082: [Soulpreneur 411] How To Generate Organic Traffic (For Free)

Kate Kordsmeier 0:04

Welcome, welcome, welcome. We are back with the Success with Soul podcast. I'm your host, Kate Kordsmeier. And we are officially in season two of the show now. And I'm excited because we're doing something a little different. We've just released a brand new series called solopreneur 411, where entrepreneurs just like you can send in questions if you want some personalized laser coaching. And I will answer each week. So if you want to leave me a message and be featured on the show and get some free coaching for yourself, which is usually only available inside the incubator, head on over to Kate kordsmeier.com forward slash Ask, and you can be featured and get coached as well. So with that, let's dive into today's question.

Zola 0:52

Hi, Kate, this is Zola. And I have a couple of questions. The first one is what are the best non paid resources to get traffic to my website? And my other question is, what do you recommend should be the best lead magnets to get people to subscribe to my email list? What are the best ways to get more subscribers to my email list? Thank you.

Kate Kordsmeier 1:21

Hey, Zola, thank you so much for such a great question. So I feel like a bit of a broken record here sometimes. But my obvious answer, I think, for how to get more traffic to your website is SEO. It's not paid, right. So we're not paying for ads, like doing something like Facebook ads, or even YouTube ads or something like that. And it's not social media, which requires a lot of time and energy and effort every single day in order to generate what may be actually a very small amount of traffic, because social media is designed to keep you on the app. Right. So without getting on my soapbox about social media versus SEO, I want to just talk a little bit about SEO itself. So we have a few episodes that may be helpful to reference, which include Episode 57, which is content marketing strategies that work. And then Episode 44, which is five reasons all businesses need a blog, even if the term influencer makes you cringe. So definitely check those out if you haven't already. So then coming back to SEO itself, that this stands for Search Engine Optimization for anybody who is not sure what that means. And essentially what we're talking about when we say SEO is generating organic traffic from Google. So somebody would type in a search using certain keywords. And then your post will show up in the Google search results, which they will hopefully then click over to and land on your site. So this is my favorite way to generate organic traffic in the most passive way possible. And the strategy behind all of this is definitely not something that I could answer completely in just you know, a quick 10 minute episode. But I'll try to do my best with some of the key points. So this is an entire module inside the Success with Soul incubator, and we have tons of trainings about exactly how to generate organic traffic through SEO. So the first sort of pillar of SEO is producing free content of value to your ideal audience, to attract them to your website. So this involves you actually publishing new content to your website, at least once a month, probably not more than once a week is needed. So something between one and four times per month, this is the fastest way to start showing up in Google search results. But if you're just publishing content, and you're not optimizing it for SEO, it's a little bit like the opposite of just build it and they will come right you have to build it with more strategy than that. So something we've talked about a lot in the past is niching down and the need to really get super clear on what it is your blog is about who you're speaking to, and how you can help solve their problem. So one of the best things to start with is answering the question, what problem am I trying to solve? And then from there, you can start to establish your content pillars. So Google, which is a robot, right, robots do not understand multi passionate websites. Google understands and rewards true experts with authority and trust. So if you haven't heard about eat, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, definitely check out our blog post about that and the subject. So instead of producing content that covers a wide range of unrelated topics, the most common example I see is like a lifestyle or mommy website. ate with recipes and motherhood advice and product reviews and fashion tips and mindfulness hacks, and all kinds of different topics, right? Google does not understand what you're an expert in, when your content is all across the board. Google does not understand what you're an expert in when your content is all across the board. So it's best to have one core focus, and then that can be broken down into three to five content pillars or topic clusters, which can then be broken down into three to five categories. So again, the best way to figure out your content strategy is to answer the question, what problem are you solving. And then from there, your content pillars can speak to specific problems, and or your ideal client avatar, and your categories or where you can get really granular and specific. So for example, I might say the problem I'm solving is bloggers who aren't making any money from their sites. And a content pillar example might be affiliate marketing. I think affiliate marketing is one of the best ways for bloggers to monetize their blogs. But then the category example might be affiliate marketing for food bloggers, so it's even more granular. From there, in order to really be found, you have to optimize your content for SEO with keywords. So we have a lot of tech tutorials and trainings inside the incubator to help you figure out exactly how to do keyword research. It's a combination of looking at search volume and competition. And then mostly it's about matching search intent. So thinking about what are the specific words that people are typing in? Like, what problem are they trying to solve? So once you figure that out, and you determine your keyword, you can write your posts accordingly. One of the biggest problems I see happening with people who say, all my blog posts are optimized for SEO, I always get the green light with Yoast is that they've chosen a key word that they're not able to rank for. Because the competition is too high, the search volume is too high. And as a new blogger, they just don't have the authority to outrank sites that are, you know, massive websites, huge news organizations, etc. So it's really important that you are optimizing for the right keywords. And again, this is something we teach inside the incubator actually, like I said, there's an entire module inside the incubator, we're where we really dive deep in terms of content, calendars and systems and SEO and keyword research and pillar pages and content clusters. And eat that one thing I mentioned earlier that this is something that all websites must have. And even just some like Seo 101, because there's a lot of things on the back end that people often don't know makes a difference like site speed and image compression, and plugins and those types of things. So like I said, this is a very meaty topic with a lot of detailed answers that I don't have time to get into here, but would love to tell you more about inside of the incubator. One last note, before we sign off on today's 411 question, is why I really recommend this method of organic traffic SEO, rather than something like social media. And I want to say all this with the disclaimer that look, everything works. Every strategy out there can work, there's somebody who it's working for, it's a matter of figuring out what works for you. So for me, social media, it's just not in alignment with my values with the way I want to spend my time with how passive and automated I want my business to be. There's lots of reasons that for me, social media does not work. If it's working for you, and you love it, and it brings you joy, and you're getting the results that you want, you can basically just go ahead and stop listening to this. But if you resonate at all with that feeling of needing more traffic, but being exhausted by the social media hamster wheel, then this part is for you. So I want to highlight some of the key differences here between social media organic traffic, and SEO organic traffic. So with something like Instagram, you have to show up every single day with new content. So you're literally starting at zero every day, because the shelf life of a post is usually 24 hours or less. And the feed it's