Where There is Traffic, There is Hope

[yinka]

Contrary to what many people believe, the main metric online should be profits, and not traffic.

For instance, would you rather have a website that receives 200,000 monthly visitors and makes N100,000 monthly in profits, or a website that receives only 20,000 monthly visitors but that makes N300,000 monthly? I am sure the second, and this gap in the traffic/earnings ration happens in real life, too.

That being said, traffic remains a very important metric online. It’s not more important than profits, but it probably comes in a close second place.

The reason is quite simple: unless you have people visiting your website you won’t be able to engage them, to spread your message, to gather feedback, to sell your products/services and so on.

And you could go a step further: even if the money you are making with your website is pocket change right now, as long as you have traffic, you can always change your monetization strategy and perhaps improve your earnings.

In fact I both got burned and profited with this rule of thumb in the past.

When I got burned: I bought a website that was making around N80,000 monthly, despite having only 15,000 monthly visitors or so. I figured I would be able to increase the traffic and consequently the earnings, but within months of my purchase traffic dried and the earnings almost disappeared, probably because of fluctuations in search rankings.

When I profited: I bought a website that was making only N45,000 monthly, but it was receiving over 100,000 monthly visitors and it had some strong search rankings. I figured the low profit margin was probably related to a poor monetization strategy, and a couple of months after the purchase the monthly earnings jumped to N175,000 monthly.

So remember: where there’s traffic, there’s hope.