This is a follow-up to my last post that was a rant on all of those “Get More Traffic Today!” advertisements you see out there. (You can see that post here: Get Less Traffic Now!).
What I’m going to explain is that what you really want is more targeted traffic. Now, sometimes when you work toward more targeted traffic, you get discouraged because you are getting less traffic. You start to think that you are doing something wrong, and then all of the sudden you realize that your bottom line just tripled.
We all get caught up in the traffic fever at one time or another. We post a comment on a comment board and get 200 hits that day and think: “If I could just do that everyday, I’d be rich!”. Well, the problem is that not all traffic is created equal. Getting 200 targeted prospects from a mention in an industry magazine is totally different than getting 200 browsers coming by your site because they liked your comment on how great Quantum Leap was as a show. But when your analytics software tells you that you got 400 hits that day, all because of a comment, you can forget simple principles like that.
One of my most profitable investment websites is Fulltimer Blog. This site is for people who live Fulltime in an RV and travel around. This is a very small group of people, and the site has little pizzazz. It consistently brings in money, every month, despite what I do. The traffic to this site is a trickle… usually only 10-15 people a day. When I first started working with this site, I tried a bunch of methods to get traffic to the site… sometimes bringing in 100 people a day, sometimes 20, sometimes 300. But, over time, I realized the the same number of products sold either way. The same 2 or 3 people that came to the site were interested in buying an ebook or membership. They were the right traffic I was after. Everybody else was just wasting their time, because they weren’t interested in what the website sold, so I stopped working to get those hits.
I remembered that it was my bottom line that I wanted to see improve, not nessesarily the number of hits on my site or the number of subscribers to my email.
In the next post, I’ll explain how to start finding your right traffic by doing keyword research. Keyword research is just going through the Google database to find out what your searchers type in to find what you offer. There is usually a pretty big disconnect between the words you use to describe what you have, and the words your clients use to ask for what you have. Bridging that gap is what Keyword Research is all about.
And remember that if this interests you, you can always contact me for Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and a myriad of other Web services. If you live in or around Columbus, Ohio, we can sit down for a face-to-face. How many people can offer that?
-Brad
A Rant:
Does an advertisement like “Get More Traffic NOW” sound familiar? Doesn’t everybody just LOVE the idea of more, more, more traffic? Jeez, wouldn’t everything just be great if there was MORE traffic to your website?
Let me tell you something: More doesn’t cut it.
I don’t mean to be the guy to spoil the “More Traffic Party”, but it’s not more traffic that you want. It’s the RIGHT traffic you want.
You don’t see restaurant owners going out begging for just anybody to be in their restaurant… they aren’t looking for people just milling around with no money getting the rugs all dirty and getting in the way of the servers and what not. A restaurant wants the RIGHT kind of traffic too, in this case someone who is a)hungry and b)willing to pay what it costs to eat there. The 85% of the population who is either not hungry or has insufficient funds isn’t invited. That’s how you should be thinking about your website too.
What is the right traffic? Well it depends on your site, but usually the right traffic is someone who wants to buy your product, will click on an ad, or wants to hire you for a service. Too many webmasters are out there working for and paying for traffic that’s getting them NOWHERE.
How do you decide what traffic is the RIGHT traffic for your website? Well, that’s a good question, and one that doesn’t get a lot of attention sometimes. And it just so happens to be one of the best questions you can ask yourself.
And, it’s also a big enough question to justify an entirely new post. So until then, just remember that it’s not MORE you want, but the RIGHT traffic.
(The follow-up to this post is the first post in the How to Find the Right Traffic to your Website series. Click here to see it.)
-Brad
Use this tool to check and see if the domain name for your business, organization, or just the domain name you’ve always thought would be cool or memorable is available.
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Thanks for coming by my site. I was happy to take a look at (website).com and see what types of things could be done to improve your traffic.
Being that there are two ways to get traffic- paid and unpaid- I think a good idea is to take a balanced approach to both. From your email, I suspect that you are working with Google Adwords and having poor results. Adwords is a complicated system to operate correctly and I usually suggest you hire a PPC (pay per click) manager to manage your account along with his hundreds of other clients. It’s cost effective and they use special strategies to get the lowest prices. I am not a PPC manager, but I could lead you in the direction of some good ones.
My specialty, however, is getting Organic or Search Engine (free) traffic to your site. From that perspective there are a number of things you could do to drastically improve your site. I don’t think that Yahoo Stores is making the most of your content, and there are a bunch of things that could be changed to make overnight results. For instance:
-Title Tags that are based on Keyword Research… For instance, the title page of one of the pages on the site is “$400 – $600″, and I would suggest making that something more along the lines of “Men’s and Women’s Wedding Rings priced between $400 – $600″. Doing this with each page will make a drastic difference.
-You can purchase links from high ranking sites that will pass some of their ranking and traffic to you
-Each page should have a unique meta-description
-Pages with duplicate content shouldn’t be indexed (they can be clocked with a robots.txt file)
-Javascript and Tables should be used at a minimum
-You could start a related Blog on the site which has articles on Wedding Rings, wedding planning, and the like that could draw in more organic traffic. These articles can come from free sources or could be written by you or a copywriter.
That is a bit of what I would start with to get your site showing up in organic results at a much higher rate.
I do offer an Internet Marketing Consultation that will give you an outline of how to attack an SEO campaign as well as Usability of your site (how many people drop out of the purchase because they get confused with the shopping cart?) and ways to expand your site’s ability to generate revenue for you. It’s a very in-depth report that I’ll give you and it costs $99. It should cost a lot more, but my hope is that you’ll hire me to do the work because you’ll be impressed. However, it will be complete enough that you could do the work yourself if you have specific knowledge or you could hand the plan over to another developer and they could follow it like a blueprint.
Please feel free to email me or if you want to chat, I’d be happy to talk with you on the phone also.
Gratefully,
Brad Spencer
Linkbaiting is the newest fad. Pretty much it’s another word for creating a great article that gets a lot of links.
Since it’s been so popular lately, I’ve decided to give it a go and see how it works.
Since domaining is coming into popularity and I’ve got a bit of experience in that area, I do a linkbait article on how to become a domainer.
You can check it out by clicking here: The Penguin Guide to Domaining.
-Brad
My name is Brad and I love to help people drive traffic and make great blogs. Thanks for coming by. If you like what you see here then check me out on 