moving so fast. We all know the algorithm is impossible to beat. Or even you know, get seen, you're lucky if 5% of your followers, the people who have literally chosen to see your stuff actually get shown your stuff. And you're not even really findable on the platform unless someone already knows who you are. So hashtags are just about the closest thing to search that Instagram offers. And there's really not a great way to stand out if you're a smaller account. This is one of the reasons that local Businesses often do better with something like social media because people are searching for a smaller segment of people like chiropractors in Atlanta, for example. So aside from that, this basically means that we're on the most unsustainable, exhausting and toxic hamster wheel because we haven't even touched on, you know how deeply harmful social media is to our mental health and central nervous system. But above all else, I always ask people who are frustrated with their lack of traffic and the lack of revenue, and they're spending a lot of time on social media. Is it working for you? Are you even getting clients from social media? Are people leaving clicking through to your site? Most likely? The answer to that is no. And that's because like I mentioned before, these platforms are specifically designed to keep people on the platform. So something has to be so beyond juicy for someone to actually click off. So you might be saying, but Kate, I know someone who makes tons of money from Instagram, to which I would say a yes, everything works, it is possible to make tons of money from Instagram, and be what is the cost of that success? Literally, does this person's post dozens of stories every day? Do they spend their life glued to their phone? Undoubtedly, yes, I know, there are several influencers, that when I was on social media, I used to follow them. And it seemed like they were posting 50 stories a day, they were just living on their phones. Now, I don't really know anyone who's truly moving the needle on their business with just a couple minutes a day on social media, or a couple hours a month. But I know lots of people who are moving the needle massively in their business with just a couple hours a month on SEO and blogging. So we're all burned out, we're sick and tired of starting at zero every single day. And no matter what we did the day before, and we still want more traffic. So blogging is a great alternative to social media. And I'm talking specifically about SEO. So this is just to me, it's the timeless, classic strategy. There's no more trendy hacks or hot tips or trying to hack the algorithm. This is really I think the answer to creating a sustainable long term strategy, a business that can stand the test of time and generate organic traffic and leads for you on autopilot. So again, you don't have to be an influencer, to have a blog. A blog is just free content that attracts your ideal customer. So if you have any content on your website, it is quote unquote, a blog. So forget, you know, what you might think about traditional bloggers are being an influencer, there are plenty of really successful businesses out there that have even brick and mortar businesses or software businesses, you know, physical products, and they have a blog, because they know that it is attracting their ideal customers, they're findable, it's the fastest way to show up in Google search results. This is also really cool. Because when you show up in Google search results, you're findable by your ideal client, and they are this is when people are the hottest leads, because they're literally searching for you and they're ready to take action versus interruptive marketing like Facebook ads or regular Instagram posts. Again, it's not that those things don't work. It's just figuring out what works for you. Do you have more time? Or do you have more money? Do you have the desire to show up every day? Or would you rather create something that's more passive and can happen in the background. So blogging is relatively passive, whereas blogging, you can just let the SEO juice do the work for you and take a break without losing all of your hard work, because blogging has such a long shelf life. So blog content literally lasts forever. And it actually age as well, because Google rewards longevity. So having a history of quality content on your site can help with rankings. I mean, I have a blog post that earns 1000s of dollars every single month and affiliate revenue, and I wrote it over four years ago, all I've done every year is update it one time to just make sure it's still current and accurate. And with just a few of those minor updates, I've been getting that steady stream of organic traffic coming to my site. Plus, of course, you can monetize the platform itself, adding additional revenue streams like affiliate marketing. And as opposed to something like ads, which aren't necessarily reliable. I mean, algorithms change, Facebook could go under, you know, iOS changes, third party cookies change. And if you put all of your eggs in one basket, what happens when that basket disappears? So again, I'm not anti ad ads can be an amazing compliment. But if you are only using ADS, what happens when that breaks? And Nicole Walters was on the podcast recently and she said something that I think is really worth repeating, which is Facebook got big without Facebook and Instagram got big without Instagram And so it is fully possible for you to get big and to grow your business to your wildest dreams without the use of those platforms as well. And blogging really builds that know like and trust factor, because you're giving away that free valuable content and you're nurturing their leads to ultimately buy from you. And free content really shortens that sales cycle, because you've warmed people up, and You've nurtured them. And so you don't have to sell so hard because they already know like, and trust you from the value you've given them in your blog posts. Again, this is like, you know, something that is said all the time, but you own your blog. So unlike social media, you own the content on your site, whether it's written or audio or video or otherwise. So don't build your business on rented land. Plus, there's an amazing amount of repurposing potential because you could create something once and then just repurpose the shit out of it. Like you can have a VA go through your blog posts and turn them into social media posts. If you want to, you could record a podcast episode with a video on a view basically, like reading your blog post, you can publish it to YouTube, and then put everything into a blog post. And you've just fed three birds with one seed. So these are some of the many reasons that I love blogging. And if you really focus on SEO, I think you will get the most bang for your buck. So I hope that helps Zola. And in terms of your lead magnet question, the answer is really it depends. The first thing you want to make sure is that you have enough traffic coming to your website in the first place so that people are even seeing your lead magnet opportunity, and then are able to opt in or not. So a lot of times people will say, Oh, my lead magnet is not working. And it's actually not that it's not working, it's that nobody's seeing it. So we want to first adjust our traffic, or we want to first rather look at our traffic and say how many people have seen the lead magnet. And then what is the conversion rate. And if the conversion rate is really low, but lots of people are seeing it, but they're not converting, then there's some things we can do to troubleshoot and to figure out, you know, how we could improve this lead magnet or your messaging positioning, making sure it's aligned with what your readers are really looking for, etc. I'll just say because this, this is a topic that I could, you know, go on and on about. And again, it's something that we teach, you know, in detail inside the incubator. But the main thing is making sure that your lead magnet is something super specific. So don't create a lead magnet that just says opt in for updates, or subscribe for the latest. People aren't doing that anymore. Everybody's you know, inboxes are totally flooded. So they're subscribing because they want something super specific that you're offering. So make sure that your lead magnet is something like opt in to this webinar on the six systems for our six figure CEOs. Or here's a roadmap for your first 30 days in online business, the more specific you can be, the higher the conversion rate. So thanks for your great questions, Zola, and I look forward to seeing you all next week.

