Blog Traffic: Increase sales without increasing your website traffic
Every business blog wants it. That crazy blog traffic that jams your servers to the point of total failure… Hoping for that call from your webhost screaming that you need a dedicated server, yesterday, because your website visitors are overloading the hosting package you have now.
Right?
Now it’s time for a reality check. The odds are, your company blog is centered around a fairly specific niche. So the traffic your website gets might not be bandwidth busting. But if you have been blogging a while, your overall traffic might be pretty good for your specific niche or market. You may just not know it.
So off you go, looking to buy traffic or getting into traffic trades and autosurf programs, all in an effort to bring up your traffic levels. It can become consuming, and it can definitely eat up a lot of your time. What’s worse is that there is probably no need to go looking for this type of traffic at all.
Because this type of traffic sucks.
I know, there are going to be people that say all traffic is good traffic. But I beg to differ here. Why in the world would you want visitors to your website that are never going to have any value? Other than a bigger number in your webstats, they add nothing to your website.
Think about it for a minute. The goal for your business blog is simple. Generate readers (read website traffic) that come to your site because it contains a particular value to them. You in turn want to receive some value as well. If they are not going to become buyers of your product or service, then you hope to at least gain comments or some other type of site participation.
With junk traffic you get no value. Just some more burned bandwidth.
So rather than focusing your time, which is scarce, on generating a big pile of junk traffic, why not spend more time working on the traffic you already have?
What I mean by this is that you can work on your blog posts. Shaping the titles and the text. Including more sales text, or more opportunities for your readers to add to the conversation. Or working on keyword research for future blog post topics. Something. Anything. But if you already have traffic and are not making sales, then something needs to change. And it’s probably not going to change by simply buying a few more junk hits.
This is where a good honest content analysis comes into play. Take a good hard look at your blog and it’s visitor stats. Pay special attention to pages that are receiving a lot of organic search traffic. Determine what terms and keywords are bringing them to your blog or website.
Then read the content, and figure out why you are not generating any value from those visitors. Because you have done the first part. You’ve brought them to your blog. Now it’s time to work on making that reader a buyer.
If you are honest with yourself, you’ll see where you are slipping. You’ll see weak text or sales pitches that could be strengthened, you’ll see where you could have been more direct, or in some cases, less forceful. Whatever the case may be, you should see it if you are really looking.
It may help to have another set of eyes look this data over as well. A partner, colleague, or coworker. Sit them down and explain to them what you are trying to do and ask them to help. Ask for their opinions.
Then take what you learn and start applying it with your next post. I never suggest you go back and rewrite an old post, because that post you wrote is what brought those users to your website in the first place. The point of a business blog is to keep adding new content to your company website, so keep doing just that. Take what you’ve learned and start posting more effectively.
And get those sales. Because if you have traffic you may not need more. You may just need to work on converting that existing traffic.
Tags: blog visitors, sales, traffic conversion, website traffic