If You Don’t Own Your Traffic, You Don’t Own a Business
The words might sting, but it’s a painful lesson if you wait too long
I recently heard a podcast from Russel Brunson, the co-founder of Clickfunnels (an on-line sales platform). He tossed a great quote. I hadn’t heard this message delivered so bluntly, and it hit me hard.
I figured you’d find this message valuable too.
Russel said:
Until you own your traffic, you don’t own a business.
I cannot emphasize this enough. We must own our customer list, or our business is owned by someone else. When a business is purchased, many times the business itself isn’t worth much. People purchase the customer list.
There was a story I told awhile back, about my cousin. He and his wife opened a beauty salon. The place went bankrupt in short-order, because there was rift between the owners and the hairdressers. The hairdressers owned the traffic. They booked their own appointments. When they walked they took all their customers with them.
My cousin and his wife couldn’t cut hair. They were left with an empty shop and no customers. No one wants to buy and empty beauty salon. Bankruptcy happened soon after.
My cousin didn’t own the traffic.
As creators, we’ve got to take full responsibility for this crucial piece of our business. If we build our entire business in the backyard of someone’s house (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Amazon, even the Google), we don’t really own our business. We own the idea of our business. But someone can close the curtains any moment.
I’ve hear hundred of people losing their entire businesses overnight, because they lost a Facebook account, or YouTube changed and algorithm. We don’t want our business to be based on the whims of an algorithm change… unless we own the YouTubes or Facespace.
There are three things every business must have to thrive and grow:
- A system for getting consistent, new customers every day.
- A system for engaging all your customers on a frequent basis
- A series of product offerings that match the customers’ wants.
When we don’t own the traffic, these three things become hard to maintain and monitor.
What’s the answer?
You can own your traffic in different ways. Your traffic source depends on your business model. If you are a high-end consultant, you may need to earn each client face-to-face, one handshake at a time. Which is fine if your clients are worth a few million dollars apiece.
If you’re a smaller creator, it’s more-likely you’ll use email.
When we own our email list, we’ve built an insurance policy around our business. No matter what we sell. We lose all our social accounts. We can botch our product launch. We can create a product that doesn’t sell. But if we own our list, we own our freedom.
Now, email isn’t some golden, magic bag of amazing.
Email is a lot of work, especially in the beginning, when you start with a list of zero. However, the good parts of email far outweigh the hard parts. With email, we can be a one-person shop and scale our business as big as we’d like, using the power of multiplied effort, and automation.
With email we control the message.
With email we control the sequence.
With email we build the relationships over time, in measured doses.
With email we automate the sale.
With email we multiply our efforts from one to many.
With email we demonstrate we’re a real person on the other end of the business.
With email we own the traffic to our products and services.
It’s time to own your traffic
I can’t imagine putting all my life-energy into a project or idea, only to host that project in someone else’s office. This is what new business owners do every day when place all their eggs on someone else’s platform.
Would you walk into Disney World and try to sell your work to the patrons?
If you made one wrong move they’d kick you out of the park. You started your day with a hundred-thousand potential customers. You ended the day with zero.
Maybe twenty-percent of the people in the park were buyers, but you owned zero percent of the traffic.
In the morning you woke up and thought you were a business owner. But you went home with no customers and no sales, all because the platform (Disney World) kicked you out of the park. Because you wore a blue hat. Or because you hurt one out of one-hundred-thousand people’s feelings.
The house makes the rules. It’s time to become the house.
When you’re ready to own your traffic, tap the link at the bottom and enroll in my free email masterclass. Finish the year with your first 1,000 subscribers (a list you own).
We’re waiting for you.
(Grab My Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers.)
August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.