Internet traffic resembles a bit the trafficking of drugs – it makes fast and easy money, there are no official rules, while sometimes it leads to violation of rules and laws. You may have the best idea, incredible design, professionally programmed and optimized website but if you do not have traffic, you cannot realize any of the listed business models. At least for now, no one has managed to develop a business model based on zero attendance. The question that bothers both beginner and advanced webmasters is how to attract as much traffic to the website as possible. I would advise you to attract not only the biggest but also the right traffic.
To prove my theory to you, I will tell you about the Ozone.bg website. It was launched back in 2008. At that time there was only one specialized player on the gaming market and its model was focused mostly on sales at physical stores and using the internet only as a bonus/addition. Ozone.bg was started as an entirely online business and so far it does not give any signals for an offline offensive. The reason is that Ozone.bg is focused on efficiently covering the online audience.
In 2008 the store started selling games and fan items, and in its final variant, the portfolio included categories of gamers’ interest: games, gaming accessories, movies, board games, and figurines. Gradually it gained loyal audience mostly because of the fast and correct servicing of clients, which the store willingly proved through the results of a public opinion survey carried out by GfK. The client service is highlighted as one of the company’s major corporate philosophies.
If we assume that Ozone.bg is an average website and apply on it the models for unlimited internet traffic generation, do you think that this will bear a positive effect on the store? For instance, a news website often generates more than 250,000 – 300,000 unique visits a day. This is an absolutely fantastic traffic for an online store. Does this mean that the news websites are earning more than the online stores? Or does it mean that the sales will be directly affected if the traffic of the online store is increased?
People enter media websites in different ways and for different reasons but most often they go there when there are looking for concrete information on Google and come across an article on the issue. However, a large part of the traffic is absolutely chaotic, even accidental, not without the participation of the website’s optimizers and editors. For instance, if you are looking for a book titled The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, then in your search results you will probably see the bookstores selling it and many reviews.
The media websites are struggling to make you click on their links because this way you generate impressions and they are scoring points before the advertisers. However, often such a visit does not bring direct profit to the media website. This is the reason why this type of websites needs hundreds of thousands of visitors every day to keep a relatively low level of revenues and consumers.
On the other hand, we have the stores like Ozone.bg – if you come to this website looking for the aforementioned title, you will have the chance to see a brief description and price and you can buy the book with a few clicks even without having to pay for the delivery. This way the consumer is converted into revenue for the website.
This is the reason why online stores have fewer visits a day but they are properly and clearly targeted – people looking for concrete products and services offered by the store. This way a store can be happy to have 10,000 consumers a day, even if only 30% of them place an order.
How much and what kind of traffic you need depends on the audience your website is targeting. The websites that fail most often are those addressed “to everyone”. Many people think that when they address every single internet consumer, the website will be visited more and become more attractive to advertisers. In practice, it is just the opposite. More and more often the narrowly specialized websites enjoy higher consumers’ approval because they know what they are looking for and what to expect when they enter there.
Even if you have AdSense or another type of a website supporting itself from advertising, it does matter what kind of traffic they attract. Often you will see offers for 10,000 unique visitors per month or even per day for your website at the price of only $50. The price is very low and from the very first day, the number of visitors in your website will top that of some market leader and position itself in the Top 100 of Tyxo.bg or another chart you have targeted. Such offers are as tempting as they are pointless. The truth is that you will really get the promised traffic – your web counters will report it, but it will not be real. In practice, this type of advertising networks generates thousands of clicks through different software systems or programmer’s tricks.
