In my years of doing online marketing, working for myself, with other businesses and speaking with tons of enthusiasts also interested to make a living through this industry, one thing I often come across is the misunderstanding of quality vs quantity when it comes to traffic, aka the amount of visitors coming to your site.
I want to take this time to clarify that if you’re aiming at high numbers, you’re overlooking the big picture.
Obviously for those who are new to the business, it’s easy to assume that the more people you have coming to your website, the more chances you’ll make more money. Right? Well not exactly.
And what’s worse is that a lot of the people who have these misconceptions end up making poor investment decisions and doing things such as paid marketing, buying up junk traffic (thinking it’s profitable) or hiring people to do this for them. In either case, the one who loses out is the investor.
Often times, I’ve spoken about the importance of targeted traffic and this is really the keyword in this post. Targeted traffic is the same as quality traffic and what I mean by that is if you have a specific group of people (let’s call them group A) coming to your site whose subject is also to their interest (let’s call it subject A), you will end up being much more profitable in the short/long run than another business who aims to get as many people as possible to their website (groups A-Z). Trust me, I’ve run this test on many occasions. This rule remains as solid today as it did the first time I tested it.
When I try to make these points to those who are new to online marketing as well as business owners looking to expand/create an online business, the counter argument I always get is that they want to focus on getting as many people as possible to their website.
Sure they care about quality of the traffic, but in their mind, the quantity is what counts because by their rationale, if anyone comes to their “Awesome site” and sees what is being offered, they’ll immediately jump on the offer and if you multiply that by 100s, 1,000s, even millions of visitors, you have a huge profit.
Well here’s a few reasons and examples of why this mentality is wrong is going to screw you over financially:
Quality Traffic > Quantity traffic examples:
1) It doesn’t matter HOW many people come to your site. If the person/audience is NOT targeted, it doesn’t matter if you offer them a million dollars, they simply will NOT buy and will leave your site.
2) I see TONS of make money online sites offering people free memberships, training and super secret amazing deals. Then the site owners make paid ads and try to advertise on a large scale to people all across the board, meaning people interested in various things. So often times they will get visitors, but with people who aren’t exactly familiar or interested in making money online.
What ends up happening is that they end up paying MORE, getting more visitors, but in optimistic cases, a few sales, IF any.
3) I was helping a local company market itself within a certain city. They wanted to market themselves to the state. I told them this is a very bad idea since there’s NO way people from outside the city (at least far) will ever go there. Their mentality was as I mentioned previously that quantity > quality.
What ended up happening is what I predicted: They got a lot of visitors to their sites but VERY few conversions (sales). I ended up suggesting they ONLY target specific audiences interested in the specific product they offer, BUT only within the city area. This ended up getting them much less clicks, but MUCH more sales. Quality wins.
4) I often make the “needle in the haystack” argument when I try to convince people about the importance of quality > quantity. In the example of online marketing, the quantity goers are always trying to find that 1 person in a whole crowd. But the resources being spent to find them (money, time, effort) are NOT worth the investment.
Let’s say the needle is the one person you’re looking for and the haystack is just other various groups of people. Don’t chase the haystack, chase the needle.
5) I was recently speaking with someone who was promoting a make money online program through Craigslist, but he was trying to find potential leads/sales by placing ads in areas like: Computer, resumes, looking for work.
He got 100’s of clicks and only 2 people actually joined the site, but never bought anything. This is because the crowd was completely NOT targeted.
Now if he were chasing say: People looking for online business opportunities OR those looking to work from home, then we’re getting closer to the quality crowd that would be interested in the offer.
Ways to improve the quality of traffic to your website:
Improve the quality of visitors going to your website and the sales will follow. I wrote up an entire post on how to get targeted traffic to your site, but just to offer you a few pointers:
1) Identify the crowd/audience/niche your site is chasing. If you don’t know about niches, I strongly urge you to check this tutorial out on niches. If you’re not chasing niches (specific audiences), you are losing out on profits.
More examples: Micro niches always get you targeted quality traffic.
2) Once you identify the niche, set up your site to target THAT niche. This means all your advertising, whether SEO, PPC (paid advertising) should revolve around that crowd.
Example: If my site was based on say promoting a business in a city, the first thing I would do is:
- Identify what the business sells so I can find the niche crowd that’s interested in it.
- Then I would place ads targeted ONLY at the city and use ONLY keywords that are related to the services the business offers. That way only people who type those keywords into the search (the crowd I’m chasing) will see my ad/s.
3) Repeat these 2 steps and you should be fine.
Is quantity ever a priority?
Well yes, but only when that quantity is consisting of targeted visitors. Then it’s smart to invest your money and time into getting higher traffic numbers. For instance, if I see that a site is getting a lot of targeted visitors, I would want to maximize this by finding even more places/keywords where these targeted visitors could be found.
How could I do this? Well by finding more keywords.
If I’m doing SEO (free), I’d find low competition keywords that my specific audience types into the search engine and write up HIGH quality content on it. This will rank on the search engines and attract that audience to my site.
If I’m doing PPC (Paid), I’d also find keywords they type into search engines and put up an ad/s to attract them. Unlike SEO however, with PPC you don’t need to find low competition keywords. Just make sure they are highly relevant. Here’s a full tutorial on pay per click on making highly relevant PPC ads.
If you properly utilize these tips, you will see a much better ROI in your business endeavors, spend less time chasing the un-chasable crowds and being much happier with your results!