Site traffic doesn't matter

There's a new and very enthusiastic kid on the block who you may have met already. His name is James and he calls himself The Infopreneur. His work ethic is excellent, and he's shown how consistent posting can really drive traffic to a new site.

He's been talking about monetization for some time, and his objective is to generate enough income to stop his full time job and take up blogging as a career. I have no doubt that he will achieve it.

This morning, however, he posted some income projections that are sadly flawed. And I thought I'd use the example as a case study to prevent Mike's Life readers from falling into the same trap. You can read his post here: It will only take 8 people a day.

The mistake James has made is to assume that overall site traffic is what leads to conversions, and of course that isn't the case. In his post he suggests that five people a day will buy one of his tutorials, going on to say:

"Now 5 people a day isn't that many really about 1% of the total visitors to this site on a daily basis which I think is quite a realistic target."

The problem is, that assumes every single daily reader will actually read the sales page for the tutorials, and that 1% of them will then choose to buy one. The reality is that only a few of those readers will actually click through to the sales page, although once there expecting 1% to buy is a sensible aim.

Let's look at the real scenario:

We'll assume that overall site traffic is around 500 unique visitors per day.

What we have to gauge now is how many of those will actually click the link or advert to the sales page for the tutorials. Let's assume it's 5% of those, and that's very high, much higher than I achieve on this site.

What we're now saying is that 25 people a day will actually read the sales page - the other 475 visitors will be reading the latest posts and archived posts - they won't even notice or know that the site is selling stuff.

Quick tip: When I'm working with people on monetization I use an easy rule of thumb to gauge how many people we can get to a sales page. Base it on the number of new subscribers you get each day. If you get 20 new sign ups per day to your subscriber list, then you can realistically expect to get 20 per day to at least view your sales page.

Now we can apply our 1% conversion rate, and that means James will sell 0.25 tutorials per day, or one every four days. If he wants to achieve his aim of selling five per day, then he needs to get 500 visitors per day to his sales page, which probably means overall site traffic of 10,000 or more uniques per day, unless he can get other people to drive traffic to it as affiliates.

So what does this all mean in terms of learning for us?

The key to success is not overall site traffic, but the amount of traffic you can get to your actual sales page to read about your products.

This means we really need to focus on getting traffic to that page. How can we do that?

• Keep linking back to the sales page in future posts
• Send out review copies and ask people to post reviews of the product
• Offer an affiliate program to get others to drive traffic to your sales page
• Get it into the Clickbank market place

What else can we do to drive traffic to our sales pages? Please post your thoughts below.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Talking about driving people to our sales pages:

If you've found this useful, you'll probably benefit from The Beginner's Guide to Blogging, a 60 day course for people keen to earn an income from blogging. Read about it and the seven day trial you can do here: The Beginner's Guide to Blogging

These may also be interesting:

1/ Four steps to blogging success in 2010

2/ Why you have to become a better writer

3/ Will Carling and RUCKU - a perfect example of a community website