that. For example, with iTunes, put out some more stuff more frequently, get your episodes transcribed, whatever it is. It just seems like instead of trying to find the trick, the loophole, whatever kind of bug that they haven't fixed just yet, it seems like instead of trying to fight this big giant website, help them out and make their website better and it seems like they will reward you for that.

Lance Tamashiro: They reward you long-term, which is most important.

Robert Plank: That way you don't have to keep starting from scratch every couple of months. Like you kind of sort of have to do with Ad Words, or Bing, but it seems like with this long-term strategy once you have that momentum going, like you have a high ranking on Fiverr, or Amazon, or whatever, once you have that ranking then you don't have to frantically scramble every single week it seems.

Lance Tamashiro: Yup, way easier life to live.

Robert Plank: Cool. Makes a lot of sense to me. Could you tell everyone what's your website? Where can people find out more about you?

Lance Tamashiro: I think the best place to go would be go to lt.show. We've got a lot of more information for you. You can find out about our courses. You can find out about how to get in touch with me, but check lt.show, and I look forward to hear from you all.

Robert Plank: Perfect. I'm going to add that to my bookmarks right now.[/showhide]

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