My recent survey revealed that most people have problems getting visitors (traffic) to their web site. Here’s a pie chart showing the most common concerns my blog readers have…

So it looks like I need to talk more about how to increase traffic future.

Or more specifically how to attract more prospective clients and ready to buy customers.

I always think the phrase ‘traffic’ is too vague.

It’s very easy to get lots of traffic. For example you can pay as little as $0.05 per click (or 2.5 of her Majesties pennies) to get a near-instant surge of traffic from places like Stumbleupon.

That can make your Alexa Ranking suddenly look great… but does it convert into lots of happy paying customers and clients?

No, not in my experience.

Attracting targetted traffic is key, and I’ll explain the most effective methods I and others use over the coming weeks, starting with the most cost effective (best ROI) first.

However, before we get going on that, there’s a much bigger problem I need to address.

In my survey, I also asked how often my readers check their web site statistics.

Here’s the response…

Let me reiterate — if you don’t know how many people (aka ‘unique visitors’) are currently visiting your site each week, that should be your first priority… before you spend any time or money on encouraging more people to visit.

If your web site is not getting any (or very few) visitors, then obviously, increasing the volume of targeted traffic to it is a priority.

However, if your site is already getting visitors, but none of them are becoming customers or clients, you need to fix your web site and improve it’s ability to convert FIRST, before you increase the volume of traffic to it.

If you are in the ‘red slice’, don’t worry. It takes less than 15 minutes to install a small piece of code that keeps a track of your statistics. I cover a few of the best (in my opinion and expericence) statistics tracking facilities in my book.

After that I recommend you check your statistics at least once a month — or for businesses where the web is really important, once a week or more. (Many of the web site statistics packages can be set to automatically e-mail you a weekly snapshot of your web traffic.)

OK, rant over. As from tomorrow I’m on a new blogging regime of traffic tactics, plus other more common challenges including Internet business strategic planning, conversion, list building and others.

See you then.

-Ed.