Daily Marketing Ace

Traffic.

Is it ever far from our minds?

Aquiring and monetizing web traffic is certainly one of the most important, and emotional issues we as Internet marketers face. We talk about it, develop schemes and technology to generate it, and pay dearly for it. The most spectacular product launches that we see are about how to get massive amounts of traffic.

Yes, we think about traffic A LOT!

And for good reason. No matter how good your content or offer is, you can’t have a viable business without traffic.

This post is part two in my blog series on developing a traffic strategy. You can read the first post here.

In this series, I’ll reveal the thought process and steps I take to develop a traffic strategy for Daily Marketing Ace.

At the prodding of Jonathan Paston, I promise I’ll not only share the good, but the bad and the ugly as well. It won’t serve my readers very well to provide a sugar-coated ’spin,’ so if I go off track and miss my goals, I’ll do so publicly.

If I’m going to share this process, I need to start at the beginning so you can see everything from start to finish. So I’m going to ask you to bear with me while I show you how I approach strategy development. This post will, hopefully, provide a context for the rest of the process.

But let me warn you, I can get a bit academic at times, so if I start to bore you… slap me.

Let’s start at the beginning. What is a strategy and how does it fit into a business?

Here’s a sketch right out of my notebook (I told you I’d share the ugly!):

What it shows is my view of how organizations (even organizations of one) can most effectively approach the process of developing and executing strategy.

Let me explain the ideas behind the drawings above as concisely as I can.

On the left, you see a pyramid — I call this the Strategic Pyramid.

At the top you have the vision for the organization — in this case, the organization is a business.

The next layer is strategies. Next comes projects (or tactics) and finally tasks.

The X axis (horizontal) of the pyramid shows ‘frequency’ and ‘organizational focal points’.

This simply means that the width of a layer in the pyramid indicates how much of the organization’s activity is spent in that layer (frequency) and how many ‘focal points’ exist in the layer.

If the layer is wide, it means that the focus of the organization is spread thin. It also means that more time and effort is spent in that layer than is spent in narrower layers.

In other words, the widest layer, tasks, has the highest freqency and most dispursed focus. The task layer is where the organization spreads out to get things done, and it is where most of the time is spent.

On the Y axis, I am showing ‘importance.’ This one is more obvious and easier to understand. Layers at the top of the pyramid have more importance than layers at the bottom in terms of moving the company forward.

Now take a look a the four-quadrant graph (there *must* be a name for this type of graph). You can see that the X and Y axes are still the same, but the data is being shown differently.

In the upper left corner, is the Low-Frequency/Sharp-Focus/High-Importance quadrant. Vision and strategies belong in this quadrant.

In the lower right corner, is the High-Frequency/Dispursed-Focus/Low-Importance quadrant. You can see where Projects and Tasks land in this quadrant.

Now, keep this in mind, it is extremely difficult to keep an organization focused on driving toward a unified vision. It is so easy to get lost on the morass of daily tasks that vision seldom comes to mind.

The only way to ensure that your vision becomes reality is to carefully craft your strategies — making sure that they serve your vision.

Then you must select projects that help you accomplish your strategies. After that, everything pretty much falls into place. Tasks support projects, which support strategies, which support the vision.

So now we see where strategies fit within the grand scheme of things.

But we haven’t really defined what a strategy is.

Strategies are simply the methods you expect to use to help your business attain it’s vision.

Now, Wikipedia might disagree with that definition. It’s kind of my own take on what a stategy is and it works for me, so I’m not really looking for someone elses definition.

Tasks are important, but only if they are the right tasks.

I know, from experience, that the worst thing a business can do is focus on the wrong tasks. It’s where you burn most of your time and resources.

In order to be successful, every business needs to make sure that their tasks are serving the right projects, which are serving the right strategies, which are *all* serving the vision.

So what I hope to come out of this exercise with is a traffic strategy that serves my vision for Daily Marketing Ace and a project or two that will help me accomplish that strategy.

So where do we start? With the vision of course. Without a clear vision, there can be no pyramid, just a blunt blob that will not help anyone.

In my next post, I’ll share my vision for Daily Marketing Ace with you. And, maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to sink our teeth into a strategy.