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 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website.
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: 220 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website.
(note: image from c0ntr0 on Flickr, 
some rights reserved)
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes I agree, anyone can drive tons of traffic, but is it just useless traffic that will take up your bandwidth?
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 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 🙁
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.
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.
Yes a lot of traffic is useless I would rather have 10 visits a day that convert that 1000 visits that do not 🙂
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
So by the sound of it, there isn’t such a thing as BAD traffic (i.e. with a negative value), but there’s lots of traffic that isn’t worth putting in time and effort for. A matter of plotting it on the effort-to-reward graph and adjusting your future efforts accordingly.
I know that good qualified traffic which brings you good conversion rate and will be helpful in business market.I think targetted traffic is always better than non targetted.
One thing that annoys us is when someone quotes number of hits instead of visits. It takes some time to explain that hits does not equal “good”.
It can be as banale as someone hotlinking an image from your site.
I don’t earn real big from my blogs,but at the beginning I was happy at least to look at the stats and loved to see traffic, but later I realize that traffic has to convert to customers or it has no use, but then AdSense is a great way to earn some bucks if you have loads of traffic.
I get traffic, but it’s due to entrecard.
That’s a whole other topic however. I use it because my blog is no new.
Excellent post. I think one idea to make sure that some of your readers (i.e. traffic) are potential customers is to provide information or offer a solution that fulfills a need. For example, if you have a blog about affiliate marketing, you can offer a product or service that is useful to other affiliate marketers (therefore they will pay for it). But do more than simply post a banner – evaluate the product or service, review it and point out positives and negatives, explain how the product has helped you etc.
Then, when such a post is found by someone via the SEs, this will already be a pre-qualified lead. It’s then up to your promotional skill to complete the sale.
Excellent blog, by the way!
You blog layout is also very nice, and i think that means something for potiential clients as well.
As for traffic, well traffic has the potiential to “sell”, and it dosn’t matter much if this is through advertising, or through products you sell on your website.
It would however be rather stupid to rely on advertising alone, because then you just ain’t getting the full earnings potiential.
I wish I got more traffic. It just doesn’t work out for me
It’s the relationship building and high quality content that help make blogs a good traffic generator.
Write any good material and frequently ping the RSS and it always seems to help.
But your right, few are comparing the numbers to their lead/sale conversion of that traffic. Very important.
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 agree with what everyone seems to have said so far. Good article and good sentiment. I would rather have devoted readers based on content than those that just flit through and don’t decide to stay.
very interesting it does make a lot of sense though that you brought this to my attention and now that i think of it i’m going to have to put this into consideration
Actually I have always been using awsats, and it always showed very accurately.
I agreed with my previous comment that awsats shows a pretty accurate stats. But I think it’s also a good idea to keep additional stats, in that case wp is another nice choice. Thanks for sharing this nice article. Thumbs up!
So many people get caught up with page rank, link build and traffic that they miss the obective. You have to make money. Forget about SEO…just get out their and sell!!
I find this article informative…thank you for clearing things up regarding about SEO. :)I wish I could start a blog,this post helps me
What about monetizing your blog instead of using it to drive traffic to another website. It seems much simpler to me.
Interesting point of view.It didn’t occur to me that the conversion rate might not be high even when there are lots of traffic to your blog.Point noted.Thanks
You should monetize your blog and put effort into the posts so you can drive traffic (quality traffic) to your site on a daily.
To my mind, blogs generate a huge traffic to your site. Monetizing will not give you such amount of money as selling will.
Well, I am doing all my efforts and time just to increase my traffics. I hope with this, I could drive more traffic to my site.
After working on over 20 ecommerce sites as well as SEO’ing them (for the same company) I realise that ppl that tell you they fully understand Google SEO clearly dont.
We now strongly belive that Google has variables within their PageRank algorythm in order to confuse people, as a few of our sites are EXACTLY the same (ish:) however come up in completely different places within Google SERPs.
Also when we look at how and when google spiders this seems to be abigious and they seems to be clearly no logic.
I’ve seen some sites, mainly e-commerce, that receive thousands of visitors but less then 1% turnover. In essence, having traffic is good but with no profit it’s basically useless.
