Throwing Spaghetti: How to Leverage the Traffic You Have To Get The Traffic You Want

Visitors are coming from all over the world, through all different sources and, don’t lie, there’s always that little feeling of pride when you see all those numbers laid before you in Google Analytics.

But you’re still not getting enough traffic.

You tried article marketing for a while and a few people trickled in from article directories, but not the avalanche of backlinks you’d hoped for.

You tried a few YouTube videos and those brought in a handful of people, though you never could get more a 100 or so views apiece.

Then there was the time you really put your back into social media for about a week and hoped you’d see a rush of new visitors, only to have what few there were dry up when you got distracted and decided to try social bookmarking instead.

These were all supposed to be the only traffic sources you’d ever need.

They were all supposed to be fast, effective, and easy.

So what happened?

I’m going to show you how to turn this trend around with a two-step method for getting and then leveraging traffic, so that you get more visitors while cutting out 80% of the traffic building you’ve been doing so far.

Best of all, you’ve probably already finished Step One . . .

Throwing Pasta For Web Traffic

I know that feeling that comes when you first try to get traffic.

It’s gut wrenching.

As you browsed all the blogs and maybe invested in a book or two about getting more traffic, you started to realize that you were staring down the barrel of dozens of traffic options, with no idea which one was the right one.

They probably all work, but you wanted the best one, the fastest one.

So instead of just picking one and risking wasted time, you’d do them all!

And though you probably didn’t know it, this was actually a really smart move, though not for the reasons you suspected.

You wrote the articles, you did the videos, you put in your time to get traffic from Twitter and Facebook, and did your best to do a little of each every day.

And though your results were disappointing, that “try everything” approach is step one in a powerful two-step traffic leveraging formula.

It’s the step I call “Throwing Spaghetti.”

Like an old Italian granny throwing noodles against the wall to see if their done, you’ve thrown traffic sources.

The only problem you’re having is that you haven’t yet moved on to Step Two yet, which is . . .

Finding The Traffic That Sticks

Now that you’ve got your noodles, or in our metaphor the traffic sources you’ve already tried, now is the time for you to find what’s really working - what stuck to the wall?

Go take a look at the “Traffic Sources” section of your Google Analytics reports from the last few months.

Seriously, go do it. Open another tab and I’ll wait for you here.

What did you see?

Like the screenshot above, I’m guessing you have one or two sources sending most of your traffic, right?

There are others sending smaller trickles of readers every month, but I bet you have at least one clear winning source.

These are the noodles that stuck and they are what you are going to leverage.

The rest of the list you can ignore. You don’t need them.

Why Ignore Valid Traffic Sources?

You might be feeling a little weird about ignoring traffic sources.

After all, if Twitter or Facebook isn’t performing well, you surely can’t start ignoring such a large audience.

You have to improve it, not get rid of it, right?

You have to get Twitter followers, right?

No.

At least not yet.

The strategy that I’m introducing you to is called Pareto’s Principle, but you also probably know it as the “80/20 Rule”:

80% of your results will come from the top 20% of your actions and vice versa.

Look the traffic sources that brought in the top 80% of your traffic for the last few months.

That was only 20% of your traffic building effort.

Now look at the rest of the sources listed.

That’s where 80% of your traffic building work has gone!

Over three quarters of the work you’ve put in driving visitors was wasted.

Now imagine if you took those top 20% tasks - the tasks that bring 80% of your traffic - and devoted 100% of your time to them.

What kind of improvement do you think you would see?

The answer is: a huge improvement.

All by simply leveraging what already works for your specific blog and not wasting time fixing what doesn’t.

Traffic At Every Level

The beauty of this plan is that it works at any level of your blog and evolves as you evolve.

If you’ve just started, spend some time throwing spaghetti by trying every traffic source you find, then see what sticks by finding the top 80% and proceed from there.

If you’ve already completed round one of this traffic leverage, now you can go back and do the same with the remaining traffic sources by finding which ones are bringing in 80% of the leftovers.

Do this every month and you’ll find you can grow your traffic faster and more effectively with the power of leverage than by just trying everything.

Oh, and cooked spaghetti really does stick to the wall, in case you were curious .

Image Source

What's Next?

Get Ana's complimentary 7 Steps to Complete Search Engine Domination workbook Start flooding your website with free traffic today - download your free copy right now >>>