Traffic - a major milestone

“A lot goes into coming up with a smart digital business strategy.

• There’s choosing a profitable topic that provides you with purpose.
• And then there’s figuring out the right people to attract.
• Plus uniquely positioning yourself for those people within your industry or niche.

But one thing is likely nagging at you the entire time…

How will I get traffic to my website?”

• Brian Clark

Traffic is the number of people that arrive to your website.

It’s a motivating number, as it’s the first sign that people you have shown your message to, are interested enough to look you up or click through and see what you’re offering.

Traffic also solves a lot of problems. If people are seeing who you are, it means they’re aware of you and something you’re doing is resonating.

There’s a lot of nuance to traffic and what is considered good or bad, and there’s no need to get caught up on it. Getting traffic is a significant milestone for your business, but it’s not the endpoint.

Remember - sales beats everything else.

If traffic is leading to sales - we want to do more of it.

If traffic is being delivered and we’re not getting sales - there’s either a problem with what we’re doing to get the traffic, or a problem with what people are seeing when they arrive.

It’s really that simple.

What are the typical challenges with traffic?

The traffic is low-quality.

High-quality traffic comes from an audience absolutely primed to engage with what you’re offering. Low-quality traffic is spam or getting mentioned somewhere where you’re not relevant. An extreme example would be selling your $20,000 Fliteboard on OzBargains - you could offer your product there - but no amount of traffic is going to deliver sales for your Fliteboard.

Another example would be spending a lot of time and energy on SEO being popular for the term “coaching app” but your coaching software is far more expensive than an app and delivers traffic to your website that isn’t interested.

The traffic is cold.

Cold traffic is visitors that are unfamiliar with your business, your offer, or what you do. Something you’ve said is enough to warrant them clicking through to you, but it’s much less likely to follow any further unless what you’re saying is completely on-point and all about them.

Another example is re-activating an old email list - if you haven’t announced who you are and you’re good reason for doing that, then you’re on a one-way express train to annoying the person on the other end.

The traffic is an audience that doesn’t match your customers.

Some audiences aren’t cold or low-quality, they’re just never going to be a customer of yours. This tends to happen when there’s a well-meaning channel partner giving your product or business a shout-out, but their audience is simply never going to be into what you’re offering. I used to work on the BMW account. They did a stunt in Germany with SnapChat. It seemed to go well enough, but when SnapChat got in touch to ask if we wanted to do something similar in Australia - the answer was a clear no. It’s not that it was a bad idea, there were just more efficient destinations to make offers to the BMW audience.

The other challenge is when people are arriving at your page but not signing up, booking an appointment, purchasing the item, buying your product, or doing any other activity that’s leading to a sale.

These challenges usually move beyond marketing problems into business problems.

Some things you can check are:

• Your offer is clear, explains itself well, and provides enough information
• There’s a single call-to-action (CTA) on the page and its obvious that’s what the next step is
• The language on your page matches where the offer was seen
• There’s no spelling mistakes, the copy is clean, there’s risk reversal and social proof
• There’s no technical issues and your CTA functions correctly, and looks right on a mobile phone

If there’s plenty of traffic and the above is okay - and still nothing is happening - then your offer stinks to the audience you’re in front of. Your price might be off. You might have skipped the Understanding your customers process. Something about who you are targeting is janky and you need to go back to learning more about who you’re serving.

It’s frustrating - but this is where real breakthroughs can happen. Getting face-to-face feedback, empathising with your audience, or finding channel partners who are more closely aligned to what you’re offering are all strong moves you can make to solve this.

Embracing the challenge and remember it will take at least 100 times.