Recently I was reading an article about traffic vs. conversion and the author couldn't decide which was more important since you need both to have a successful business.

Now before we discuss the importance of each of these things, let's make sure we understand what they are.

Traffic - the number of visitors to your site.
Conversions - your site visitors who perform the action you desire (i.e. buy something or join something) - usually given as a percentage.

It obvious that you need both because without traffic your offer won't be seen and without conversions you're not making any sales.

So which is more important?

Wrong question!

The real question should be, where should you devote most of your effort?

And the answer is - drum roll please ...

Conversion.

Sure you need traffic but if a million people visit your site and no one takes the desired action you need to make some changes.

Most online marketers think that if their sales are down they need to increase traffic to their site. However, veteran marketers know that before they increase traffic to their site, they need to have a site that is performing well.

Increasing traffic to a site that has a poor conversion rate is a waste of effort.

An important aspect of improving your website conversion is to continually keep tweaking and testing your website. Test new headlines, different guarantees and different prices. Sometimes something as simple as changing a few words to bold or adding a P.S. will improve your conversion.

Of course with every change you'll need to drive some traffic to your site and measure the conversion rate. If it helps, keep the change and then tweak something else. If it doesn't help, keep what was working the best and tweak something else.

Only after you've got a site that performs well are you ready to start driving a lot of traffic to it.

If you'd like your own personal copy of "Website Conversion Secrets: How To Make Your Website Sell Like Crazy!" by Ewen Chia you can get it inside the FriendsWhoCare Circle of Friends area. This is NOT a free eBook and normally sells for $27.

Note: Testing and tweaking should also be applied to your ads. Whether you use ezines, PPC, sig files, search engines, links on other site, classifieds, etc., you need to be testing and tweaking to get a good conversion rate for those who see your ad.

You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated.

Susan Carroll

Susan has been helping people with their online marketing for more than 4 years. You're invited to join her membership site.