Which is important for a beginner IM, Branding or Traffic?

Hey Jude,

Welcome to IM world

About what to do when you first dive IM, if I am going to answer specifically your question then I am going to pick Traffic.

Because simply, without traffic you can't create a brand or make money or do anything.

About how to get traffic, well you got paid option and free option.

Paid option: PPC (Pay Per Click), Buying Banners on forums, blogs and websites or outsourcing people to do the free option for you (Blog commenting, Forum posting, Articles submission, ... etc)

Free Option: Article Submission, Social Bookmarking, Blog Commenting, Forum Posting, ... etc.

My recommendation if you are a well-funded warrior is to go into the "Paid Option".

It gets you results, FAST.

Let me know if you want more help and welcome to IM again.

Good Luck,
Mohamed

I say if you are new, instead of choosing any of that, find someone who is looking for JV (Joint Venture) and if that person has a big list and likes your product or service they will promote it... that's what I did with my WSO... I am not an internet marketer, but found a guy to JV with me and off we went!

I would say that traffic is important for the beginner in IM. This is because of the fact that the beginner would gradually derive confidence from traffic building up on his site.

I don't think there is "more" importent...if you are selling your service or a products you own you will need to have a brand; unless your product is really unique and solve a big problem it will be very hard to sell it without being a "someone" (=branding), even if you will have traffic.
Now, without traffic you can't show the "world" your service/product, so of course you need to figure out how to get traffic.
Work on both, set a time in your daily plan for branding and a time for traffic getting methods etc.

I say the most important thing is to focus on one method and stick at it for one month. Get your squeeze page, sales funnel set up...then keep driving and driving and driving traffic to it. Don't worry about getting everything perfect. Just Go For It.

I'm going to be a contrarian and say branding.

Until you've decided exactly what your business is, how you want to represent yourself, and so on, your traffic will often be one-offs.

You (or at least your website) won't be memorable for people to return to, over and over again. All of your efforts will focus on driving fresh traffic to your site. That's a time sink, and a sad waste of resources.

Start with your own interests. Why does that niche interest you? What are your strongest opinions about that niche, and how do you want to convey them?

Your site should provide a strong visual impression as soon as visitors arrive. It should convey your niche but also your individual slant (or sub-niche) on the topic.

Like everything about your website, it should be memorable.

Follow that with articles that have a clear "voice" to reinforce your branding.

Frankly, the only way to be memorable is to work on your branding from the beginning.

You'll find great advice about branding from a variety of pros, from Seth Godin to Tiffany Dow, and from Kevin Riley to Simon Greenhalgh (Linkwhizz). Most of them will stress the importance of establishing yourself as a personality with specific views and style.

Traffic is important. In fact, it's vital. However, my advice is to establish yourself with branding first, so your traffic converts to return visitors, from the beginning.

Traffic is the number one if you want to make money, however if your opt-in page sucks then all that traffic will be going to waste, My advice to you is to play around testing your opt-in pages before driving tons of traffic and effort,

The best way to do this is to experiment with different opt-ins/squeeze pages by using cheap traffic sources. There is a wso in the wso forum which gives you ten mega cheap traffic sources. These may be considered junk traffic (which I wouldnt entirely disagree with) but its a great way to do a bit of testing without spending tons. Check it out, have a play around and spend a good month or so doing small campaigns and tweaking as you go along! this way will give you an idea of how well your page will convert! once you've done that then YES its all about traffic!!!

Brand itself won't do you any good without traffic and you can build brand without traffic, so Yes traffic is most important.

Not much I can add to the good advice the Warriors have already given you except.

Welcome to the Warrior Forum Jude!!

If you do not have much budget, it is better to get some traffic and make some money to cover the daily costs. then go for the branding. This works for most IMer.

Hi Jude, welcome to IM. I am rather new too. I have done quite a lot of readings on IM and attended a few courses. Overall, I would summarize that both are important. Driving traffic is always key as you will need traffic to make a sale. But you will definitely need branding so that you make an impression to your list/readers/prospects. So get traffic then continue to build branding But one important takeaway, focus and be consistent and what we do, don't give up.

Traffic is most important. Solve all cash flow problems and automate it... then focus on becoming a world class expert and branding yourself.