Is
All Web Traffic, Good Traffic?
Is All Web Traffic, Good Traffic?
I am sure I have listened to just about every Internet Marketing
Expert alive on this planet talk about web traffic. Some will tell
you, that you need to get as much web traffic as possible, others
will tell you that you only need a little bit of traffic to make
money on the web.
Each of these gurus talk about how they achieved so many sales
from 10,000 visitors, or we will guarantee you will make at least
1 sale from every 1,000 visitors you have at your website even if
it’s a ugly website.
Well, I don’t want to give you any false hopes on how many
sales you will make, in fact, I want to share with you, what can
really go wrong on the web if you are not seriously careful in getting
the right web traffic. I had been working with a couple of different
mentors for our business from both the traditional Bricks and Mortar
perspective and an Internet perspective.
I wanted to test out a new sales page I had written to see if
we could sell any of our Microsoft Office Specialist Excel Training
kits online. Everybody who has seen our training programs have always
commented on how easy they are to understand and how much more professional
they are to others on the market.
With the help of our internet mentor, we built a sales page, and
then used Google’s Adwords to drive traffic to our website.
The advert we had put together on Google was nothing short of amazing;
our Click Through Rate or CTR was as high as 12.5% which is absolutely
out there.
I had achieved something I never thought I would. After 24 hours
we had 1,200 visitors with about 120 people registered for our free
chapter extract, after 6 days I had had over 10,000 unique visitors
to our website with approximately 900 people having given us their
email addresses to get their free chapter.
One Catch – WE HAD ZERO SALES
What I had effectively done was to drive traffic from Google to
our site to get their free chapter but the traffic that was driven
to our site had absolutely no interest in buying anything from us,
they only wanted what we going to give them for free. Now to give
you an idea of what that traffic cost, to get those 10,000 unique
visitors to my site had cost me just over $3,500 US dollars. I should
make a note at this point, I had implemented all the programs, internet
marketers recommend like using AutoResponders, doing follow-ups
on the people who had registered etc.
One of the things I had done prior to building this site was to
put into place a number of strategies I had learnt from an audio
package called the Mr H Interviews, if you want to listen to them,
there is about 5 hours of interviews and you can get access to them
by visiting my website – http://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp In
these interviews this gentleman talked about learning about who
your customers were and whether the traffic coming to you site is
valid for your site.
Driving traffic to a site is easy. Just give something away Free
that people want and you will get people to your site. But, just
like in our bricks and mortar building, we only want to give the
free things away, if people truly want to purchase our wares, or
what is the point in being in business.
Prior to driving this traffic to our site I had developed the website
to track where people were clicking off, I did a follow-up survey
7 days after they visited my site and I asked them a range of questions
such as were they interested in buying my product and it was at
this point I realised that the traffic I had purchased from Google
via the Adword campaign was absolutely the wrong traffic for my
website.
I started to get comments from people demanding that I give them
our training material for free, that they weren’t going to
pay for it cause they had no money and I was this big company who
should be giving it for free.
I must have got about 50 responses along these lines and very quickly
I realised, the traffic I had driven to my site was the wrong traffic.
More than that, I can honestly say, getting responses like these
really do get depressing especially when I am only a small Australian
business with just nine people working for me.
Anyway, where I made my biggest mistake was that the Adwords campaign
I had used was simply the wrong advert to be catching the customers
I wanted. In the advertisement I had stated that who ever clicked
on this link would get a Free Chapter Extract of our Excel program.
It turns out, the type of customer I had attracted was one that
only wanted everything for Free.
One of the lessons I learnt in using Google, Overture and other
pay-per-click search engines is that it is not the volume of traffic
but the quality. In our adwords campaign, I wasn’t using generic
keywords, I was in fact using very targeted keywords but still attracting
the wrong type of customers. I needed to qualify my customers through
the advert a lot more than what I had done.
Before you even think about building an Internet business you really
do need to have a very clear understanding of who your customer
is, what it will take your customer to buy, what attracts your customer,
where your customers can be found and how you can check to make
sure that the customers you are attracting to your website is valid
for your business.
The other issue to make a special note of, is make sure you build
your website that can test where people are leaving your site, how
far they are reading to and what their objections are in buying.
If you put these strategies into place, you will very quickly see
whether your website is working for you, but even more so, you will
have the information to know whether any changes you make are in
fact working. Essentially you want to take the guess work out of
your website.
About the Author Chris Le Roy is the
Managing Director of One-on-One Personal Computer Training and has
been training people in building websites and using the Internet
through his company for 10 years. If you would like to listen to
the interviews mentioned in this article click on the link –
http://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp
|
