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Joshua Levy is a business development manager at Zango, an online media company that automates and monetizes relationships between content creators, Web publishers and advertisers of all sizes.

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Bulking Up On Traffic May Not Be The Right Diet

Written on
September 14th 2007
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by Joshua Levy  |
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‘How many unique visitors per day?’

I hear this question all the time. After all, traffic is the Holy Grail of the Internet.

People look at a Web site’s traffic ranking as the key metric in predicting a partner’s potential. Both advertisers and publishers fuel this obsession; ‘The more traffic the better’ is an industry maxim.

Therefore, it’s tempting to boost traffic at any cost. A publisher may pad his stats with cheap Asian traffic or trade links with completely unrelated Web sites. He may also use misleading advertising to score more inbound clicks. Unfortunately, it is far easier to measure another site’s quantity than its quality and many Webmasters know this. Boosting traffic also leads to higher bandwidth costs and a lot of time and effort.

In fact, bulking up on traffic may not be the right diet for your site.

The amount of traffic a company controls on the Internet is akin to how much revenue an offline company generates; in both cases there is no correlation with profit! Your goal should be increasing your profit and the solution may surprise you: trim the fat.

Become picky with your traffic. Only work with similar sites. Geotarget. Use search optimized traffic, where you can be 100 percent confident that each user they send you is actively searching for the content you offer.

Also, keep your Web site’s focus razor sharp so that you can pinpoint your target audience. You’ll make a name for yourself as being someone who only has quality traffic, and that feels good. And of course, the major search engines will reward you handsomely for keeping your site so ‘fit.’

You’ll have less traffic but that traffic will be worth a lot more.

Running a lean and profitable site will also free up more time to diversify your revenue streams. For example, imagine owning a celebrity gossip site which pulls in 70,000 unique users per day, with each visitor only interested in a couple of celebrities contained on your site. Now, imagine owning seven sites with 10,000 unique users with each focused on a particular celebrity (Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, etc). Each visitor is going to find exactly what they’re looking for! Also, having seven separate revenue streams makes you far less vulnerable than putting all your eggs in one basket.     

When growing your business remember to keep this simple maxim in mind: more traffic does not equal more profit – so ignore the pressure to bulk up on as much as possible, because shedding those flabby traffic pounds will help you race faster towards the dollar signs.



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