take action increasing traffic

take action! increasing traffic

"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."

Hesiod

Whenever I'm confronted with mystical forces that seem beyond my control, I become exceedingly rational. I break down problems, prioritize goals, make lists, and take frequent breaks for important tasks like reorganizing my bookshelves.

Multi-faceted problems, like increasing your site's traffic, benefit from this uptight approach, because it's hard to get your head around all the issues at once. Traffic, you see, isn't merely a function of your site's popularity or marketing budget. Many symbiotic factors influence the final numbers. Fortunately, the problem can be broken down into four basic objectives. Yes, just four:

To increase traffic to your site:

1. Attract new visitors.

2. Keep visitors around longer.

3. Bring visitors back more often.

4. Improve site speed.

The relative importance of each step varies from site to site, but they all make a difference. Most sites place too much emphasis and waste too much money on acquiring new users, while giving little thought to retaining the ones they have. It's important to build an audience. But to sustain growth, you have to keep people coming back.

So focus first on increasing traffic from existing users, getting them to return more often and perhaps use more of your services. And if, on each visit, you can increase the length of their stay, then everyone wins. You get increased pageviews, increased revenue, and a chance to build a deeper relationship with the customer. And the user's been engaged enough to warrant an extended stay. Of course, visit length isn't directly correlated with user satisfaction. A long frustrating visit doesn't do anyone any good.

The final factor related to traffic may be the most important. You could do everything else right, and still fail, if your pages load too slowly. It's the speed, stupid.

5 quick traffic tips

1. Know your user. The more you know about your users, the easier it is to find and keep them.

2. Respect your user. Stupid schemes to trick users into visiting or rack up extra pageviews always fail in the long run.

3. Work as a team. Traffic development is not just a "marketing problem."

4. Speed it up. If your site is lagging, you're sabotaging your own efforts.

5. Get in the In-box. Email is the best tool you have for attracting repeat visitors. Use it.