What is Traffic?

You can have everything right in your business, and if you do not have traffic, you have nothing.  Many of you are familiar with that, you understand that, you get that.

I believe you’re going to get a breakthrough in your understanding of traffic.  I’m going to dig into why in just a moment.

What is Traffic?

First of all: I want to define traffic.  I’m going to use that word, it’s a whole lot easier than saying the mouthful: “attracting prospects who need what you have to your website”.

If you’ve been following me long you know that I don’t like the word traffic.  It’s so cold.  It’s like assigning people numbers. Person 661249 just called.  That’s what it says when we say “traffic”. I think that the word traffic really messes people up.  You get this idea that “if I get 10k traffic, 10k visitors this month, I’ll make a living.”  You could get 100 people who really need what you have and you’ll make a whole lot more money than 10k visitors who don’t know, like, or care about you.

When we think about traffic, when we use that word traffic, what we generally mean is we want to get people to our website.  But in reality what we really want is to get people who need what we have.

Imagine that you owned a store in the mall.  You sell children’s toys.  Frankly, you could say “I would love to have lots of people in my store.  Let’s have 10k people in my store every day.  I’ll make more money.”  You probably won’t.  There’ll be people bumping into each other.  Banging into each other.  You probably won’t have 10k moms or dads that are buying toys for their kids.  You’ve got 9,900 teenagers that just think your store is cool because you’re handing candy out at the front of the store.

You can do that.  You can fill your store up by having a free candy day.  Everybody that comes in, you get free candy.  When you bring in 10k people that are looking for free candy.  Instead of buying toys for their children, they overwhelm your business.  I think the same thing happens in a web business.

If all you’re focused on is getting a lot of people to click on your website, but 99% of them are not the people that you want, then they shouldn’t be there.  They’re going to clog your website up.  They’re going to skew your results when you do a survey.  What you want are people have a need that you solve.  And preferably, the desire to solve that need.

I’m going to use the word “traffic” simply because it’s easier.  It’s simply easier to just use the word “traffic”.  But, please, I want you to translate it mentally to: you only want people to come to your website who need what you have and want.  Those are the only people.  I would rather have 100 visitors who need what I have, and want it, than 10k people who just run my web stats up.  That’s where your mindset needs to be.

Here’s the thing, once we get that mindset, all of a sudden we don’t need that much traffic.  Right now, you may be thinking, I had 1500 web visitors last month.  You’re looking at your web stats.  I had 1500 visitors last month.  Only got 20 subscribers.  I can guarantee you that if you’ve got a decent call to action, and you only got 20 subscribers, those 20 people are the ones who really need what you have. If you got 1500 last month, 1480 of them didn’t belong there.  They just don’t count.  The 20 count.

When you’re building up your traffic, you want to build up a flow of people who want to be there.  If you’ll spend your money, your time, and your energy getting the people who need to be there, you won’t have to have as many people come to your website.

That’s principle number one.