The Way To More Site Traffic And Happier Visitors Begins Here…

To the efficient go the spoils.

I sat down with a site owner the other day to discuss increasing traffic and subscribers to his new newsletter. He had some of the same questions all bloggers and website admins have had at one time or another.

• What’s the key to more site traffic?
• How can you make more sales of a product or service on your website?
• How can you increase Adsense clicks for revenue?

Mainly, he was interested in traffic.

“If we could just get more visitors we’d make more sales,” he said.

In browsing some of the web admin boards like Sitepoint, I see this posted a lot. If I could just get more traffic, I’d make more sales. I’d get more Adsense clicks. Then I’d be happy…

Sure, more traffic might temporarily make all of that happen. But shooting for a major traffic increase is incredibly inefficient.

Let’s say for a second we increased his site traffic from 1000 visitors a day to 100,000 in one day… Then what?

Do you have an structure in place to retain those visitors and make them long-term readers? Or would you most likely go from 1,000 visitors to 100,000 visitors then back down to 1,000 visitors? It is the tiny minority of bloggers and site owners who have reader retention in place. So a surge in traffic becomes a short term spike, instead of a long term gain.

A good way to illustrate this is through the use of email newsletters. I like to use newsletters because the stats are much better and easier to understand.

Below is a picture of some stats from two recent Achieve-IT! newsletters (click to expand).

In the highlighted area, you’ll see that there is a 76.1% open rate on one and 86.8% open rate on the other.

If you are new to this type of newsletter open rate, those are outstanding results. There are many newsletters where the subscriber base is 100,000+ but the number of people who open and read the newsletter is only 1% or 2%.
What that means is my newsletter is more efficient and can outperform a newsletter 50 times it’s size. How can a newsletter be this successful? I must be giving readers something they want. (Tip: If you haven’t subscribed, you can by registering at the right column of this site)
Looking only at web stats, webmasters will tell you a disappointing fact. The vast majority of visitors to any one website will leave in 5 seconds or less. Some sites it can be 50% of the visitors leave in 5 seconds, other sites it can be 95%+.

The bad news: Achieve-IT! has about 70% leave within 5 seconds.
The good news: Nearly 10% of the visitors to Achieve-IT! stay from 20 minutes to 1 hour. 7% stay from 5 to 20 minutes.

That means the lion’s share of the people who do stay, are getting something from their visit. Let me say it again, the people who do choose to stay are getting something for being here.

What I see among many, if not most of the traffic seekers out there is they are the ones who want to get something. They never consider the new visitor could go someplace else in 5 seconds. They never consider what they can provide to the visitor that would build a relationship. They never consider how value is the only thing that will stop them from leaving.
The site owner is instead concerned with what they can get from the visitor. It should be the other way around.

Before you seek more traffic I’d ask how are you serving the traffic you already have? Are your visitors happy? Do they tell their friends? Would a visitor send a friend or coworker to your site? Or do they click away to never return?

Because if you aren’t providing something of value, you could have all the traffic in the world and it would make no long term difference.

Considering what visitors want is a concept some people will never understand. Some people get it, but some most certainly don’t.

I’ve sat down with companies to discuss this topic and the response can be sickening. “Ok, Brad so lets say I give away 3 things of value, then can I get ask money?” They’ll never get it. They’ll always be looking for the next big wave of traffic that will surely crash in a day or so.

If they had only put their visitors first, their visitors would have handed them all the traffic they would ever need.