Web Applications for Business

We all know, that Internet business is all about traffic targeted to your web site and conversion rate of your website. If you will rise any of those parameters, you will win.

Conversion rate

Simple explanation: Conversion is ratio between number of visitors of your website and number of your customers.

Imagine, that your current conversion rate is about 1%. If you will improve your conversion rate only by half percent to 1.5%, with same traffic you can earn 50% more as before optimization. So think about it! It is much cheaper to optimize your website and increase conversion by 0.5% as to "buy" 50% more traffic!

I will not write here in deeper details about options how to increase conversion of your website. MUST is to use e.g. Website Optimizer from Google or any other similar tool and test, what on your website rocks and what is bouncing your visitors away from your site. Only if you will measure and test you can make correct decisions about changes on your website.

Now rise the hand all of you, who does e.g. A/B testing or multivariate experiments on your website !

Ok, I don't see hands here, but I'm pretty sure, that more than 75% of you never tried it... So before you will drive to your website more and more traffic, start with optimization of your website and test all possible variants! And the best is to start now!

Traffic

There are different strategies how to drive traffic to your site and I guess all of you know what works the best for you.

In general there are few basic traffic sources, which you can consider:

1. Traffic from Search Engines

example: visitor clicks on your link in search results of search engine like Google

Only way how to improve this type of traffic is to have relevant content on your site and make some SEO optimizations. Important are high quality back links, BUT not JUST back links :-) e.g. Google evaluates about 200 parameters about your website.

2. Direct Traffic

example: visitor types in to browser directly your website url

To improve this type of traffic is long term process. You need to build your brand. Your brand needs to be unique enough, otherwise users will not remember it next time they will search for you. Name of your brand needs to become buzz word on Internet. Try to start with PRs.

3. PPC - Pay Per Click

example: you will buy targeted clicks e.g. from Adwords

Yes, If you have a lot of money, you can buy anything :-) But think about it ? Is it cheapest way for you to get traffic ? In case of PPC is even more important to tune conversion rate of your website. The best would be for all of us to pay just for traffic, which really means sales and not just for clicks, which will generate in 99% no sales.

4. Traffic from referring sites

example: your affiliate will write blog about your great product and use your link in his blog

Yes, this is traffic we love.

This is something, what generates back links for us.

This traffic is "free" (or at least we don't need to pay for such clicks ahead)

This is AFFILIATE MARKETING.

Conclusion

I don't want to tell you, that you should do just Affiliate marketing and stop paying for PPC! No, if you want to have really stable incomes from your website, invest your time and money into each of traffic source. It is same as money investments. You need to build your portfolio, in which you have risky funds (PPC) and also long term stable investments (SEO, high quality affiliates, good brand).

How we do it in Quality Unit?

We develop affiliate software and try to use it. We try to drive more "free" traffic to our site as to pay PPC.

I looked quickly into Google Analytics now and currently we receive much more traffic from referring sites or affiliates (43.67% - over 2000 affiliates) and direct traffic (24.05%) as from search engines (32.28%).

It seems to us more profitable to pay for building of good affiliate program as to pay one time investment into PPC. Money invested into PPC will generate immediate income, but nothing more. Money invested into affiliate program generates for us long term income.

E.g. it is worth for us to pay $50 to our affiliate just for signup to our affiliate program, as to pay $1 for one click from adwords, because we know, that each active affiliate will generate for us more sales as 50 clicks from adwords (our conversion ratio is far from 50%).