What is Cold Traffic? Why You Don’t Want This on Your Site.

I consider the value of traffic you get to your site to be divided into 5 categories (1 is worst, 5 is best). I categorize cold as 2, which is bad. 

Yet most people who create websites and start to experiment with different ways to get traffic do not understand that MOST of the time, they are actually getting either the cold or junk kind, which happens to be categorized as 1, aka the worst, by the way.

In this article, I’ll help you identify if you’re really getting cold traffic to your website, as well as how to switch up your efforts so you can start getting the 3rd, 4th and best of all, 5th kinds to your page.

There is also the potential to take existing cold traffic and raise it’s value from a 2 to 3 and even higher through specific marketing methods, and I’ll show you how to do this as well.

Before we continue, what is cold traffic anyway?

It is basically real people (audiences) who visit your page but really do not convert into anything meaningful:

• No leads.
• No sales.
• No conversions of any kind.
• No comments, no shares. 
• No return visits or bookmarks.

Basically, when you get this type of audience to your site, it results in nothing good, other than a +1 visit to your page, but that doesn’t add any value if the visitor doesn’t do any of the above things anyway.

And this is because either your site is not of good quality and/or perhaps the actual audiences visiting it are not targeted enough to like your content, and because of that lack of targeting, they don’t really enjoy your website or stick around to do any meaningful things I listed above.

A shocking thing about this stuff:

1) Most people who have websites know next to nothing about traffic generation.

So they might build something but without proper understanding, never actually get any meaningful visitors, just maybe friends or family or perhaps offline customers. 

2) Of the minority who do, MOST of those people are actually getting the first and second categories and rarely 3.

• People who blog.
• People who use traffic exchanges.
• People who use solo ads.
• Those who run ads on Google, Facebook and other networks.

These people do not understand how to properly use those places and while those networks and options do get them visitors, 99% of the time, at best, they will be category 2’s. 

So what ends up happening is for example, those who blog a lot, get the cold traffic and you already know the results of those efforts and how they lead to nothing, so they waste time blogging needlessly. 

And those who buy visitors from the other 3 examples I listed, end up wasting money because the category of those visitors is already low and again, you already know that it leads to nothing.

How do I know if I’m getting cold traffic to my site?

In order for me to explain this, there is one major core concept I need to share with you and that is the following:

Now that I’ve explained that part, how can you tell what sort of audiences are coming to your page and what category they fit in?

Well if you have a page where articles, pages and posts on it are writing about stuff that is categorized into the red and yellow categories that I gave examples of above, that is the sort of audience you will be getting to your page.

So let’s take one of the examples above…

Suppose someone runs a wealth related page and it talks about various ways to generate wealth. As long as the content that’s written there is broad and just talks abut basic ways to generate wealth, it will attract broad audiences, the low category kind.

That’s really the best way to explain how to figure out if your incoming audience is cold or not.

So when people ask me to look at their page (and generally they ask because they aren’t making money from it), one of the first things I look at is their content, and what they are writing about and in the majority of cases, they are writing broad, category 1 and 2 content, and based on that, I can already see the first major problem they are having.

Is there any hope for pages that make this mistake? Yes there is:

Let’s suppose we take the same wealth page example. A person came to me for advice (they have the wealth page), and wanted to know how to improve it.

What I would suggest that person do is switch it up and start writing about a specific way to generate wealth like through the stock market and to make the whole website focus on just that 1 niche topic. Then that person would start attracting ONLY that type of audience to their page.

And honestly, this is what I would suggest you do if you currently run a blog that is targeting categories 1 and 2 topics. Just figure out a specific niche (100 examples) from that you can fit into your page, and start blogging about that niche. You will start getting the niche audience, aka category 3 people and higher to the blog.

Already targeting a niche? Great, just don’t make the following mistakes:

I would strongly advise against using the following methods to get visitors to the page:

Traffic exchanges. These are one of the worst places you’d ever want to go to and pay for to get visitors. They send bulk amounts of visitors to your page for a price and I guarantee you that MOST of those visitors are categories 1 and 2. 

These places love to advertise how they’ll send you 100,000’s (some of them promise this) and inexperienced buyers think that they are literally getting category 5 people to their page from this, when in fact 99.9% of those 100,000+ people are probably categories 1 and 2. 

Solo ads. I would ONLY use these places if you are very experienced at sales funnels and know how to convert cold traffic into higher categories and that requires very good marketing skills.

Solo ads CAN sometimes provide you with high value visitors (category 3, rarely higher), but in most cases, those will be in the minority. 

So overall, I’d avoid these 2 options. Instead:

1) Blog about the niche topic, and believe me, there’s a lot to blog about, read this if you think there isn’t. And you will be getting that high value visitor.

2) If you decide to do paid ads, gain experience through blogging first, and then run ads through PPC networks like Bing and only target specific niche audiences.

For example, if I ran a stock market site, I’d only target keywords people put into Google and Bing such as how to make money from the stock market, not stuff like “how to make money”, otherwise, I’d attract cold traffic to the page and spend money needlessly on the ad.

If you need even more examples about anything I mentioned in this article or you have questions, let me know.