Website Traffic: Not All Visitors are Equal
People talk incessantly about - gaining more website traffic - but they rarely mention that a site really needs targeted website traffic. The only way to have a successful site is to court targeted website traffic — or people who keep coming back to your site, visiting one page after another.
Your site might be pretty and interesting, but the information is useless unless the information is useful to the person reading it. For example: when you browse a book at Amazon.com, you see a list of other books people have bought in that same category. From that list, you might decide to buy again — you’ve just been targeted.
Targeted website traffic and guaranteed traffic are not the same thing. You don’t want to attract just anybody and everybody to your site. You want a specific client — one that will benefit from your information or product, ultimately becoming a loyal customer.
Although they don’t really hurt anything by being there, you don’t want to waste time courting them, just hoping they will like what they see and become a fan or a customer. It is up to you to take advantage of all the marketing knowledge out there, just waiting for you use.
One good way to get targeted website traffic is to use keywords. Think of the person you want on your site. When he or she is looking up something on the internet, the person uses particular words to do that, right? If they need fuzzy dice to hang from their rearview window, they will type certain things into the search engine in order to find those fuzzy dice.
This is why you’ll often hear internet marketers talking about ‘getting inside the head of the prospect’. What would they type into a search engine in order to find fuzzy dice? Would it be “car dice”, “furry dice”, “soft hanging dice”? Or some other variation that you’ve never thought of? Picking the right keywords is about improving your chances of success.
So what else are you selling along with your fuzzy hanging rearview mirror car dice? You can’t get targeted website traffic if you don’t know who you’re targeting, so figure out just what kind of site you have. Should car dice should be sold at a car accessories site, a weird gifts site, or a kitsch site? They should be sold on a site that has other merchandise that will appeal to the fuzzy dice people-like fuzzy steering wheel covers, or even animal print clothing, if it’s a retro shop. That approach will get you more website traffic.
Targeted website traffic is like playing the stock market — you can make predictions based on careful research, but you will never know exactly whether your predictions will translate into sales. All you can do is increase the odds of driving more website traffic to your site through targeting your audience.