Getting Traffic Is Half The Battle

By December 4th, 2007 Leave a response Business, The Net

You know the old saying, traffic equals money? Well, it’s only half true. Getting traffic is only half the battle and it’s not even the most important half. What is more important than getting traffic is what you do with the traffic after you get it. There are tons of sites with a lot of traffic but make very little money because they don’t monetize it properly.

John Chow dot Com – One Year Ago Vs. Now

If you read my recent income report than you know this blog made $27,240.83 last month. That’s a nice big increase over the $2,139.93 the blog made in November of 2006. However, what many people find shocking is the traffic the blog got in November 2006 was actually higher than the traffic from November 2007.

income-vs-traffic.png

The above chart illustrates the growth in traffic (red bars) vs. the growth in income (blue bars) from November 2006 to November 2007. In November 2006, the blog received 217,876 unique visitors and 329,853 page views. This is actually higher than the 185,386 visitors and 323,572 page views it did in November 2007. Yet, the blog income was over 12 times higher. Making money online has way more to do with optimizing income from traffic than just getting traffic.

It’s A Lot Easier To Double eCPM Than To Double Traffic

Many webmasters make the mistake of thinking traffic and income are proportionally related to each other. They think all they have to do to double income is to double their traffic. This simply isn’t the case. The easiest way to double your blog income is by optimizing your advertising mix. Believe me, it’s a lot easier to go from $3 eCPM to $6 eCPM than it is to go from 250,000 page views to 500,000 page views. One will require a major marketing effort while the other may only require placing your ads at a different location.

You Must First Get The Traffic

While optimizing income from traffic is extremely important, you must first get the traffic. If you’re a new blog than getting traffic is what you should concentrate on. Sure you can tweak your blog until it gets over $80 eCPM just like John Chow dot Com. However, that won’t make much of an impact on your finances if you only get 1000 page views a month. In real life, you wouldn’t be able to get that high of a eCPM with that little traffic anyway. This is because traffic and income is exponentially related: Doubling traffic equals more than double income.

Generally speaking, your income goes up exponentially higher with increasing traffic. This is because you’ll be able to attract special deals that smaller bloggers can’t get. Higher traffic also allows you to command a higher ad rates because ad networks will fight over you. All this comes back to my Big Site Rules, Small Site Drool post.

If you’re getting decent traffic from your blog but not making much money, then work on optimizing the revenue mix. Can your blog handle more ads? How about affiliate programs? Are you using every possible methods to make money online or are you still living by the Google?

If your blog is new then building traffic is your number one goal. Here are some traffic building posts to help you out:

Just to clear one last thing up for anyone who maybe thinking that this blog hasn’t experienced any growth during the year. While the blog traffic hasn’t changed much in a year, it’s readership has increased tremendously. A year ago, this blog had just over 1,000 RSS readers. Today, it has over 14,500. When it comes to making money online, unique readers is a lot more important than raw page views.