I remember when I was just starting out in Internet marketing. I remember working for a company as their digital marketing vice president and believe me there was a tremendous amount of misconceptions regarding online traffic. My boss at that time was under the impression that as long as our website got a tremendous amount of traffic, eventually all that traffic would translate into cash. As you can imagine, the company went belly up after a few years.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. You see, even if you get all the traffic in the world, that’s still not going to be enough to put food on the table because at the end of the day, the only visitor action that matters is conversion.
It doesn’t matter how you define conversion. Maybe you convert by getting people to sign up to your mailing list. Perhaps conversion matters to your company in the form of actual sales. Possibly, it can take the form of software downloads or app installs. Whatever form it takes, it has to be there. It’s all about conversions, conversions, conversions.
Admittedly, it’s very easy to overlook conversions. Seriously. In the big scheme of things, it is so much easier to get excited about the fact that your link is really ‘going viral’ and getting crazy hits. Who wouldn’t get excited? After all, this is the kind of stuff that happens now. Conversion is what happens later. Conversion only takes place when your stuff has developed a high enough level of trust in the minds of the target audience you are trying to reach.
Unfortunately, if you focus on popularity as measured by visitor traffic, you’re not playing the game the right way. What I learned from my many years of online marketing experience is to focus on niche viral success.
Don’t get thrown off by the word “viral”. A lot of people are under the impression that when a piece of content goes viral, this automatically means that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have viewed that piece of content. Not quite. If your niche is very narrow and small, getting one thousand visitors to your website from a piece of content qualifies that content as “viral”.
Focus on conversions because it’s going to change the way you look traffic and content reach. In other words, it’s going to set you on the right path. Otherwise, if you insist that your content has to get a ridiculously tremendous amount of traffic, you’re really just setting yourself up for failure. Eventually, you’re going to be letting yourself down because you assume the wrong things.
You have to adjust your expectations, and you have to modify your assumptions. Otherwise, it’s going to be very easy, if not very tempting, to fall into the trap of high-volume traffic.
Make no mistake untargeted traffic is essentially worthless traffic. Your main goal should be to use viral content to attract qualified or niche-specific traffic. This is the kind of traffic that will put more dollars in your online bank account.
