Although many small business owners view the launch of their website with a mixture of excitement and fear, reality usually sinks in quickly. The website of a typical small business often functions as a component of the marketing efforts by that business and, as such, it is rare when the website becomes a profit center unto itself. A key challenge for most small businesses after launching their website is how to market it so that it becomes a profit center, even if it will never become the cornerstone of the business. One of the great lessons learned from the early days of on-line marketing is that traffic is not king. Traditional retailers have long understood that bringing additional foot traffic in through the doors of their stores is only profitable if those people are customers.
Foot traffic is worthwhile only if it produces more revenue than it costs.
Foot traffic that produces no additional revenue is actually harmful because of the additional investments in infrastructure and personnel that are required to manage that traffic. The same rule applies to websites. Having a healthy amount of traffic is vital to the success of websites, but only if that traffic produces more revenue than expenses. To spend on-line marketing dollars attracting traffic that produces more expenses than revenues is foolish and, through the use of affiliate programs, also completely unnecessary. Traditional advertising models applied to the Internet can successfully drive additional traffic to your website, but much of that traffic will not produce additional revenue.