One thing you have to say about blogging is that it’s a great way of generating traffic to your website. You write a blog post and promote it a bit. Your posts goes out to your feed subscribers and can gets picked up by social services. With a little effort, your blog can generate gobs more traffic for your website than your old, static website ever could.
As a blogger, you learn pretty quick how to look at your traffic stats. You see that your traffic goes up the days you write and down the days you don’t. You look at your referring sites regularly to see where all the traffic is coming from and spend more time on the sites that are driving you the most traffic. And hitting the motherload of website traffic is getting to the front page of Digg, Reddit or del.icio.us.
But do your traffic stats mislead you? Is your goal just to get gobs and gobs of traffic to your website?
Maybe it is. If you’re blogging for fun, to make a few bucks on the side or using your blog to sell ad space and affiliate products, it may just be about generating as much traffic as you can.
But if you own a business where you only get paid when you’re clients are buying your service, having tons of traffic may completely mislead you.
Website traffic is great, don’t get me wrong. And it’s certainly an important part of your business strategy on the web. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be teaching a teleclass called 147 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website (it’s on Nov 25, and I believe there’s still seats left).
Yet you want to be careful about evaluating the health of your web marketing by only looking at how many visitors and page views your site is getting. You need to also compare your overall traffic stats with stats on solid lead generation, prospecting, conversion and sales.
You can do this pretty simply by tracking all contacts people make with you through your site in a specific period of time - say, a month. An RSS subscription and a comment is a contact. You could consider those soft leads. A newsletter signup is a firmer lead, because now your visitor has given you something of theirs - so track that. And obviously phone calls, emails and form submissions from your website are solid leads also, so track the number of those each month.
Then, you want to follow through with how each of those interactions develop. Do any of your commenters, for instance, contact you directly about your services? Do they then convert into paying clients? The same goes for your newsletter list, phone calls, email and form submissions - any of the ways that people can contact you directly. Do these generate sales?
If they do, it means your website traffic is serving your business. If not, then you need to make some adjustments as to who you’re targeting in your blog posts. For instance, let’s say you’re a life coach and you’re using your blog to promote your coaching services. Inevitably some of your readers will be other life coaches - that’s actually a good thing. But a good portion of your readers need to be potential clients as well. If you’re only getting other life coaches to read you blog, it’s unlikely you’re going to convert many clients. This means, you’d want to look at how you can adjust your content and your promotional efforts to reach your market, rather than your peers.
Generating huge amounts of traffic can be compared to creating a massive newsletter list. If you have a business, it doesn’t really matter how many people you have on your list. What matters is how many of the people on your list will buy your services.
So, how are you using your blog to promote your business? Is it working? If so, why. And if no, what’s one thing you can change to make it work better?
And maybe the most interesting question of all…are you currently, or have you in the past, been too focused on generating as much traffic as you can without really caring about how it affects your bottom line?
Let’s talk about it.
And if you would like to find more ways to generate traffic - specifically traffic that increase your bottom line, take a look at my upcoming teleclass: 147 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website.
(note: image from c0ntr0 on Flickr, 
some rights reserved)
My name is Dawud Miracle and I'm a
67 responses so far ↓
Excellent post Dawud, I heartily agree that traffic and visitors isn’t a gauge to how successful you are but rather the conversion rate in which you make business from that traffic.
In B2B companies like the one I work for, the website and blog can be effective in a completely different part of the business process as the chances of making a new customer from a cold web visitor is so much slimmer due to the complex nature of our business. However, the blog and website will almost always be visited by potential customers at some point or other for information gathering etc. therefore it is valuable in that respect to re-enforce our message. Our traffic is less but it achieves more.
Nesh,
I think there’s something to be said about less, but more qualified traffic. I keep having to instruct the bloggers I work with that your blog is not a business model. The blog is a marketing platform; a lead generator.
Many ‘probloggers’ don’t understand that their business model is selling ad space or affiliate products. If they focus on it from that perspective, they’d find clearer success.
