Let me ask you this very important question…

Do you really want more visitors to your website – is that REALLY your objective when you unleash a new marketing campaign such as writing articles, blog postings, publishing videos, or even paying for traffic?

Are you happy if you see the number of visitors to your site go up by a factor of 3 or 4? 

A DRAMATIC REALISATION THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS FOREVER!

Several years ago when I set out the massively generate new content (I wrote over 1,000 articles and have well over 1,000 blog postings within a couple of years), it was all about driving traffic – wild streams of traffic that would turn my 5-figure business into a six and seven figure business.

And you know what?

That’s exactly what I got – at least the dramatic improvement in traffic generation. 

About that same time, (mid 2000’s) there was a big push from top internet marketers to test, analyze and refine their businesses…things were getting more competitive and the need was to better use their time and energy on marketing that was really making a difference.

What really shocked me is when I began to analyze all of the responses to content and paid advertising over the last 1-2 years – at that time.

What were the results?

Remember the 80-20 rule where 20% of your traffic will lead to 80% of your response, well in this case it was more like the 95-5 rule – where 5% of my content and paid advertising was bringing me 95% of my response. 

So…what that meant was that putting in 14-hour days generating mass content and placing more paid advertising was having a dramatic effect on traffic to my site, but a much smaller impact on sales. 

Sure, there was some impact, but given the 95-5 rule I discussed, most of the content I was busting my butt developing was missing the mark, which led me to the question…

I MUST BEGIN THINKING BEYOND VISITORS

I remember sitting at my computer at 2AM near the end of the year in 2005 thinking, I have all of these visitors, but what is the use if they all visit for a few minutes and then leave forever? 

Not all of them do of course, some of them come back again and again and eventually turn into action-takers buying one of our products or participating in our blog or become a loyal subscriber.

But most do NOT!  At least not back then.

From that point on I started to analyze every aspect of the process from generating traffic, through the initial visit all the way to taking multiple actions in the lead-generation and sales process. 

Let me tell you, when you think through traffic generation in terms of the entire process of illiciting actions, you see all kinds of disconnects that may have otherwise been missed – completely.

For example, for one of my online businesses I generate content for 3 different target markets – writers, professionals and entrepreneurs. 

Each of these target markets are VERY different in how they think, what they believe is important, the language they use and are comfortable with, what they VALUE and what they don’t, etc…

Writers wanted to know how to spend more time writing – they love their art, so any system that could help them make more money with their writing (as we outline in the Ultimate Information Entrepreneur’s Success Package) needed to focus on the benefits of having a steadier income to feed their urge to write.

One the other hand, entrepreneurs desire starting successful businesses and know that having their own product is a key part of the equation.  So, we focus heavily on the advantages of the demand for and profit potential from packaging information for profit.

Both groups by my products like crazy, but…

As you see, the message is quite different.

So, generated traffic from all three and sending them to the same landing pages was my first mistake.  It just doesn’t make sense trying to “talk” to these 3 groups of people in the same way.

Another mistake, I offered the same incentive to opt-in to all three markets.  Again, the issue is that all 3 markets valued information, tools and other giveaways in different ways. 

Then, there’s the ongoing email sequences, blog communications, offers we put in front of them, additional follow-on content and so on…these all need to keep in mind the different nuances of these 3 different target markets. 

Since altering my follow-up process I’ve been able to triple my response rate making the effort and investment put into content development, SEO and advertising much more worthwhile, profitable and effective.

The lesson in all of this…have a profile of your customer in mind…who are they, what do they value the MOST, how do they talk, what words do they use, what words do they find as “hype”, and how would they expect to be treated once they click to your site?

Then, tailor your process, from beginning to end, in line with communicating with THEM the most. 

Suddenly, traffic itself won’t seem so important – what comes first is what you DO with that traffic. 

Once you have a solid back-end lead-generation and sales conversion process in place, you can then ramp up your website traffic generation machine to take full advantage of the automated money machine you have created.