Does Your Blog or Website Suffer From Conversion Cancer?
It seems like I get at least one email each week from someone asking me about how to increase traffic to a blog or website. Usually after reading the email I’ll take a moment to visit the site that belongs to the person who wrote me. The complaint is very common: Bloggers and site developers feel that they need more traffic to make up for a loss in earnings that differ from what they had originally expected. They feel that by adding more traffic to their site it will then correct their deficit.
Having that said, I am not going to tell you that traffic is a bad thing. The more traffic we all get to our sites the happier we are, that’s a given. Who doesn’t want extra traffic? But that’s not the point. The problem is that most people think increasing traffic is the solution towards fixing a web site that is failing to earn money. That is far from the truth.
In most cases when I check out the sites of the people that email me asking for tips on increasing traffic, what I find is that their site has conversion cancer. Simply put, their websites or blogs are failing to convert for them. It doesn’t matter what it is, some people want to get more Google AdSense clicks, others simply want their visitors to purchase their eBooks. Whatever the call to action may be, It all boils down to the same thing; conversion, and the lack there of.
What good is increasing traffic if the current traffic you already receive doesn’t convert? If the existing traffic you receive doesn’t convert, do you really think that adding more traffic will help conversions? It won’t!
Something is wrong. You have to change something. If your blog or web site doesn’t have a lot of traffic, that is fine! Use that to your advantage. In my business, I based things off percentages rather than by units. In my fleet of a few hundred various sites I own, most are very low volume. Meaning each site I own typically gets around 100 visits per day. Most of my sites are monetized with Google AdSense. My aim is to score 10 clicks per site per day off 100 visits, which equates to 10% conversion.
On occasion, quite a few of my sites get bursts of traffic. When that happens, they still convert at 10%. When more traffic is added, say 1000 visits per day, I make more money off the added traffic because I still convert at 10%. The reason why is because I always focus on conversions based off low volume. Gaining massive amounts of traffic to a blog or web site is the single most difficult thing to achieve. My focus is in taking full advantage of the traffic that I do get.
Consider this and re-visit your blog or web site and ask yourself what you can do to capitalize on the current traffic you get. If making money using Google AdSense is your goal, then consider changing the position of your ads. Maybe change the size of your ad or even the colors. After you make changes, take note of the effects the changes have. If performance increases, try to tweak things even more. If after you tweak things further and find that the results depreciated your earnings, reset things back to how you had them previously, or try something different again.
You’d be amazed when you discover how simple it is to run tests on your site. The beauty of discovering how to score high conversions is the fact that once you discover what works, you can do what I do and duplicate your system over a few hundred times. My Google AdSense earnings for the month of December 2008 exceeded $10,000 USD. This was all generated on a few hundred low volume sites that achieve high conversion rates of 10% or higher.
Before you ask for advice on how to increase traffic, the better question to ask is how can I increase conversion off the current traffic I already receive.
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:19 am
A very interesting article and highly informative. Thank you!
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:46 am
This is certainly one of the good post i have read in recent times. Yes, i do completely agree with you all we need to look out for is whats going wrong with our websites instead of running for the traffic all the time. I need to tweet this post
January 2nd, 2009 at 8:49 am
I am sure conversion will be a problem of mine but at the moment traffic is the problem. Maybe offering a free ebook will do the trick.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:13 am
Awesome post. This is my problem exactly. I get plenty of traffic. I know how to snipe keywords and rank very well with the search engines. I am just “monetization-challenged”. We’ll have to talk more about this. Thanks.
January 2nd, 2009 at 10:51 am
Excellent advice Garry. That 10% conversation rate is something I am striving for myself.
For Dec I managed 7% a good result and still leaves me room to improve upon. I will be experimenting with ad placements for Jan.
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Garry, I 100% totally agree – coming from a bricks & mortar sales background, it doesn’t matter what the footfall number through the door / traffic to your site is, the key is your conversion factors and conversion rates.
Having said that, at the end of your post you mentioned “the question shouldn’t be …, it should be …”
Well, that is exactly my question – “How can I increase conversion off the current traffic I already receive?”
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Duh! Sorry Garry – missed the link to related posts!
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:23 am
Well, I know what you mean from 1 st hand experience. I have a pr1 ranking for my website, and have been experimenting and rewriting copy on the sales letter and I know it needs testimonials and beef up on the gaurantee however how am I supposed to get those without any sales , its like a catch-22. I am happy as a newbie to get a number one ranking slot on yahoo for my product niche , but for all the good it does me I haven’t made sale one as of yet. Even when I used the given affiliate page from the owners of the product I had a better ranking in google but not one conversion on their page either. So now I am using the site to hammer out my sales copywriting technique. I’m new to writing the salescopy , I feel that it is getting stronger, however not strong enough as of yet. Please feel free to critique the site and issue pointers, it sure could use a boost to get some conversions. I am also bypassing the other main sites sales letter since I didn’t get any sales from their sales letter.
p.s. I like the putting the article in the email I feel it is more time efficient as I’m mainly scanning my emails these days for important points. Having the article in the email in html form was a good technique.
Feel free to drop by and leave me a comment. Thanks Gary!
google-ambush.net
January 3rd, 2009 at 4:29 am
That was very interesting. I’d be curious to hear your opinion on whether or not adsense cannibalizes affiliate sales/leads or vice versa? Tx
January 5th, 2009 at 7:38 am
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January 8th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
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May 11th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Great site! I am loving it!! Will come back again – taking your feeds also, Thanks.