By Melissa Shea

Finding ways to drive traffic to your web site should be one of the top priorities of any marketing strategy.  We all want more traffic so that we can introduce more people to our services, but before you invest time and money in driving people to your web site, you want to make sure that once a visitor is coming to your web site, they are doing what you want them to do – which is to get them on your mailing list. Whether it’s through a freebie or a purchase, building your mailing list is the ultimate goal of any good marketing strategy.

Before you start any traffic-building campaigns first analyze what you want the visitor to do and implement a path for the visitor to take.

If you have several products or services, you’ll need to create opportunities to capture your visitor’s email address in multiple ways.

1. Always provide an “opt-in” method for your home page. This is usually done by offering a freebie, such as a list of top 10 tips, free e-book, audio training, etc. Coffeeshopreneur recommends using Aweber for an opt-in box and email marketing system. Having an opt-in box allows you to capture the email address of visitors that are researching products and services and are not ready to make a commitment. Once you have their email address you can begin an email marketing campaign to promote your services to them.
2. If you have several products or services, create a landing page for each one that is optimized specifically for that service. This will allow people who are looking for that exact service to find you easier and it will give you more high value content for the search engines to index. On each landing page sell a service – even consider offering several price points so that you don’t miss an opportunity to make a sale.
3. Consider other ways to collect a visitor’s email address through asking them to sign up for a newsletter, blog updates, quizzes, or polls. Engaging your visitors on your web site provides a more interesting experience for them as well as many more opportunities for you to create a relationship with that person.

Once you have set up all of these creative ways to building your mailing list, compare the web site statistics of your site to the number of people you are getting on your mailing list. This is critical to analyzing whether or not your web site is working for you. Ideally you will capture 100% of your traffic through a “forced opt-in” method, which means your visitors must sign up for your freebie on the home page to get access to any of your site. This method works well for some internet marketers, but not everyone uses this approach.

Here are some ways you can analyze your opt-in methods to see what is working best for your web site:

Forced Opt-in: If you have set up an opt-in box on your home page that someone must fill out to get a freebie and access your web site, you should compare the following numbers:

1. The total number of unique visitors – these are people who have come to your site for the first time.
2. Your bounce rate – these are the number of people coming to your web site and leaving without clicking on a second page. A good average bounce rate is around 30%. If it’s higher then you might have a problem.
3. The total number of people who opted in for your freebie during the same time period as the statistics for 1&2.

If your number of unique visitors and your number of people who opt-ed in are close – congratulations!!!! You’re doing a great job. But, if there is a large disparity between 1 and 3, and your bounce rate is high you need to reconsider what you’re doing by asking yourself these questions:

Does the home page of my web site look professional?

Does my home page communicate my services effectively?

Does my freebie have a perceived value?

Many times it’s very hard for the business owner to evaluate their own web site and marketing. Try to find a successful colleague that will take a look at your web site and give you some feedback. Coffeeshopreneur can also provide you with a Web Site Review that will analyze your web site and statistics for you.

Multiple Opt-in Opportunities: If you are providing multiple ways for visitors to connect with you, then you will need to analyze the success of each opportunity to determine which ones are working for you and which ones need attention.

1. Compare your total unique visitors to the total number of people who have given you their email address through all methods – freebies, purchases, polls, etc. If those numbers are close, then you’re doing a great job.
2. Then compare the total number of unique visitors per landing page with the total number of emails you received for each landing page campaign – where it’s for freebies, purchases, or other methods. This will allow you to see which methods are working effectively and which are not. You should analyze the methods that are not working and try new things to see if you can improve the effectiveness of that page over time.
3. Compare the bounce rate of each page. This will let you know if a page is not optimized correctly for your service or is not communicating your message. If the bounce rate is high on a particular page, you should conduct keyword research to make sure you are using high value keyword phrases and implement better SEO on the page.  Coffeeshopreneur can help with SEO and keyword research as well.

Getting traffic to your web site is very important, but if your traffic doesn’t convert to customers, then you’re missing opportuntinties every single day. Before you spend time on free or paid traffic strategies, make sure you test your web site’s conversion with the traffic that you have now. Once you are converting most of your visitors to your mailing list in some way you are ready for the next step.

And remember – always work on free traffic strategies first! Click here to get Coffeeshopreneur’s 101 Link Building Tips to help you get started.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.