Traffic Method #256 | Make Sure Your Site Converts First, *then* Learn Traffic Generation

So this is part-rant, part-tip. I thought it would only be fair to warn you, right off the top. I considered making it two separate posts. But the facts divorced from the passion felt flat and dishonest. I hope you’ll indulge me.

Most of October, I’ve been out of pocket. In catching up with people and things, I’ve been thinking primarily about one thing.

Why does it seem so hard to make money online?

No matter how many free guides there are about how to make money online, in the end, the simplicity of it is trumped by the fact that it’s not easy, and can be time consuming if you don’t have a dedicated advertising budget, an affiliate program, or massive partnership program. The best method of making money is nothing without clients.

Now, if you have 100 good affiliates, 10 great JV partners, or a $1000 a month advertising budget (at least), along with the ability to leveraged any of these, generating traffic will probably be the least of your worries, granted.

But no matter how your visitors come, whether by someone else’s list, someone else’s traffic efforts, or buying traffic, it’s still traffic generation, and you’ll still need to get the people who get into your sales process to buy (or click if your monetization model is selling ads).

Bottom line: If your site doesn’t convert traffic to clients at some predictable rate, you may as well hang it up.

And if you can?

Then the ability to generate targeted visitors is like having the ability to create what creates money.

Take my business. It’s quite simple. I make how-to guides to show people how to get more traffic. I offer consulting of advising people how to get more traffic, or I get the traffic for them. (And on other sites, I make money from advertising. But that’s on the back burner until my new partners take over.)

Lots of people come to this site. A certain percentage of them buy my products or services. Everything I do is about getting more people to come to me, and then showing other people how I get more people to come to me.

But when I had to stop working for a while, and came back, business was at a dead stop. There was nothing to sell while I was sick, and no reason for people to keep coming. No people, no money.

So what did I do?

I got people to help me get more people to show up to the site, updated my products, updated my services. Lots of people started coming to the site. A certain percentage of them buy.

The only problems I ever have with keeping my business thriving have to do with not enough people coming to the site, or not having the time to create new products or not having the energy for consulting services. Those are really the only three problems I have, when it comes down to it.

If that’s true, then what is the difference between my business when it’s thriving, and when it’s not? And an even better question, what’s the difference between my business and yours?

I can tell if someone is going to be successful in their traffic efforts mostly by looking at their site. Every page should have conversion potential. And every site should have a plan about how to serve visitors, how to convert visitors, and how to generate visitors, not all necessarily from the same location.

If you’re not making money from your site, the very first thing to look at, before you call in a traffic generation expert, before you decide to buy a book to tell you how to make more money, is whether or not your site will convert. If it can’t sell, it doesn’t mater howmch traffic you throw at it.

Traffic potential is money potential, if and ONLY if that potential has the chance to be realized. Get a traffic expert to tell you what to change about your site so it can make money first.

Then you can start thinking about how to generate more traffic. In the next tip, we’ll talk more about what you should do first when you’re ready to create what controls your ability to make money online.