Sorry, off on a tangent. But it’s true, a website should be part of an overall marketing strategy. That’s why I’ve never considered myself an internet marketer. I’m a business advisor who just happens to know a ton about using the internet to grow business. But I focus on business growth, not internet growth. If clients select to use the internet to grow, great. But they should focus on growing their overall business and clarifying their business model.
Thoughts?
To follow your tangent, I would have to concur. I wrote an article in May this year talking about the “symbiosis of offline and online marketing” to this very effect.
You are spot on with the ‘problogger’ business model which does perform well in the same way that TV works by selling ad time. A lot of businesses can’t operate like that because their business isn’t the right niche or they have limited time to spend online and of course any advertising they display will be for their competitors.
I’m a firm advocate for blogging for business but I am realistic to expect that directly it won’t achieve sales in certain types of business. Unfortunately, that is why so many businesses don’t blog - because they don’t see the return on investment.
like a breath of fresh air…..finally some sense around monitoring numbers of people and engagement and business in the social media space.
thankyou
Mike Ashworth
Marketing Coach and Consultant
Brighton and Hove, Sussex, UK
Boosting Sales for Small and Medium Sized Businesses by
helping them find, attract and keep Customers.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeashworth
http://MichaelAshworth.wordpress.com
My thought is that I don’t care too much about the traffic as long as most of the visitors gets the sales
Getting the traffic if the easy part. The hard part is converting them. I look forward to hearing more from you on this topic.
I couldn’t agree anymore, Ive see instances where people get crazy amounts of traffic but suffer from a very low conversion rate. All that really matters is that closing percentage.
Long Island Web Designer - Bowen Media
Nice post! Generating traffic and marketing your business really needs a lot of effort to do. And may blogger misled on how to do those things, maybe because they really don’t know what to target and how to market their business.
I have a decent amount of traffic on one of my sites, but am yet to make a sale on it. So my conversion rate is “a tad low.” Thanks for the article, I agree with you.
To be honest, I once did care about the website traffic, as I thought more visitor will be meant more potential buyers…
However, after the day went by, I realized that it’s not about the traffic, but all about the sales conversion!
Soo, that means that the traffic quality matter a lot.
It’s necessary to remember about SEO and SEM techniques on your blogs. Bigger amount of backlinks can be reached not just from changing links; there are several other important ways.
in my opinion a one site for need trafic lots of steps
1-unique site links
2-unique content links
3-internal links
4-external links
5-SEO
6-Advertisement
For me the more traffic we get the higher conversions we get. I want as much traffic as possible. The best kind of traffic though is the targeted traffic for those actively searching out our product.
Traffic is not everything, but everything is need traffic :D. From my blogging experience, it’s, without any doubts, very important to keep the quality of our posting. But, if we intent to grab some money, we must keep our traffic high…
In theory, increasing the traffic on a blog or website and considering the conversion rate as a constant, will increase the conversions right?
But I agree, traffic alone as a metric could be misleading
Cash is king. At the end of the day the conversion is all that matters. Personally I’d prefer to have only one person a day on my wesite if I could get the conversion.
“I think there’s something to be said about less, but more qualified traffic. I keep having to instruct the bloggers I work with that your blog is not a business model. The blog is a marketing platform; a lead generator.”
+1 - a blog is an enabler, not an end in itself.
I think that traffic is good which brings you good conversion rate and will be helpful in business market.
Thankfully there are many tools out there that can assist you in getting more specific information about your traffic. All you have to do is dig a little deeper.
I allways thought it was just about driving tons of visitors to my website what i needed to do.
Thanks for the info.
Well, one can only complain about the quality of traffic when he actually does have traffic. Conversion is the least of my worries now trying to build any kind of traffic going.
Getting the traffic is the easy part. The hard part is converting them. I’m looking forward to hear more from you on this topic.
Yes I agree, anyone can drive tons of traffic, but is it just useless traffic that will take up your bandwidth?
I do have a love-hate relationships with stats. It’s so important to look at how your traffic is converting and test how you can improve that conversions. But at the same time I don’t want to just look at my numbers to look at them. I know when I have a new site (whether for fun or profit) I spend too much time looking at my numbers and seeing if I’m ranking in the search engines. The first few weeks I should focus more on just providing unique and fresh content.
