Merchants Group

Don't doubt it: Traffic is the key to success in online marketing. You can have great products, a fine website with enormous amounts of valuable relevant information (content); a great choice of SE optimized keywords, and still not be making significant money online.

Sell "Shovels"!

Consider the experiences of prospectors in the California gold rush of the mid-1800s. Only one or two percent of such prospectors got rich digging in the gold-fields. Maybe 5% made a living at it. But there was one group of entrepreneurs out there with a much higher success rate - somewhere between 50% and 80% got wealthy at it. This group was comprised of the merchants who sold the tools, equipment, and supplies that the prospectors needed to go out and dig.

We know the merchants sold much more than shovels. They sold "panning" pans, pick axes, tents, food, cooking gear, clothes, weapons, liquor, and a full panoply of tools and supplies that the prospectors needed. Let's use shovels as an icon for all these necessities - because until the prospector stuck a shovel in the ground, he had yet to actually begin prospecting.

It's a fact. Gold rush merchants were a lot more successful "prospecting" for customers than most prospectors were at finding gold. These merchants made fortunes at it and lived well on the proceeds. Many of the grand old mansions of San Francisco were built by such merchants after the gold rush dust had settled; and many of their businesses continued to thrive for years afterward.

The Same Principle Applies Today

If you want to make big money on the Internet, you need to apply the same principle today that the gold rush merchants applied in their day. Sell shovels - or the Internet equivalent of shovels. Today's equivalent is website traffic - or, more specifically, the means of getting the traffic you need.

Let's say your product sells for $10 and your website traffic amounts to 100 visitors a day, or 3,000 visitors a month. And let's suppose your site is so well designed and so well written that 20% of your visitors become customers. Terrific! So you make $6,000 a month. Not too shabby.

How likely is that 20% conversion rate of visitors to customers? It's not impossible if you are selling exactly what your visitors are looking for; but it's still highly unlikely. Most successful online marketing sites convert between 1% and 2% of their visitors into customers. And that's the good ones.

So what does it take to make the same $6,000 a month if your conversion rate is only 2%? Answer: traffic of 30,000 unique visitors per month - or 1,000 visitors per day. Do website owners actually achieve such traffic? You betcha! Some get ten times that amount of traffic. So at $10 per customer and a mere 2% conversion rate they make $60,000 a month. Would you agree that's some business?

You Can Do It Too

There are two principle elements to the resources you need to duplicate that kind of success:

* Products of which Internet entrepreneurs are most in need - that is to say, traffic-creating "shovels", and

* The willingness to buy and use those traffic-creating tools yourself.

Following these two simple principles will do the job, because you will be positioning yourself in exactly the position of the gold rush boom-town merchant. Instead of using shovels to dig for gold, you use them to attract the gold prospectors whose need for them is absolute.

The reasoning and methodology of this approach to online marketing are inescapable. And the know-how, and tools (the shovels if you will) required to implement it is widely available online. You won't have to look far to find these resources.