When I read people talking about huge amounts of traffic, big email lists, and tons of Facebook Fans, it makes me laugh.
Understand that I have built an email list with 10 million, and generated over 50 million visitors to a site…back in the day.
The key is, back in the day; today with the impact of social media, and more and more choices, the question is not how much you have, but what is the quality, responsiveness, and conversion you get from those big numbers.
Surprisingly I’m seeing more success with focused, “smaller” audiences (I mean there are only so many Facebooks out there), where people actually know like and trust the business they are visiting. Here’s a quick video, followed by some specific actions you can take to find quality, segment your traffic, and separate the wheat from the chaff…
Quality over Quantity: Why Old Ideas Are Fading Out
In the early days of the Internet, it was all about more, more, more…you’d see crazy traffic numbers, mostly inflated by laundering traffic and various means to jack up impressions to get more advertising dollars.
With the advent of smart tracking and wiser online businesses, combined with the insane and overwhelming choices we all have, it’s become much more a game of smaller groups of people who are truly interested visitors and…
Know, like, and REALLY trust you (you can’t fake this, sorry old Internet marketers, as I shared in a recent video, Trust is the New Currency).
You Get What You Look For…
The days of bragging how many people visit your site are gone, unless you are selling ad impressions…and even then at $0.25 eCPM’s I’m seeing, that’s not going far unless you generate millions and millions of visitors.
Sure it’s easy to say I’m going to monetize by advertising, but the fact is unless you are doing something HUGE, you are going to get less traffic. TV shows get less viewers, everyone is dealing with smaller audiences yet we all want to believe that we will get millions of visitors who come back again and again…
The only ones doing that are the big players, with big funding, and trusted brands. While many of my startup friends target this kind of growth, I like to ask them…
What are you going to do to make money if you don’t get millions of visitors, and can’t rely on advertising to fund your venture?
This is where they usually go silent, because they are in love with their solution, and in a weird “Law of Attraction” irony, they feel that negative talk is against their dream, so they shut you off.
Here’s one key to remember; it’s tougher and more lucrative to continually probe the problem, how the customer sees it, and then integrate how you see it. Your goal is to find the key problem you solve, not a group of problems, because people don’t really know what they want, what their problem is, and even though you have written down what you THINK it is, they are still figuring it out.
Get out among them as Steve Blank says, “get out of the building” and get into the people. Listen to them, and take your time to define and figure out their problem.
Focus and Clean – Quality is the Goal
My best advice is to segment, segment, segment…if you have traffic, watch where they enter your site. Is it search, links, social media, email visitors, where are they coming from?
And how do those groups of people react to your funnel, how you introduce them to your product or service? Where do you lose them? Which traffic converts better so you can stop doing so much and focus on what works?
Quality is not easy, which is why most people focus on quantity. Quality will help you thrive, bet on it. Quantity is an old illusion that we need to wipe from our minds, as well as claiming that all businesses will be funded by advertising.
The big shift about to happen is based on this realization; you should be able to do more with less. Instead of telling me how you’re going to get rich with millions of people, tell me how you’ll survive with half, a quarter, or 10% of that traffic.
Because if you can’t answer that question,
you’ll quickly be eliminated.
How are you looking for quality in your marketing? Share your thoughts below, love to hear what you have to say.
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