Conversions - How To Acquire Your Internet Goals
Everyone is concerned about getting traffic to their websites. After all, More Traffic = More Sales, right? This is a myth that too many people believe. If you're serious about making money from your web presence, you need to concentrate on the quality traffic that leads to conversions. (CONVERSION = Your end goal acquired by your visitor when visiting your site. This can be anything from purchasing a book to signing up for your newsletter.) In this article, we'll discuss how to profile your target visitor, where to find them, and what to do to your site leading them to a conversion.
Profiling Your Target Visitor
Yes, I said it! That dirty little word: PROFILING! 1,000 poor quality visitors usually isn't as valuable as 10 quality target visitors. In order to get what you want out of your visitors, you need to first understand your best visitors. If you're selling skateboards, you'll be looking for young people from approximately 8-30 years old. Most would say, "30 years old?? Isn't that a bit old?" This is why you need to really know your customer. A 25-30 year old has more of a disposable income and is more willing to spend a couple hundred bucks on a skateboard than an 8 year old that only gets one really big gift a year. Following this same example, you'd be targeting mostly athletic males in urban areas. Once you've successfully targeted your visitors, you can begin to optimizing your Google Adwords campaigns geographically and start promoting your sites in places friendly to this type of visitor.
Promoting Towards Your Ideal Customers
There are many ways to go here. On the web, some of the main ways would be with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, socially, and organically. PPC is the quickest, but most expensive way to derive the ideal visitor. The beautiful thing about PPC is that you can test the efficiency of your ad material and your landing pages. It's the most controlled environment on the web, and I highly suggest using it even in small amounts just to feel out the best path to take. With Adwords, you can write different copy for the same ad and choose to have the ad with the best Click Through Rate (CTR) show more often. This way you can let your visitors choose the most enticing ad. Also, you can set up conversions through adwords. You'll be able to track how many visitors went all the way from Click to Conversion. After this, you can determine from which keywords your ideal visitor is coming from as well as many other crucial statistics.
Organically, you can now take this data and put all of your SEO efforts into those ideal keywords. You'll be surprised after doing the research at what keywords are bringing the conversions. "Buy Blue Widgets With Defects" may bring you closer to a sale, and be easier to obtain organically than "New Blue Widgets". It's a crazy world and no one knows our best customers like our best customers. That's why letting our customers do the work of profiling themselves is so valuable. PPC isn't just for advertising, but also for testing.
Socially you can get some great targeted traffic once you know what to look for. With the myriad of niche blogs, forums, and social communities out there, it's easy to find exactly where your target visitors are playing. Go in, become one of them, and point them in the right direction. If you do it with good intentions and valuable contributions, you're likely to be accepted. If you go in with the wrong mentality, chances are you'll be called out as a spammer and have to start the process all over, if possible. Read More...