Excellent post Dawud and thank you! 🙂
-AS
It’s very important targeted traffc! It can to be only some unique visits, but highly targeted!
Hey Dawud, another great post 🙂 And its so true, there is no point in getting traffic, unless you can get something out of them (if your running a business anyway, unless your just nice). I run a forum (www.australiaworks.com.au), during the night when the Americans are on, we would constantly get 50-100 guests, with only 2-3 users, and I wake up in the morning with new users =(
Blogging should really provide the opportunity to drive targeted traffic to your website. Analyse the key words that are driving people to the site and continue to manage your posts to cultivate the propects.
Great article. More web traffic is always a good thing, but if you really looking to make money from your blog, looking at how much of the web traffic actually you can convert is more important. Some places like Digg.com is a great source of traffic if used correctly but the traffic from those sources doesn’t convert well and hence it wouldn’t be wrong to term that kind of traffic as worthless. The quality of the traffic matters more than the quantity.
Traffic matters with content, thou I agree with the part of marketing to create a traffic. Here I just follow the twitter, where I came to know how good the people are, to use the keyword for specified search and the resultant of it brings traffic to twitter and eventually to our link.
Traffic or no traffic if your blog is about generic news and without a unique writing style then your bounce rate will be very high and your traffic will be your enemy at the end of the day. This is also very important if you rely on adsense to earn some money
I completely agree, having lots of traffic is very beneficial to sites. It does not only invites visitors but it also by happenstance can also add sales.
Traffic really helps in promoting a blog or a website which enables high page ranking.
Great blog. Thanks.
Traffic wont help your PR Amy. Get somebody to work with your linkstrategies
Actually traffic is useless without conversions. The real goal is high quality content, good linking and good conversion ratios.
I reckon go for quantity for first. The ‘spray-and-pray’ approach. Some of it will stick and then begin you fine tuning to bring down your bounce rate and get more targetted traffic which will convert better into sales
@Poker, it’s true traffic w/o conversation is useless, but as you said real linking and real pr comes from true content and comments. so you have to be careful about how you open up the flood gates.
That’s really true! I have learned to continue posting articles everyday and ping afterwords….that helps so much for my business especially in Google.
Indeed. Generating huge amount of traffic is the top priority of most of us. But giving the contents and update to your site some of your time won’t hurt much and would give you lots of wonderful things the next day.
I agree with you. I have a number of analytical tools, and each one gives me a different traffic number.
Content is king. We all should take care for Content. Because user want to read somethings useful and related to their searches. Then we should take care about on page optimization then off page optimization.
A lot of marketing is based on keywords with the highest search volume, but it’s important to target relevant ones that will bring the right kind of traffic you want to convert.
Any blog I have ever had a link from produced worthless traffic. If you do not get keywords that count, your waisting your time reguardless of any traffic.
The challenge with Google SEREP is that the rules can change quite rapidly. This means that no one approach guarantees success. A little bit of everything is better than a lot of one thing. You will find a balance and good content and regular posting will get you 90% there
Yes, I have gotten caught up in the traffic generation game in the past and lost sight of the conversion element. Since targeting my link building toward very targeted keywords, my organic searches, and conversions, have increased dramatically.
This is a really good lesson to learn when you have a business online.Traffic is as you said GREAT but it’s the buying power of the people that makes the bucks and keeps you online.
anyone can get the traffic , but it is most important what is the conversion rate
Providing the right content that will result in the user taking the appropriate action (i.e., signing up, calling, etc.) is the greatest challenge.
Yes traffic can be misleading in itself, conversion is key, new tool i come accross to boost conversions what is money extractor it challenges the visitor to buy.
Google analytics is a good tool to check the traffic and where its comming from but there is a service like click tale where they show you what exactly the visitor does in your website.
I am pretty green at all the SEO topics. I read and read but it seems there are skills needed far beyond just reading. The stats are without a doubt missleading. But I think the so called experts thrive on these stats. This post is so true but a add to this is that side. These so called experts use these stats to duke newbies in the online SEO wars by showing results for traffic. And trust me, when you are new traffic looks so impressive. Then you calm down and realize it is worthless traffic so many times!