Apr. 20, 2009 - Traffic to Your Site is Traffic to Your Site but Does High Traffic Make you Money?
There has been a lot of debate lately about the AP (Associated Press) and their crying fits about Google “stealing” their content. As dumb as their argument is the argument itself has spurred a lot of debate. While no one is stopping the AP from shooting themselves in the foot or even handing them a shovel to dig their own grave because for the most part the grave is already dug we are just waiting for the newspapers to line the coffin and get in but that doesn’t stop everyone from endlessly debating about why newspapers are dying. It also leads us to whole other areas to argue and Fred Wilson recently brought up some good arguments when it comes to the value of links leading to your website and which ones are important. Tech Dirt has some interesting points to make as well regarding what Fred had to say.
So what’s in a link you say? How are some links more valuable than others and what the heck could this have to do with those of us in the real estate industry?
Everything!
Make sure you read the above articles and then read the follow up by Fred Wilson here to understand what I am talking about next.
What we have here is probably the most important fundamental aspect of your blog and websites and it’s probably something that you have never even considered. For an example I will use some of my own data and basically just guestimate it but you will get the point none the less. Some links carry more weight and not in the Google Juice sense but in the sense that some are bringing people to your blogs and eventually to your sites and some carry so much weight that people stay and the ones that weigh the most are the ones that lead to conversion.
Conversion of course is the metric on your site that you can actually measure in dollar$ because it’s the metric that takes the casual visitor and turns them into someone who wants to buy a home or if you are an inspector someone who wants to have a home inspection etc. If you get a ton of traffic to your site and you have no conversions then you are more or less wasting your breath. This is the thing that all these web analysts and SEO gurus are always preaching about but usually it’s not clearly laid out as to why this is important and I think that sometimes even the gurus don’t always fully understand why it works. To be fair conversion involves so many different factors, sciences and fields that you literally have to weigh all of these things to even begin to scratch the surface as to why a person eventually picks up the phone and calls you for business. That’s what makes this line of work so much harder than say direct sales, after all Amazon can measure their success on any given aisle of their virtual store simply by looking at the number of DVDs in a specific genre that have sold. Add to that the exact nature of their website and you can know literally what keywords brought them to the site, what other areas that might have looked at and what eventually they put in their virtual basket. To me that seems easier than all the guesswork I have to do when I look at the analytics for my site.
For instance I have to look at why they might be coming there, what they “took away” from my site, what parts they read and I have to think of what they might have been thinking when they left. Sure I can measure the number of phone calls I get from my site or the nice compliments I receive such as this weekend when I was told at an open house that my website is the best for open houses of any site in Eau Claire. That made me feel great and I actually talked for quite some time about why they liked my site, what features they liked best, what wasn’t working and where I might improve things. If only every visitor told me that! Even then I still don’t have any actual money in my pocket from any of this. What I really need is for people to tell me that they liked my site and next week they want to go look at a house. That I can measure. So you can see the problems inherent with analytics in general but let’s delve a little deeper shall we?
As I was saying links can have different weight and the most powerful links are the ones that lead to conversion and this is when you write such a compelling blog post that people read it and call you to start working with you. Again this is something you can measure. But there’s a lot of in between stuff that is hard to measure such as someone who likes using your site and is casually shopping for a house. They stop once a week to see what’s new. They didn’t grab at the chance for emailed listings so you don’t know they are there other than they are just one more visitor to your site that consistently pokes around. This goes on for 2 years and then you get a call one day that tells you what you want to hear, they are ready to buy a house and found one they liked and want you to show it to them. Bingo! So like a great analytical mind you ask them all these questions as to why they called you and find out all the information above about how they poked around for two years… right? You are asking these kinds of questions right?
Again we are getting at some important stuff here but we aren’t getting to anything new. One of the important arguments being made in those articles is that traffic is ok and all but it’s not always paying the bills. What difference does it make if you have a high volume traffic site and no one converts? Where is your traffic coming from? What are they doing on your site when they get there? What’s your bounce rate? All of these things you should be able to roll off your tongue without thinking and if you can’t then you should hire someone who can explain this to you. But again this is the stuff people have preached for over a decade now. But let’s poke at something new here or flip the proverbial cow patty for a moment.
