Traffic Numbers Feed Your Ego Not Your Bank Account

For years, I’ve come across countless website owners that get consumed by the almighty traffic stats. For many clueless individuals, daily traffic stats become a badge of merit. Don’t be like the largely unsuccessful masses. Focus your time on the right kind of traffic–targeted.

Imagine one day you are walking down the street. You are a typical person who lives in an apartment in the city. As you are walking, a man approaches and offers to show you a way to improve the quality of your front lawn. The problem is you don’t have a yard.

Receiving unqualified traffic is the same thing. Would it matter if that man asked 1,000,000 people just like you? Of course not. They all live in apartments in the city and don’t have yards.

Profit Through Precision

It’s not the traffic quantity that matters; it’s the quality. Spend your time focusing on bringing in traffic from targeted avenues instead of simply yelling about your site in the middle of the street, and hoping someone is interested in your offer.

Large quantities of non-targeted traffic will simply eat up bandwidth. It will also eat up advertising budget—if you are paying by the click—when semi-curious people click over to your site only to leave a moment later.

Apples and Oranges

One problem I see with many business owners is their inability to target properly. I’ll give you a good example. Let’s imagine that you own a video game website. What type of sources would you target?

Often, business owners will go with the apples to apples approach and stop. They’ll only look for other video game sources to get traffic from. But you are smarter. You will also look for the oranges—the related stuff.

To do this, you want to think about your target market. What’s your visitor like? What are his/her interests? Once you have those, expand your marketing efforts to these areas. Don’t settle for just apples when there’s a whole basket of fruit out there for you.

Spending Time Where Time Is Best Spent

Yes, it’s okay to do some things to get free generalized traffic, but you shouldn’t spend great effort on it. Run your tests to find out where valuable visitors are coming from. Once you pinpoint great sources of traffic, spend your time and/or money improving those efforts.

Getting traffic, such as generally worthless traffic from some social sites, is easy. Building a solid daily flow of valuable visitors is a more difficult—but possible—task.