I think the most important is the content. When the content is truly attractive, naturally more people will drop by and increase page rank. At the same time, we can work on the SEO part and then the number we see will be what we want to see.
Well, you are not going to get much conversion unless you appear trustworthy. Often that comes from building relationships, or having a really good website.
When I was new to blogging, I used to spend a lot of time just to improve the traffic to my blogs. And as you mentioned here, it came to no use when it came to business. Its a very good idea to target for selective traffic rather than random ones. Thanks a lot for the useful information!
I also think it’s better to try and attract traffic that is long-lasting. Random visitors that check out 1 page for 1 visit and never come back, seem practically useless to me.
I wish that blogs I advertised on were interested in getting more viewers to their blogs!
Mmmm - creating a blog is a lot of work. Yes - it looks like a great way to drive traffic.
I think having a product set up first is an ideal way to make sure you are ready to sell after you have set up your blog.
Getting free website traffic is another story all together. You need to spend a lot of time generating backlinks and this takes a lot of time.
There are plenty of free ways to get traffic. However, most of them do not deliver very well at all.
I’m not concerned with traffic as such - traffic doen’t earn you money. It’s sales that’s important. Yes, conversion rates and traffic contribute but it’s good traffic I want.
Yes a lot of traffic is useless I would rather have 10 visits a day that convert that 1000 visits that do not
I reckon blogging is a bit different thing and the kind of visitors it brings, might not be right for the main website. I have a website and a blog too but the blog visitors are merely there to read some information, they do not bother ordering something of my site
If you’re speaking about website at all than traffic numbers could matter something. But speaking about the blog I don’t pay too much attention to traffic stats.
The main idea of a blog is to create a community. I don’t need traffic at all if it doesn’t converting into community.
Agreed. I have personal experience in jumping into driving traffic to a site without any clear cut strategy for what to do with the traffic. Once we got clear on a strategy on how to convert leads and then executed that strategy, we felt better about driving more traffic to the site.
The biggest mistake that people make is trying to get massive amounts of traffic to their website. This is essentially useless!
Like I always say, it is better to have 100 quality visitors who are genuinely interested in what you are talking about, rather than 10,000 people who are simply being forced to view your website - like in a traffic exchange, or something of the sort.
Great post Dawud, gotta say here that the top 10 list (of your previous post)did it for me. A month ago I made a Top 10 ways to motivate geeks list and it got a little attention from reddit and digg. I didn’t think much of it until lifehacker got ahold of it and posted on it. The last 3 days I’ve been getting 100 times my normal traffic after reaching del.ico.us popular and a few dozen additional link-ups. It’s not really slowing down that much either.view my serviced offices traffic chart here.
I just created it on a whim. It wasn’t really something I figured would do much, but the top 10 list did far more than I ever expected it to do.
Measurement/metrics is key for ROI.
> “your website traffic is serving your business”
That’s really the key, I bet most business owners would rather have 5 visitors that turn into customers than 1000 that only turn into 1. I wrote that before seeing Rakeback’s comment above
Anyway, this is one of the reasons I put together a case study walking through how a web visitor becomes a lead.
You can only improve what you can see and measure, and I wanted to illustrate visually how the process works. Hope it’s helpful.
I agree with you that you want qualified traffic to your website but to me it seems that the more the better.
Building targeted traffic is the key to success for any commercial website. If you bring in lots of targeted traffic and your site is user friendly with good calls to action, you will get conversions. Directory One began using a blog to promote its website and attract business some time ago. People searching for updated information on SEO, SEM, website design, brand building and more were able to find that information through the blog posts. They also connected with a company who would provide the services for them. After testing the blog’s success, D1 started encouraging clients to use them. It works!
Nice ideas. This should keep more people busy working on their sites now knowing things like this happen.
You’re right. Blogging now is one step to instant fame. That’s why more bloggers are opening their doors so it may generate traffic that surely lead not only fame but money, of course.
