Traffic: Quality vs Quanity

When you really get into the business of making money online, you will always find yourself scouring the internet for new and fresh ideas. Many times I do this through visiting some of my favorite sites or check out make money online targeted message boards such as Digitalpoint.

Whether it is people trying to sell their site or just talking about revenue, I always see people blaming their low revenue on a lack of traffic. While it could definitely be a viable problem, poor traffic numbers alone is not the reason for low revenue.

For most of my personal sites, it is a rare sight to see 1000 plus unique visitors per day, yet I am still making more money than people see 2000 unique visitors on a consistent basis.

So does it really matter how much traffic you get as long as its quality traffic?

To really understand this debate, we need to look at some of the ways people try and drive visitors to their site:

Guest posting: One of the best free methods to increase your page rank is by probably posting on somebody else’s site. While that is all good, I can’t tell you the number of times I see people post on sites that have no relation to the niche of their own site. So yeah you may have guest posted on JohnChow.com and received hundreds of visitors, but what good is it if many of them are probably not interested in your unrelated niche?

Social networks: There are probably hundreds if not thousands of social article networks, and there are probably tons for any given niche. If your site is financial related, then would it make sense to submit your article to a network targeted for sport topics? Articles submitted through StumbleUpon will also bring lots of un-targeted traffic as well.

So we figured out some of the problems with the quality of traffic you may be bringing in, but, once you get them there, then its time to look at your monetization process:

Non-targeted ads: When it comes to which ads to display on your site it is extremely important to put up ads that are directly related to your site. If you run a site on how to buy and sell stocks, then you DO NOT want to put up an advertisement for an affiliate network. It just won’t covert. Many times people are blinded by who their real visitors are. Regular people that come across your site through searches and so on, have no interest in high ppc campaigns.

Low quality ads: The problem with many affiliate programs is that they usually contain a bunch of bogus or “rip off” products. If you are not prepared to use that specific service/good that you are advertisting, then what makes you think others will. When traffic is low, it is better to push quality, well-known products that people can trust. It would also help if that affiliate also dished out some deals or other free stuff.

So while a larger quanity of traffic is always a positive, what good is that traffic if you don’t have some proper monetization process or that traffic is not targeted at all?