Attracting Traffic Boosting site traffic is a hot-button item, I know. I give a few dozen keynote speeches and seminars each year, and nearly all organizations ask me to address the topic in depth for their attendees. It doesn't matter whether it's a high-end corporate crowd or a membership organization of travel agents or credit unions. The only time you may want boxcars of unfocused traffic coming to your site is if you're in the business of selling ad banners. If you are, you may well find yourself with over 80% of those avails unsold. Ad banner avails have saturated the marketplace and they're becoming less and less effective all the time. That means advertisers will only be willing to pay less, moving forward. A site owner who has over 5 million impressions monthly confided in me recently that his site serves twice as many ads and they're making half as much as they did a year ago. So what does he need with more traffic? If, on the other hand, your site is used for accruing prospects and sales leads, you may be wise to go for fewer but more qualified visitors to your site. After all, what good is it if you have to spin your wheels on a bunch of tire-kickers who ultimately burn up your time and money? Clickthroughs go up when the banner is more targeted. This is one reason why advertising in targeted email newsletters works better than banners. WDFM's revenue comes from the ads in this email newsletter. You'll find no ads at http://wdfm.com. In order for banners to maintain any sort of clickthrough rate, I believe ad networks and sites alike are going to eventually bundle in the targeting capabilities for which they now charge extra. So, it's not just any old traffic, but rather relevant traffic that is the order of the day. Buying keywords at search engines, highly targeted DM drops, optimizing your website for search words that people actually do use as opposed to the ones you think they use to find sites like yours, establishing email newsletters and reminder lists that lure the faithful back to your site, along with establishing what I call "links of a feather" with affinity sites similar to yours, are what will work for the long haul. Ah yes, the long haul. Isn't that what we're all in this for? I can tell by the reaction of audiences that this type of straight talk is what they crave. They shove their lunch or dinner aside in favor of taking notes, tapping into Palm Pilots, or speaking into voice recorders. They don't want a rah-rah speech about the Net. That's over. In these times, people want and deserve the unvarnished truth. If you're looking for that kind of straight talk from the lectern, contact me and I'll put you in touch with my manager. But if you're looking for a canned Internet speech telling how the future will be so much better in some warm, fuzzy way, and that the Internet is the greatest invention since fire or the Gutenberg Press, I'm not your man. |
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