Traffic Does Not Mean Users How many times have you heard a competitor, a co-worker or a friend state that they have twice as many hits on their Web site as you do? How many times have you said that yourself to someone else? I have a better boast than that. I had One-third the amount of traffic that you did, but I made three times more money. Now, isn't that worth boasting about? Traffic without income or results is like having four university degrees and no job; the framed degrees do look pretty but they are only for show. If you have any traffic to your site you have to ensure that you are taking advantage of it as much as possible. There are vital points to understand about your traffic and Internet browsing habits that will help you take better control of your own money flow and make you more successful. These points are vital to understand when you not only design your site but also your revenue model. 1. Not All Traffic is Targeted Are the users coming to your site looking for you or your services? You might be surprised to know that a large percentage of users are not finding what they are looking for when they come to a site. What with faulty descriptions in search engines, poor title design and incorrect categorization of sites by directories, a large proportion of your traffic is coming to your site and then leaving because they are in the wrong site. 2. All Traffic Has a Purpose Every visitor to every site is looking to satisfy a purpose. Users are looking to inform themselves, enrich themselves, empower themselves or satisfy themselves. This is one of the most fundamental points of the Internet that you must understand. You may not be the person or company that they use to satisfy that purpose, but they still have a purpose. By understanding this basic premise, you can start to design your revenue platform (i.e., Web site) to help satisfy a purpose. Will your site satisfy an information purpose? Will your site satisfy a purchasing purpose of potential traffic? Once you answer this question you can reorganize or redesign your site so that it better meets this goal. 3. Traffic Without a Purpose is Not Users Remember the university degrees sitting on the wall? This is what traffic without a purpose is to you. It is simply a number on a piece of paper that you can hold up and tell everyone about. If you have paid for that traffic through ads, it is a very expensive trophy to have. Traffic that is simply going through your site with no intention of ever using your services (i.e., a car buyer in India looking at an automobile site in the UAE) serves little or no function whatsoever. Let's define "users" as traffic that utilizes the services of a site. This means that traffic that doesn't use the services does not constitute users. Here is the key point: advertising that delivers traffic and not users is worthless. Large portions of dot-com crashes were about this very issue. They had plenty of traffic, but little or no revenue generated by that traffic. If, however, you can turn this non-purpose traffic into revenue, it would become traffic that could make you rightfully proud and very rich! 4. All Traffic is Interested in Something In keeping with the thought that all traffic has a purpose, that same traffic is obviously interested in something - it maybe information, entertainment, services or products. This is the key. When a visitor comes to your site they may not be interested in you, your service or your site. However, their interest in something gives you an opportunity to satisfy that craving if you are able to discover what it is. This is where the potential for non-site-specific income arises and where you can take the opportunity to make extra income. 5. Capturing Income by Capturing Purpose Each and every site is designed to achieve profit. By profit I don't only mean money. Profit is simply the achievement of a goal, whether that profit is in the form of money, education of users, the dissemination of information, etc. The key to achieving profit is to understand that your traffic has the purpose that I outlined above. Once you satisfy this purpose, then your traffic or visitors become users. Users equal profit. 6. Conclusion This philosophical discussion of traffic, purpose, users and profit is necessary to understand how you can take advantage of the traffic that you are generating. What will scare you is the amount of income that you are losing each and every day from traffic that is being wasted. Understanding how traffic is wasted is almost more important than understanding how your traffic is converted to users. If you convert one percent of your traffic into users, you can double your income by converting 1.01% of the 99 percent of wasted traffic into users without having to increase your traffic in any manner whatsoever. Instead of having to find 100 new users to generate one sale you can minimize your efforts by converting one of your existing visitors into that sale. Isn't that easier than trying to find more visitors and then trying to convert them?