On this blog and many other blogs, you’ll get a lot of recommendations and see a lot of talk about traffic. If yours is a business or sales site, blog or not, the presumption is that the more traffic you get the more money you’ll make. Is it true? Well, kind of; let’s talk about it.
First, there’s this reality; you will have a better opportunity to make more money with more traffic. There, I said it. But “more money” has to be qualified because if you make a dollar it’s more than ten cents. So, the question has to be modified to ask “will you make enough money to survive with more traffic”. This is harder to answer.
Basically there’s two types of traffic: random and targeted. Random basically means people who find your site for whatever reason. Targeted means people are looking specifically for what you have to say or offer. Depending on what you do and what your site is about, traffic will determine whether you’ll make enough sales to be able to live off of.
For instance, does anyone really think that if you owned the Best Buy website that you wouldn’t make money? The same with Amazon. Amazon used to be targeted only for books but those days are long gone. Best Buy was never niched, if you will, for anything because they offer tons of different things. Those are monsters that most of us will never be able to live up to.
If you had a site that only sold red platform sequined women’s shoes and you optimized it properly, if there was a market for that particular thing based on keyword research you’d probably get a lot of visitors. The more visitors you get, the more sales you have the potential to make because that’s targeted traffic.
If you sell fishing equipment but your copy talks about different places to go fishing without ever talking about the equipment, it’s a closer targeted audience but not quite targeted for what you’re marketing. The idea behind something like this is that people will fall in love with what you’re talking about, decide they want to visit those sites, and might buy from you; might, that is.
If you sell books on cats but you spend your time talking about every animal on the planet but cats, you’re not going to sell any books at all because your site isn’t geared towards your product. You can get as many visitors as you want because people love animals, but they’re not going to stick around to see your book on cats because they didn’t come looking for cats.
That’s the thing about traffic. Most of it will probably come from search engines, and you don’t ever get to talk to those people. So their spiders only determine what your content says your site is about, and if you get it wrong, you’re not going to get the right people there. If you’re lucky enough to get 100,000 people a month you might get lucky to sell .1% of products or services. Priced high enough and you might be a happy person; priced within your industry and you’re just scratching the surface.
This is the part where it’s not necessarily easy to attract the proper target audience of visitors sometimes. You can’t be so niched with your product or services that the search engines think you’re trying to game the system, yet you need to make sure you talk about what you do and your product enough, and in the proper words, so that they’ll rank you high enough to help you make money, if that’s your goal.
Sometimes, that’s why it might be smart to pay someone to help you at least take a look at your site to see where you might be going astray. Then again, I would say that. 
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