Traffic
Aus Salespoint
It seems to be in vogue these days to downplay the importance of web users. It's popular (and perfectly valid) to say things like: "Traffic is worthless if you don't turn it into money."Excellent point, but this assumes that you actually have some traffic to begin with. Each step of the Internet Marketing Process is not just important - it's required for success. So, let's focus today on getting visitors to your site, and remember:A. Getting traffic to your site is like putting gas in your car. You can have a great engine, but it won't go anywhere without the gas. Likewise, you can have a perfect sales letter - but without traffic, it's just pretty to look at.B. The highest traffic sites of the world do not just get a little more traffic than the next guy - they get exponentially more traffic than the next guy. For example, according to Media Metrix, AOL's network weighed in at #1, getting more traffic than any other site in the world in April of 2001. Amazon was ranked #10. Both are top ten sites... And the difference? AOL had 89,000,000 visitors that month and Amazon had 19,000,000. That's a whopping difference of 70,000,000 visitors between the #1 site and the #10 site.Interestingly, the higher up the ranks you go, the greater the gap between each site.So, what's the difference? Why is it that the better a site gets, the further behind it leaves its closest competitor? Here are their secrets:1. They Set Up "Multiple Streams of Traffic"Back in 1995 I observed an interesting phenomenon. I found that the likelihood of someone responding to your website was highly dependent on the path they took to get there.People may ask you "what is the conversion rate of your website," but that is really an irrelevant question. Conversion rates are meaningless unless they take into consideration how someone gets to your website. (Test this yourself and you'll find it to be true.)So, I coined the phrase "All Clicks are Not Created Equal." For example, traffic from a site recommending your product is more likely to generate a sale than traffic from a site criticizing your product. That's an extreme example, but you get the point, right?When people discover this, their natural tendency is to start getting picky about how they get their traffic. Why waste your time on traffic that won't generate a sale, right?If you're paying for advertising, this makes perfect sense. However, many people mistakenly throw away traffic from free sources as a result.High traffic sites never throw away traffic and constantly endeavor to set up new traffic streams.Let's take the worst possible traffic source imaginable: FFA pages. Traffic from FFA ads is extremely sparse. To make matters worse, this traffic is rarely the source of an immediate sale. Very little amounts of the lowest quality traffic in the world - yep, I think that qualifies it as the worst possible traffic source
