I love the small coffee shops along the wide sidewalks in downtowns. They serve good coffee and snacks and are always full of energetic people all day.

These small coffee shops are usually run by successful small business owners.

The reason these coffee shops do good business is because of two basic rules. For one, certainly the quality of service and two, the location. Even if the service is okay, they still thrive because of their locations.

Have you ever heard that classic mantra- “location, location, location”?

In fact, the importance of location for a brick and mortar business can never be overstated. That’s why successful business owners find the best location for their businesses.

But what is the best location for a business?

The answer is- where the customer traffic is. A coffee shop along a downtown sidewalk or inside a shopping mall will always have customer traffic and thrive.

But imagine a coffee shop in the middle of nowhere- it must close the day it opens!

That’s why smart coffee shop owners pay premium rent for great locations. They call it the cost of business.

It’s very simple- where there is no traffic, there is no business!

How does the coffee shop example relate to creating an online business? Location is important for a coffee shop, but online business can be done from the middle of nowhere, right?

You will be surprised!

The two basic rules for a brick and mortar business also applies to an online business, be it launching your own product or promote as an affiliate, you must offer good service to good traffic.

If you have worked very hard and created a fantastic product, it could make you a millionaire only if people knew that you existed, and they could buy your masterpiece.

If no one is visiting your attractive website, you are having no business and you will either quit or you will start learning the secrets of traffic.

You may not like it, but that’s the truth!

The scarier part is unless you hire expensive traffic experts to fix the problem, by the time you will finish learning the traffic secrets on your own, your digital product may become obsolete.

That is why you need to line up your traffic in advance of your product launch. If you do it right, as soon as rubber hits the road, it will start selling.

How do you line up traffic?

You most likely know that there are two ways to generate online traffic: free traffic and paid traffic.

The free traffic generation can be fun if you like blogging and you are not in a hurry. Depending on where you are in your blogging journey, it may take six to twelve months to see results. This may not be a bad thing in itself, as it will allow you to strategize your product features well and work at your own pace.

If you are just starting out, you will need to allow a little time to learn blogging in your favorite niche. You need to produce about 30 good quality posts before you can expect some traction on the google search engine.

When you will start generating free traffic to your blog site, you can capture email subscribers to retarget them with your own or affiliate products. You will need some patience for free traffic to work for you. If you do it consistently, you may see amazing results!

In a nutshell, blogging is a great strategy for free traffic, but it takes time.

Here is another source of free traffic that you may use instantly- your social media followers!

It can also be a great starting point, if you are comfortable promoting to your own followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn, etc.

If you do not have a great number of followers yet, you may join your product-related social media groups which will allow promotional posts posted by helpful members. Please pay close attention to the group rules to avoid being kicked out.

You may be in hurry, but if you are shy to promote to your social media followers, you must turn your attention to paid traffic for instant results.

Paid advertisement traffic can be a great business strategy if you can target the right audience that will subscribe to your email list and then convert into buyers when you launch your product.

Paid traffic is not cheap, so it is a business decision you will need to make.

However, it is a sound strategy to build an email subscriber list before launching your product, whether you build it for free or at a cost.

A big question often asked is- how big should your email list needs to be in order to a launch product?

The answer will vary depending on who you ask.

The rule of thumb is if you send an offer to 100 email subscribers and make 1 sale, that 1% is considered as a great success rate.

Let’s say you email 100 subscribers launching a high-ticket product for $997 of your own, or a $1,997 product as an affiliate that offers 50% commission and you make 1 sale. If you are happy with that 1 sale that earned you $997, then a 100 subscribers list is good for you to start with.

But, if you want to see 10 sales, then you will need 1000 email subscribers on your list before launching.

How about small offers like $47?

If you email to only 100 subscribers, you will make 1 sale earning $47 and for 1000 subscribers, you will make 10 sales earning $470.

Let’s reverse engineer the math. The number of subscribers needed to launch a product is a function of your income goal and the value of your product. When you know these two elements, you can do the math quickly using my formula shown below.

Zulqar’s email list formula: E= I/V x 100

Whereas:
E= Email subscriber list size (in # unit) needed to launch a product
I= Income goal (in $ unit) per month, week or day
V= Value or Commission (in $ unit) of the product

I have put this formula together myself, but I won’t be surprised if someone else did something similar prior to me.

An interesting observation you must have made is that when your list is small, you can achieve your income goal faster by launching high ticket products.

The best part of having an email subscribers list is- when you run out of your own products, you can always use the list to promote new affiliate deals every month and every week for free!

You can even promote new affiliate deals every day, if you work daily or if you engage helpers like your spouse, kids, friends, neighbors, or outsourced support.

To recap, you must have a traffic strategy in place, either free or paid, ready to roll in advance of your product launch, otherwise, you will keep spinning the wheel without selling.

Beware that either free or paid, the traffic issue can be overwhelming for some people. At least I can speak for myself that I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of learning needed while juggling my full-time job.

But I have been lucky to find one of the great online business mentors of all times- John Thornhill, who showed me a very simple way to reach my goal. He is a digital product creation and marketing guru who has built lists of hundreds of thousands of email subscribers. John is among the top 1% Vendor and top 1% Affiliate on multiple online marketplaces.

If you want to solve your traffic problem along with building your amazing first digital product that sells, you may watch this free webinar showing John’s magical power in online business.

Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of luck in your next product launch!

This is a guest post from Zulqar, if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.