Affiliate Webmaster Tutorials :

Targetted web site traffic

I've often had webmasters brag about lots of people visiting their site. When I ask them: "How many sales do you get?" There is usually a lull in their tone followed by the sheepish reply: "Not many".

The most important part of making money through a web site is not getting thousands of visitors, but to get the right visitors. It's far better to have ten buyers rather than 1,000 visitors and no buyers. So the first question you need to ask yourself is: “Who do I want to come to my website?"

This means you must understand your products and the potential buyers. There is no point attracting customers to your site who don't want to buy your products. You need to imagine who is a potential buyer. In my experience there are three types of customers to chase:

• Customers who know they need your product, and are searching for it on the net. StyleWriter example: Professionals, academics who know their writing style is terrible and are searching for software to improve their writing style. They might be using search terms such as 'writing style software', 'writers software', 'style checker', or 'plain English software'. They are the easiest to convince to buy. Buy the number of people like this compared to the next group is small.
• Customers who need your product but who don't know it and are searching in related areas of the net. StyleWriter example: Academics, and business communication professionals who are aware that their writing isn't as convincing as it should be, or have had their business plans rejected by the bank manager. They know they need help, but they're not sure what they need. They might use search terms such as 'writing help', 'writing tutorials', 'business communication', 'how to write a business plan', and ‘writing a good business letter'.
• Customers who don't think they need your product, which you have to convince otherwise. StyleWriter example of this: There are many business, communication professionals and academics who believe their writing style is perfect, but in reality, it is over-complicated, jargon-filled and long-winded prose. They may not be using the search engines to look for writing aids, but will instead frequent business, academic news portals, and read publications.

It is a good idea to brainstorm through these different traffic types to work out your target audience you want to attract to your site. The best place to start is to do searches on the major search engines using search phrases you think they may be using.

A good place to see what terms your potential customers are using is the Overture Search Suggestion Tool. This tool allows you to type in a search term and see all related terms people on the net use and which ones are most common.

Example:

The number at the side refers to how many people using that specific term on Overture's pay-per-click engine. Many of the other search engines use Overture's service so it's a good indicator of what terms people are using. You can also click on each term and see all the related search terms.

The next step is to look at these search terms and work out which are worth investigating. Some of the terms will have very high numbers of searches but may not be the best ones to investigate. For example "Free Writing Software" may many more people using this term than "Buy Writing Software." But “Buy Writing Software” would be the audience to target to make more sales. Always remember, more clicks are not always better. It's about the quality of the traffic, not the quantity.

Once you have found which terms your preferred customers are using, use the same search terms to find out what web sites come up in the results:

• What sort of content do they have? Are they academic sites with lots of free information or do they offer products?
• Do they offer products to buy? Are their products marketed well? Are there opportunities for other products in the same group?
• Who do they link to? You should follow these links and see where they send their customers. Sometimes the first site offers free help, and the linked sites are the real moneymakers.
• Is there a common portal on the Internet that they all link to? These are really important because they're the 'in crowds' on the net. In later tutorials I'll show you how to use them to your site's advantage. You can find out a site's link ranking at Alexa.

You need to look at these sets of results as 'markets' and analyze them. Find out which are already heavily exploited by other web businesses. The more commercial sites you find in the first 20 to 30 search results – usually covered with banners and selling products direct to the public – the more likely there's money in this search term. However, it's probably a very competitive market, already worked by experienced webmasters. This doesn't mean you shouldn't attempt to capture this search term – you just need to understand the effort-to-reward ratio might be quite low for a new web site. Sometimes it might be better to make $200 a week from a less profitable search term than $10 from a very popular term.

Allow yourself to wander. Make sure to search using different search engines, taking notes, and follow links you think your target market might follow. You need to be curious; many webmasters have discovered great opportunities by simply investigating that little bit further than the others.

Once you have decided on your target groups and terms that you want to bring to your site, you have to capture them and draw them to your site and get them to buy. I'm not going to go into detail here. We keep this information confidential and only share it direct with people signed up to our affiliate program.

Next Topic: Analyzing your traffic

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