A few days ago, I discussed site strategy with a prospective client who sells e-books. His concern was that sales from the site aren’t nearly what he’d like them to be and he wanted to know how to improve them. After we’d spoken for a few minutes, he asked whether I thought a complete site redesign was appropriate. I responded with a question that, from his reaction, seemed impertinent: How many visitors do you get each day?
To those just getting started in the online world, the question is usually surprising, and understandably so, because a site makeover just seems to be an obvious improvement. But the question of traffic is paramount, because without it you can change many things about a site and none of them will make the slightest bit of difference. Why?
I’ll use his site as an example. Right now he receives about fifty visitors each day, converting about 1% at $23 per sale. Over the course of a 30-day month, he will gross about $345 in revenue. Now, assume he opts for the redesign, does the impossible and manages to get everything right the first time, and spends $500 in the process. ($500 would be a fire sale price for a WordPress theme). The redesign works great: he’s boosted his conversion rate to 1.25% (a very strong increase.) Instead of $345/mo in revenue, now he pulling in $431.25. It will take him a few months or so to recoup his initial investment, but after that everything else is gravy. What could be wrong with that?
Now consider an alternate scenario. Lets say that, instead of doing the redesign, he begins to aggressively promote his site by blogging each day, posting links to his content on Twitter and Facebook, commenting on blogs, and generally doing things that attract new visitors. After one month, he has modestly increased his traffic to 100 visitors each day. Of course, he’s still hamstrung by the same old blog layout, converting at the same old 1% rate. Or is he? The math is same as in my first example and it tells the tale: monthly visitors X conversion rate X price, which gives us $690(3000 X 1% X $23) . That’s considerably better than the results with the redesign, and he didn’t have to spend the $500 to redesign his blog.
Of course, in this post I’ve used small numbers, but that’s really my point. If you’re just starting out, anything you do aside from building traffic will deliver statistically insignificant results: you won’t really know if what you did had a great effect or if you simply just had a great (or lousy) day.
Focus on building traffic first and foremost. You can worry about the other things later – when they’re worth worrying about.
