Non Targeted Traffic is Like Empty Calorie Food

We’re all happy when we see the traffic to our site increase. It means that more people are becoming aware of what we offer. But, traffic alone is not the key to success. The trick is to gain more targeted traffic. Here are a few tips on what to look for in your Google Analytics and elsewhere that will help you determine what’s working well for your site.

Warm vs Cold Traffic

Folks who market online using ads and monetized blogging sites are playing a numbers game. They know that less than 10% of the folks they have the opportunity to get in front of will be interested in their product. So, they have to get in front of as many folks as possible, to the tune of tens of thousands.

The trick to increasing sales is to get folks who are already interested to come to their site. That’s called warm traffic. Helping site owners find this warm traffic is big business. It’s why sites like Google and Facebook track your interests. They turn that info over to site owners who buy ads. In other words, Google and others help ad buyers place ads in front of folks who already have interest in that topic.

Your Site Traffic

Are you getting warm or cold traffic to your site? There are a couple of ways to tell. One is by using Google Analytics to see how folks found you and what they did on your site. The other way is to poll folks who actually contact you and ask how they found your site.

If you’re not using a tracking system like Google Analytics, you’re flying blind and you may be wasting your blogging efforts. If you have no idea what’s bringing folks in, then you don’t know how to adjust your blogging strategy to bring more.

And, if you don’t know what folks are doing once they get to your site, you’re really flying blind. You want to know how long they stay and if they read any other pages on your site. If most folks are only staying a few seconds and then leaving, you’re bringing them in but not keeping them and probably not converting them into leads or paying clients.

The Myth of High Traffic

There are tons of blog posts with gimmicks on how to bring more traffic to your site. More traffic is good, but warm traffic is better. You get more warm traffic by targeting your content and SEO for it.

Non-targetted traffic is like empty calorie food. It over-inflates your numbers, but you get nothing worthwhile in return.

Folks come and then they go – quickly. They don’t become your fans and they don’t share your content with their friends. Hit and run traffic like this, no matter how high, is not a sign of success.

The Real Sign of Success

There’s only one number that really counts and that’s your bottom line. If folks come to your site and never buy anything, you can’t stay in business.

The point of a website is to have it found, read, and acted upon. That’s how you stay in business. And, the best way to do that is practice the techniques that bring warm traffic to your site and then entices them to stay and take action. That action can be subscribing to your newsletter, your RSS feed, sharing your post with a friend, or following you on one of your social media sites.

How’s Your Traffic?

What kind of traffic are you getting to your site? Do you look at your Google Analytics, or are you still mystified by all those graphs and how to interpret them?

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