All right. Thanks for tuning in y'all. If you liked this episode, and want to get coached by me and my amazing team, then come join us inside the Success with Soul incubator where we have live q&a coaching calls every single week. Plus, you can even submit your work for feedback every week to That's right, you literally can submit everything you're working on and get personalized laser coaching feedback on your actual work every single week. I don't know many programs offering this and it is one of my favorite features. And I think our students would have great. In addition to our self paced curriculum, we have frequent live trainings with leading industry experts on topics like leadership and Enneagram and metrics and finance and SEO and funnels. And because your business won't thrive if you aren't thriving. We also do monthly soul sessions with spiritual healers and wellness pros to ensure you get that self care in. So if you're ready to transform your business in life and holistic, sustainable and soulful way, head on over to Kate kordsmeier.com/apply To see if we're a good fit to work together. We're accepting businesses of all size, including those that are just dreams in your head and those who are making all the money but feeling totally empty and depleted by the process. Here's what one of our clients Molly Cahill from holistic marketing hub had to say about it.

Molly Cahill 19:31

I had my first $10,000 month and now I'm having consistent $18,000 months. Thanks to Kate in the strategies I learned inside the Success with Soul incubator. It is by far the best money I've ever invested into my business it has paid off for sure not to mention the time that it saved me being able to just copy paste import Kate's funnel, and I love that you get a lot of one on one time with Kate on the weekly group calls and that you get direct feedback Back and direct critiques on your specific questions that are unique to your business. And I also love that she doesn't give you this one size fits all business in a box approach. She recognizes and appreciates that every business is unique. And she helps you walk through those unique challenges for your specific business. And on top of that, I love that she's just a real human who walks the talk. So highly recommend Success with Soul incubator. Thank you so much Kate.

Kate Kordsmeier 20:29

So if you want results in transformation like Molly, come join us inside this intimate mastermind style program at Kate kordsmeier.com forward slash apply. And remember if you want to be featured on the podcast to get coached in the solopreneur 411 series. You can leave your voicemail over at Kate kordsmeier.com forward slash ask and be featured on the show. We'll see you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai