What is Your Main Target – Traffic or Customers?
What is the biggest challenge for an online business? You might respond it as getting traffic. My concern is though, what is your main target – traffic or customers? Read on this blog to understand if you need more traffic, or customers?
We all are either the owner of a website or a blog. If you don’t know what is the difference between the two then you can also read this blog post of mine. Being a site owner I can say that we webmasters are always behind getting traffic on their website.
Being an SEO too I can say that the ultimate goal of every website owner is to get traffic on their website.
Though my concern is a bit different, I simply want to know if getting traffic is good or getting relevant traffic, which can either purchase something from you, or which can avail the services which you are offering is better?
In other words you can say if your online business is having 10 visitors only, but 6 out of those 10 are purchasing something (either services or products) from your website, and on the other if my website is getting around 2000 visitors daily, but none of them are useful for my site, then which one is better in your opinion?
I have no doubt that people will call your website as better, despite being the fact that there is a huge (around 200%) difference of traffic between the two.
To be very frank the biggest mistake which almost every site owner is making these days is of focusing for the wrong thing. Although I won’t say that focusing on traffic is somehow bad, but honestly instead of focusing on traffic people should focus on getting relevant traffic on their website.
Let me give you a quite simple example. My blog I News India share some blogging tips, SEO tips, Self Improvement Tips, etc. Let’s say my website is getting near about 2000 visitors on a daily basis. What is the point if none of them are reading the blog posts which I am sharing with so much efforts?
What is the purpose of a blog?
What will be your response for the purpose of a blog?
Well, as per me it is a platform of sharing information and knowledge and building relationships.
You write a blog sharing your information and knowledge, and an unknown person reads it, likes it, and shares his/her opinion about it, and this process is known as blogging.
So this is all about blogging, and then is it fine if I always run behind getting more traffic on my blog?
So what do you think now? Traffic is more important or getting customers is?
Well, don’t take it in this way that I somehow telling you that you or I should not run behind getting traffic for our website. Well the obvious reason or lifeline for the living of a blog is traffic only. A site without traffic is dead.
But, the serious thing is that if you are getting a bit less traffic too, then you should not feel demotivated about it.
Honestly believe me, if you will simply run behind watching the traffic to your website increase, then one day you will find it too boring too. You need some passion to run your website, and only the growth of the traffic is not the same.
I can’t say that numbers are not important. We all have different types of numbers in our life. You might have some specific number of girlfriends, or boyfriends, but does it matter much in our life?
There was a time when people were crazy about number of friends in Orkut, then they became crazy about number of Facebook friends, one day they became crazy about how many likes I am getting when I am sharing a picture on Facebook, later on they became crazy about number of followers on Twitter.
But does all that numbers matters much in our life?
If not then why are we so worried about the number of traffic on our website?
Being an SEO from last 10 years, I saw the craziness among my SEO clients of knowing how many keywords are there in which their websites is ranking? Does it matter of the real business through your website matters?
What do you say about it?
You hired an SEO firm which gave you a list of 500 keywords, out of which they ranked your website in 499 keywords, that too for a position on first page in top 5 only. You might feel proud of hiring them for your firm. But I won’t be.
Reason being, do let me know the growth of your real business. How much is the impact on your business with those ranking on 499 keywords?
If you will hire me as an SEO of your website, I won’t go for a list of keywords for the SEO of your website. I would rather prefer to give you the real business through your website. Useless traffic or keywords ranking won’t give you the best results. That can be good if you are hiring a cheap SEO firm for your purpose. Real SEO will influence your business and will cost heavy on your pocket as well.
Well, as an SEO people do believe that it will bring traffic on their website and increase the ranking of their website in Google and all other search engines.
Am I not conflicting myself only when I am saying that people should not think about those numbers only?
Well, up to an extent yes, I am conflicting. I won’t deny that traffic or keywords ranking has an important place in the world of SEO, but the real thing on which not many people are focusing is about getting real business through your website. Just like the fact that if my blog is attracting millions of traffic, but none of them are either finding it useful for them, or most of them are not actually reading it, then it is useless.
So my suggestions to any budding blogger or website or online business owners are that you should not get obsessed for mere traffic on your website. You should understand the actual need of your website and target to get those types of visitors only. It is known as relevant traffic and this can be achieved through SEO as well (know more about what exactly is SEO?).
Let me know your opinion about what are you thinking about this topic which I discussed in this blog. Please do share your opinion about this blog post of mine.
Now this is a fair question Alok and a nice choice of topic I must say :).
I think earlier it was about sheer numbers but once a business or a website reaches its stability, it is more about having the target audience and fine tuning the results and products in accordance to them. Like you said mere numbers don’t matter much. There is not much point in pushing a product down someone’s throat when they dont want them. It is more about finding the real need and the real customer and delivering accordingly. .That makes all the difference.. Targeted audience 🙂
Absolutely correct Vinay 🙂 Thank you so much for sharing your comment and appreciating my concerns. 🙂
Obviously customer when one is self hosting. After all, what is the point of investing in own domain and hosting space if you don’t earn a penny from it? In fact, blogging is a money making business. You can earn by selling products or services through it. You can earn by promoting ads or making affiliate partnerships with others. You can also earn by writing reviews.
As a matter of fact, you cannot earn customers without earning traffics. It is your traffic which will convert into your customers. According to 80/20 rule, only 20% of your entire traffic will convert into your customer. So easy way out is to increase your overall traffic which in turn also increases the value of your 20%. The hard way is to identify those 20% and target your promotion around them. 🙂
Absolutely right Ravish. You cannot earn customers without earning traffic. But my concern is to get 20 real visitors, why to work so hard to focus on getting 100 visitors? My point of view was to reach those 20 people is convenient than reaching out to those 100 people.
But anyways, your comment is also correct. Thanks for sharing your opinion about it…
A topic which I was waiting for a long time, Thanks Alok Vats 🙂
Our( here means authors of Aura of thoughts – Meenal & Sonal) blog is for specified purpose and we write about topic relevant to it till now , and hope so in future ;-). And getting traffic too, I don’t know whether it’s decent enough or not.
And coming to Ravish Mani’s point that we are blogging, and end of the day want to earn from it. Yes, even I was looking for advice on “Affliated ads and Amazon ads”.
Alok, do u have written post related to this topic(earning through blog), please share link or else please write :))
Dear Meenal and Sonal, absolutely delighted to see your comments on my blog. Let me tell you that earning through blogs is neither so difficult thing, nor too easy too. You need to invest time and money on your blog to stand it somewhere so that you can earn decent amount from it. I do believe that your blog is having a great design but then the most important things which it is lacking is a customized domain name. You can read this blog post of mine: https://www.inewsindia.com/2014/02/26/10-common-blogging-mistakes-to-avoid-by-bloggers/
As far as blogs on earning through blogs is concerned, you can read following blogs of mine and do share your opinion about them:
https://www.inewsindia.com/2014/04/11/how-to-make-money-from-blogging/
https://www.inewsindia.com/2014/05/28/make-money-blogging/
https://www.inewsindia.com/2014/07/17/how-can-you-earn-from-your-blog/
Do connect with me on twitter (@vatsalok) or at my Gmail account (vatsalok) for any query 🙂
Thank you Alok for a clear and detailed reply with links
I shall surely bother you with few more queries 🙂
Not an issue Meenal, you can anytime ask me any queries related to any doubt in blogging and SEO 🙂
Very interesting and useful artile Alok Bhai Sahab
Thank you so much Sampat Kumari jee 🙂 Glad to see you on my blog after a long gap.