I am sure I have listened to just about every Internet Marketing Expert alive on this planet talk about web traffic. Some will tell you, that you need to get as much web traffic as possible, others will tell you that you only need a little bit of traffic to make money on the web. Each of these gurus talk about how they achieved so many sales from 10,000 visitors, or we will guarantee you will make at least 1 sale from every 1,000 visitors you have at your website even if it’s a ugly website.

Well, I don’t want to give you any false hopes on how many sales you will make, in fact, I want to share with you, what can really go wrong on the web if you are not seriously careful in getting the right web traffic. I had been working with a couple of different mentors for our business from both the traditional Bricks and Mortar perspective and an Internet perspective. I wanted to test out a new sales page I had written to see if we could sell any of our Microsoft Office Specialist Excel Training kits online. Everybody who has seen our training programs have always commented on how easy they are to understand and how much more professional they are to others on the market.

With the help of our internet mentor, we built a sales page, and then used Google’s Adwords to drive traffic to our website. The advert we had put together on Google was nothing short of amazing; our Click Through Rate or CTR was as high as 12.5% which is absolutely out there. I had achieved something I never thought I would. After 24 hours we had 1,200 visitors with about 120 people registered for our free chapter extract, after 6 days I had had over 10,000 unique visitors to our website with approximately 900 people having given us their email addresses to get their free chapter.

One Catch – WE HAD ZERO SALES

What I had effectively done was to drive traffic from Google to our site to get their free chapter but the traffic that was driven to our site had absolutely no interest in buying anything from us, they only wanted what we going to give them for free. Now to give you an idea of what that traffic cost, to get those 10,000 unique visitors to my site had cost me just over $3,500 US dollars. I should make a note at this point, I had implemented all the programs, internet marketers recommend like using AutoResponders, doing follow-ups on the people who had registered etc.

One of the things I had done prior to building this site was to put into place a number of strategies I had learnt from an audio package called the Mr H Interviews, if you want to listen to them, there is about 5 hours of interviews and you can get access to them by visiting my website – http://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp In these interviews this gentleman talked about learning about who your customers were and whether the traffic coming to you site is valid for your site.

Driving traffic to a site is easy. Just give something away Free that people want and you will get people to your site. But, just like in our bricks and mortar building, we only want to give the free things away, if people truly want to purchase our wares, or what is the point in being in business.

Prior to driving this traffic to our site I had developed the website to track where people were clicking off, I did a follow-up survey 7 days after they visited my site and I asked them a range of questions such as were they interested in buying my product and it was at this point I realised that the traffic I had purchased from Google via the Adword campaign was absolutely the wrong traffic for my website. I started to get comments from people demanding that I give them our training material for free, that they weren’t going to pay for it cause they had no money and I was this big company who should be giving it for free. I must have got about 50 responses along these lines and very quickly I realised, the traffic I had driven to my site was the wrong traffic. More than that, I can honestly say, getting responses like these really do get depressing especially when I am only a small Australian business with just nine people working for me.

Anyway, where I made my biggest mistake was that the Adwords campaign I had used was simply the wrong advert to be catching the customers I wanted. In the advertisement I had stated that who ever clicked on this link would get a Free Chapter Extract of our Excel program. It turns out, the type of customer I had attracted was one that only wanted everything for Free.

One of the lessons I learnt in using Google, Overture and other pay-per-click search engines is that it is not the volume of traffic but the quality. In our adwords campaign, I wasn’t using generic keywords, I was in fact using very targeted keywords but still attracting the wrong type of customers. I needed to qualify my customers through the advert a lot more than what I had done.

Before you even think about building an Internet business you really do need to have a very clear understanding of who your customer is, what it will take your customer to buy, what attracts your customer, where your customers can be found and how you can check to make sure that the customers you are attracting to your website is valid for your business. The other issue to make a special note of, is make sure you build your website that can test where people are leaving your site, how far they are reading to and what their objections are in buying. If you put these strategies into place, you will very quickly see whether your website is working for you, but even more so, you will have the information to know whether any changes you make are in fact working. Essentially you want to take the guess work out of your website.