We all hate being stuck in our car, jammed for hours on our way back home. We are not actually stuck in the traffic, we are the traffic. Nevertheless we keep on considering it a necessary pain if we want to go somewhere.
There is another form of traffic that we love, instead: online traffic.
Every single online project owner I met in my career wanted to have more traffic on his websites. And they are ready to do whatever it takes to increase that traffic. They invest in SEO consultants, SEA agencies, they buy traffic on Adwords or FB advertising.
But does it really make sense to consider the traffic as the primary goal for an online project? My answer is no. Not even if the project lives of ADs. Let me explain why.
I have a tech background and in the past I used to design networks and firewalls. When you design a network you consider the traffic a cost because if you expect a large amoount of trafic you need bigger infrastructures and more expensive devices. Exactly like the road traffic, the more the cars the more the hassle.
So why people tend to consider traffic as a positive indicator for their online projects? Because today traffic is very cheap for them. Traffic does not introduce a large cost and modern infrastructures are able to cheaply handle an amount of traffic that is much bigger the size of their business.
But in reality they don’t want traffic, they want business. That is declined in sales for ecommerce sites, clicks for ADs sites, views for news sites, contacts for SMEs, etc.
Because traffic can increment all of them indistinctly, people tend to consider traffic as the holy grail to acchieve success. In reality they are not focusing on what matter the most: business.
My suggestion is to change perspective and start thinking about distribution instead of mere traffic.
What is distribution? Distribution is a way to take your product to your customer or your customer to your product.
Distribution makes you sell more. Even better, distribution makes you get your business objectives. Just by definition. It’s not about sending as much people as possible to your funnel, it’s about having different funnels on different channels and adapt every single funnel to that specific segment of customers. It involves multiple experiences and multiple platforms where only consistency is the limit.
Distribution makes you sell more because you stop thinking how to send people to a landing page and you start thinking where people have needs and how I can reach them to provide my solutions. You stop wasting your time on Google Analytics and you start deeper analysis on your sales funnel and integrated strategy.
Traffic is a fad, distribution is solid. Traffic can stop when Google changes its algorithm, your SEA budget is over, your website is down. Distribution always works because it’s a mindset, a process and have multiple implementations.
Can traffic be considered a form of distribution? Yes sometimes. And the hard job is to make sure that traffic is used as a form of distribution and it’s not as the primary metric to take decision upon.
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