This post is about getting more traffic to your website, more specifically determining how many visitors you'll need. I'm going to cover some topics about setting some goals and determining how many visitors you might need in different scenarios to reach those goals. I'll briefly describe what an ad impression in, what a click through rate is, and what a conversion rate is so that then you have a solid idea of where you need to be when you run ads or decide to spend money on online marketing. This should be really useful if you have never done online marketing, or have been a little in the dark about how it all works.

Step 1 Figure out how much you want to earn.

The first thing to ask yourself is... How much do I want to earn? how much is my product? And... how many sales will it take to meet my goal? These are very basic math equations.

For example, when we prepare our spreadsheet we will have a few different variables. The first is our sales goal, the second is the average price of our product or value of a sale, and third is how many units we will need in order to reach this sales goal.

Simple math: Sales Goal divided by Price = Number of Sales Required to meet goal.

If we want to earn $7000 in sales, we need to sell 70 units @ $100.

Easy stuff.

Step 2 Focus on website conversions

Once you have potential prospects viewing an offer, you need to improve your conversion rate. Being famous has no value if your offer is not irresistible.

I've purposely put conversions next on the list because even though you probably don't have traffic yet, most people will be spending a lot of time on their website's design and hopefully a basic offer before they start sending traffic. Improving conversions will be something that you will need to continually test and tweak in order to maximize results.

There are many different factors that can affect conversion rates. A few basic examples are... How bad do people already want your product? How well is your offer written? Is it clear how to acquire your offer? Is it appealing?

Figuring out a conversion rate is also very simple math. You simply need to divide the number of sales you have done by the number of visitors from that same time period.

So in the example, if we had 7000 visitors at a 1% conversion rate, then we would meet our sales goal of 70 sales.

7000 x 1% = 70

Going backwards, you can also figure out what your conversion rate would need to be if you only had a specific number of visitors.

If 70 sales were needed, and you were only able to get 3500 visitors, then you would need a 2% conversion rate.

70 ÷ 3500 = 2%

Like I mention in the screen video, please leave me a comment if you would like a copy of the spreadsheet I put together for this lesson. It will allow you to quickly experiment with some of these formulas. By doing so it will also help you figure out whether or not you need to adjust other variables such as the PRICE of your product.

Remember, a lower priced product will require MORE sales - which means you will need more visitors and also a higher conversion rate in order to meet your sales goals. Once you do these first two exercises then it will give you a good idea how to approach your pricing and how you will be marketing your product.

Will you be building an email list? Capturing visitors as they leave your page? Pay Per Click? Social Media? These can all have an effect on the number of visitors your site receives.

This is where it will end up costing you money to get the word out there. You could end up investing a lot of time to get organic traffic - such as from SEO or Social Media, or even partnering on email lists...

Or alternatively you may find it is easier to send the same amount of traffic to your site simply by purchasing a targeted Facebook or Google Ad, or other ad placement.

Think in terms of the cost of your time vs. paying for clicks.

No matter what anyone tells you, there is some cost involved. Either your time, or the cost of buying advertising.

That is unless you are well connected with someone who owns high traffic web properties, or an email list, and that is willing to send you traffic for free. Posting Social Media status updates still costs you time and may not always be the most effective way to target your market.

Which takes us to step 3...

Step 3 Where does the traffic come from?

In this section we talk about running ads and awesome stuff like impressions and CTR and CPM.

Ok so an ad impression is whenever someone SEES your advertisement or message. I would consider this like when your ad appears on a website and is shown to a visitor, or when someone OPENS an email.

Next would be your Click Through Rate (CTR). This is when someone actually CLICKS on your ad and visits your webpage and sees your offer.

Typically you can either buy ads where you pay per click, or you pay for every 1000 impressions (CPM). In the later you would pay for every 1000 impressions, but your cost per click would be determined by how many people out of every 1000 clicked on the ad (Click Through Rate).

Like an offer, an ad must be appealing. It needs to attract the attention of a user and prompt them to click through to view your offer.

By improving Click Through Rates, you can most likely improve conversions.

You will also need to do some research to make sure that there is a big enough market to reach in order to get the impressions you need. Don't be afraid to get VERY granular in your ad targeting. It may take a little more work up front but as a long term strategy I think it could be very effective.

I would STOP thinking that you need huge amounts of traffic to meet your sales goals. A better approach would be to spend more time determining WHO your perfect customer is, and then target them specifically. Think about where they would hang out online, what they read, what they like, etc. THEN serve your ads through those platforms.

If you don't do it this way then you just risk dumping money into more and more ad impressions, or more and more clicks. If those clicks are not targeted visitors then you could just be dumping money, or time, down the drain.

So how do you do this?

Another lesson to follow.

Next lesson I'll cover some good places and ideas for impressions.

You need to spend money to earn money.

Not every visitor or customer comes free. You need to keep track of your monthly spend and compare it to new sales. Does it make sense? Is your sales return 100% or more?

Dollar for dollar, only you know how much it takes your business to survive.

I once heard that a good rule of thumb for hiring employees is that they should make the companies they work for $3 for every $1 spent. Can Internet marketing do that for you?

Now get to work.

Another Example...

If you do have sales, you can determine what each visitor is worth.

Quick check on a site has about a 3 percent conversion rate.

So 3 sales for every hundred visitors.

Avg sale = $53. It's making about $1.60 per visitor. Which is $160 and three sales for every hundred visitors.

That would mean to earn $1600 you would need to get about 1000 people to visit.

3% of them would actually buy something.

Scale up: $16,000 revenue / 10,000 visitors = $1.60 per visitor

If you wanted to generate 1000 sales with a .03 conversion =
33,333 visitors needed

Just ideas. Why not shoot around some of your own by leaving me a comment. What is the price of your product? How big is your market?

I'll have more updates and tips on this topic if you are interested.