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Different kinds of traffic

Guest post by: Seth Godin

Article Overview: So, here's your choice: You can have a billboard in Times Square (seen by 2 million people a day), or you can be the keynote speaker at the Allen & Co. annual millionaire media mogul retreat, listened to by about 150 people for an hour.

Different kinds of traffic

So, here's your choice:
You can have a billboard in Times Square (seen by 2 million people a day), or you can be the keynote speaker at the Allen & Co. annual millionaire media mogul retreat, listened to by about 150 people for an hour.

A no brainer? I hope so.

Of course, it's not just the demographics. I think it's the quality of the interaction.

Here's a comparison between two hot properties (MySpace and Facebook) and Amazon.

Should Jeff Bezos be in mourning? After all, MySpace is killing Amazon in traffic.

Of course, this is all irrelevant. Not surprising, but irrelevant. It's not surprising because it's just human nature to measure a simple metric, and to want to improve it. It's human nature to believe that the more people get exposed to your idea, the better you're going to do. It's human nature to want to 'win', however you define winning.

The problem here is that Amazon users visit to buy stuff, and MySpace users visit to flirt.

Last time I checked, flirting was a fairly unprofitable activity.

There's a long list of high-traffic sites (beginning with theglobe.com and extending to hotmail and many others) that couldn't monetize. They were stuck because the bait that got them the traffic had no room for a reasonable hook. You could use a TV like model and interrupt with irrelevant ads, but it doesn't work so well.

All a long, long way to say something simple:
Whatever your website, I think you want better traffic, not more traffic.

You want to figure out why the right people will come, not build a sideshow that attracts exactly the wrong people.

At trade shows, there's always a few booths with magicians, fire-eaters or bikini-clad models. And post-show, there's no evidence at all to indicate that the noisy attractions did very much to improve the actual metrics of the booth.

So, maybe it doesn't matter how your site does compared to a site in a different category. What matters, I think, is how your site does compared to last week or last month, and what's happening to your conversion.

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Article Tags: billboard, different kinds, keynote speaker, times square



Related Forum Posts
How to bring Traffic? - I'm not sure who I'd buy traffic from. It sounds risky since you never know where the traffic comes from. I was listening to some podcaster complaining about his entire traffic was coming from SE Asia. There's practically no conversions for from the traffic.
Re: Using Twitter To Double Your Traffic? - I'm sure in many cases Twitter sends more traffic than Search Engines because most people don't have good enough SE rankings to get SE traffic. But anyone can get Twitter traffic. The problem is that Twitter traffic won't convert for the most part and SE traffic will. I'd venture to say that 98% of the time getting just 100 visitors from search is better than getting 2000+ from Twitter.
Re: Google updated page rank - Getting traffic is easy. Anyone can spend hours per day on social sites and get a ton of traffic. The difficult part is getting targeted traffic that actually converts into money in one way or another. That's exactly why most people fail. They spend all their time getting as much traffic as they can without going for the right kind of traffic. When they realize they aren't making any money they just quit.
Re: Using Twitter To Double Your Traffic? - [quote="Trent Brownrigg":v038ixh7]I'm sure in many cases Twitter sends more traffic than Search Engines because most people don't have good enough SE rankings to get SE traffic. But anyone can get Twitter traffic. The problem is that Twitter traffic won't convert for the most part and SE traffic will. I'd venture to say that 98% of the time getting just 100 visitors from search is better than getting 2000+ from Twitter.[/quote:v038ixh7] I agree with Trent, un-targeted traffic is very difficult to convert. Phil
Re: From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense Part 1 - How To M - Hi David - traditionally social media traffic does not convert very well. Search engine traffic is by far and away the best kind of traffic you can get because they are specifically searching for an answer to a problem. Social media traffic are just browsing out of curiosity and usually don`t click through on ads. Social media traffic, however, typically leads to more links to your articles (from bloggers, website owners, forum members, etc) which then in turn boosts your rankings in the search engines. More will come on the AdSense topic in the coming weeks!


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