I wrote an article a while back about how to tell if your traffic is local or not because so much focus is on getting a high volume of traffic. It’s sort of like selling a house, there is a direct correlation between the volume of traffic and the eventual sale and that’s why marketing is important because you are driving the traffic to the front door. But what if in the example above you lived in Eau Claire Wisconsin like I do and you were driving a bus all over the country picking up people and dropping them off at the front door to buy the house. You could fill up bus after bus and drop off thousands of people and they would never buy that house right? If you are a home inspector and you work in a small area and you aren’t really interested in driving 1000 miles to do an inspection then it probably makes sense that your site visitors are more localized because after all they are the ones hiring you. Sure it’s great you write all these articles that are read by hundreds, thousands or even millions of people but if they aren’t calling you (conversions) for inspections you can be the most famous inspector in the world and still dead broke. (Although in this case word of mouth is nice and I am sure you could leverage your online success into real world success)
Knowing if your traffic is local or not certainly makes some sense but it’s the knowing that is the most important here. Know what your audience is, who you want to market to and then work on getting this specific traffic up. General traffic doesn’t do much other than the general argument that all traffic is good and eventually by some crazy circumstance perhaps in a thousand years every visitor would eventually convert in some way, shape or form. Sure. But I would rather make some money today.
So long story short what Fred is getting at is that some of these links are more important because some of these links are driving the high quality traffic with a high rate of conversion to your site while other traffic is not. I learned a lot about Fred Wilson reading articles on Tech Crunch. I love the site and I bring a lot of articles to other places and try my best to relate them to real estate. I also comment a lot on the site because I like engaging in the conversations. I link my blogs to the site. All of these things would be great if I were getting paid as a tech reporter or I was actively involved in the tech community like Fred Wilson is. At one point 5% of my traffic to my website was coming from Tech Crunch alone. That’s a nice chunk of traffic and it was neat to see it come, but someone on the other side of the world in the tech industry is probably not buying a house in Eau Claire Wisconsin. So you can quickly see Fred’s point with an example from me here in Eau Claire. Tech Crunch traffic is not paying my bills.
But the light at the end of the tunnel that Fred is showing with some of his numbers on some of these sites is that social networking can be very effective at increasing your conversion rate if done effectively. It’s all about the leverage and like anything, if you force it too hard you might break it.
- Never spam your friends and your friends are friends. Make sense?
- Your strongest links to your site are the ones your friends are passing amongst their friends. If you write a great article pass it to Facebook and let your friends see. Maybe even politely suggest they pass it on but don’t force it on them.
- The more friends you have is ok but it’s the best friends that count. Thousands of people on Facebook means less time spent with each one. It may seem like you’re a big shot but you aren’t fooling anyone who knows you because you aren’t spending any time with them.
- Remember your friends and keep them close. Instead of your weakest links social networking is perhaps the biggest thing you have in your arsenal and it’s probably just sitting there doing nothing. How many real estate professionals do you see fuss every time they see a new social network or complain about having to try something new? Don’t overextend yourself like I was saying but don’t dismiss these things as irrelevant.
I have been recently working on an article about leveraging Facebook and at some points I am getting 5% of my traffic from that site as well and its good traffic I know. A lot of people on my Facebook are people that are my age and they are prime candidates for the $8000 tax credit. I have been writing about this credit and seeing the results. The page on my website about the credit is also getting 5% of the traffic of my whole site and it’s going up! For me this means that people are seeing my profile on Facebook and seeing my updated Tweets with the information from my Active Rain blogs. They are reading these links and then going to my website to learn more. Now I wait for the conversion as people either call for more information or want to see a house.
Sorry this was a long one but I thought it was important to condense this (or expand itJJ) and make it relevant to the real estate industry. Happy converting!
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