Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Building Traffic the Cheap Way

I continued to work at LoyalPlus, consulting and trying to help improve its conversion rate. I used a few different sites and tactics.  These include using paid and nonpaid public channels, improving the current offering (getting existing customers to comeback and buy), and training the team on continuing these tactics after I leave.

The first paid channels I tried were Google and Facebook ads.  It turns out that in Hong Kong this was not common practice yet.  These were at the time, early 2012, not very cost effective at bringing traffic.

Next I bought us likes and “nonpaid” traffic off the website www.fiverr.com.  My definition of nonpaid is basically word of mouth traffic.  This ranges from newspaper articles to people pinning you on Pinterest.  As for paid likes, I had tried many sources to secure likes, and Fiverr was the only one to deliver them on time and cheaply.  I paid 5 dollars for 1000 likes.  Within 1 week we were up to 65,000 likes. On a side note, Fiverr is a great site to get odd job task done for cheap.  Micro outsourcing is great for tasks that take a long time, but don’t require much brain power.

Other sources of “nonpaid” traffic are Amazon Marketplace, Yahoo auctions, eBay, and Taobao (China’s version of eBay).  The tactic is selling affordable items at cost or below to attract clients to your parent site.  Sites like eBay have huge amounts of traffic, and these customers don’t really mind where they buy their goods, as long as it’s affordable.  I learnt this tactic from a friend who successfully grew a six-figure-a-year online business selling beads online by first selling beads off eBay.

The final paid source of traffic was www.projectwonderful.com.  Project Wonderful is a hidden gem for traffic; it works very well with products that are niche because the marketing engine caters to people who are nerds.  I discovered this channel while advertising for my web comic www.TOBlender.com.

In order to get more of our existing clients to convert, I ended up creating a Chinese version of the landing page as well as starting reward-based campaigns.  We simplified the campaigns, and started segmenting the people into categories.  For example, we identified the group most likely to drink coffee, and created an ad campaign highlighting the merchants in our network who sold coffee and would give them discounts as a member.

After showing the company what needed to be done.  I got started on showing them how.  It is very important to do knowledge transfer.  Some may argue that you are losing job security by doing this, but I disagree.  If you are so easily replaced then the skill may not be worth teaching in the first place.

To help with knowledge transfer, I setup presentations and small training sessions.  The meetings included both the managers and the workers.  I involved the managers because I needed to show them why we are doing the above strategies as well as how to execute them properly.

As the saying goes, those that know how to do it will always have a job; but those that know why, will always be the boss.