Yes you are spot on there..it’s important for every Social marketing guy to know this.Try convincing your visitors to come back for your blog than by offering valuable content
There are so many facets of marketing your product service or business. Blogging and the traffic it generates is wonderful, but it does not mean that the stop doing many of the tried and true business practices that sound businesses are built on. Your post makes that point. I look forward to learning more.
i agree with most people traffic is alot easier to get than getting traffic that converts. do you have any tips on how to get your traffic to convert?
I think one of the most important thinks is to look at certain metrics. I personally like to look at the clicks-to-conversions ratio, or in other words how many clicks or how many visits to make a sale.
Great point. The other thing to consider though is that Google likes fresh, new content, and you can dominate the search engines with lots of content (another thing Google likes). So if you want free traffic, blogging is a great long-term strategy to build your buiness in the backend.
Great post. Even though I blog for fun mainly, I like to keep eye on the stats. However, I know sites with a lot better Alexa ranking for example, than mine, who get a fraction of the comments I get. (Not that I got a lot.) There are so many different things to take into account, and at least to me it’s not about how many people visit your site, it’s about what kind of people visit my site.
Getting traffic is not a big deal now because we can do it very easily but it is really difficult to turn all that traffic to something productive. To be very true, I don’t like loads and loads of traffic just to get your bandwidth just eaten. I’ll try my best to drive a little but productive traffic.
I think less traffic but of a higher quality is better than a lot of random traffic. Although having a blog making huge amounts of traffic no matter how random the traffic, is not a bad thing at all in my opinion.
I think targetted traffic is always better than non targetted.
However, when strating a new site I like to get as much traffic as possible at first, then worry about targetting properly.
Maybe that is backwards, but it has been the most successful for me.
this is entirely true. even if you only have a blog and no website it brings major traffic to itself
To follow your tangent, I would have to concur. I wrote an article in May this year talking about the “symbiosis of offline and online marketing” to this very effect.
You are spot on with the ‘problogger’ business model which does perform well in the same way that TV works by selling ad time. A lot of businesses can’t operate like that because their business isn’t the right niche or they have limited time to spend online and of course any advertising they display will be for their competitors.
I’m a firm advocate for blogging for business but I am realistic to expect that directly it won’t achieve sales in certain types of business. Unfortunately, that is why so many businesses don’t blog - because they don’t see the return on investment.
I dont think it works.
Its all about conv not about traffic. If i had 300 people a day but no one bought anything theres no point of have that traffic.
I really think it depends on the purpose of your website. For example, if the purpose of your website is strictly for sells; then, you want meaningful traffic that stays on your website for extended period of time (time will vary depending on the product). With this said, part of marketing is also branding. If your website is well done, then a quick click may attract future clients at a later date because they remember your “brand”.
I have to admit that I have been focusing a lot on the pure traffic generation and not so much on the conversion part.
Now I am seeing enough traffic to start testing conversions.
So even though conversions are the most important thing as it puts money in your pocket you can really test and tweak them without the traffic. My advice would always be to start by getting some traffic and then test conversions. It can’t work the other way around
One thing I’ve never been clear on, when you view your traffic stats, do web crawlers get counted in there as well? Reason I ask is I use the stats from my web hosting company and stats from Statcounter, and the two are way off from each other in terms of traffic to my site.
Could it be one is counting the webcrawlers that visit my site and the other is counting only true visitors?
Great article, In few wortds its :
Big traffic and no conersion = No go
Thats why stumble upon traffic sucks.
if traffic converts then it is good for a site but if it does not then it wont help in long run
Great article and definitely on a touchy subject for many. The whole traffic thing has to be looked at for what you say, what it really gets you in the end. All the social media connections and traffic that they can generate will be useful only if you make something of it. Single page visitors don’t really help for anything and generally add more overhead to your site in tracking, hosting, and sometimes one off comments or spam. However, they can find new readers, clients, buyers so they certainly have their place.
I think you need to use both but really be careful not to let the traffic guide your site. You need to continually deliver the value and content it is intended for.
Not all traffic is good traffic.
Good qualified traffic is good ‘food’ for your site, but the other like junk food
that will make your site sick 