In a post last week, I referred to my second goal of internet marketing . . . and then I realized I’d never spelled out any of those goals to you before.  Whoops-a-daisy.

So, here’s the horse following the cart:

Not surprisingly, the best way to drive traffic is from online sources, rather than offline. It is exceptionally hard to get someone to visit a website from seeing a billboard, print ad or sticker on a lamp post, unless there is some compelling call out to visit that site (“Free Gold on www.getfreegold.com!”).

Remember, while lots of traffic is good, it’s qualified traffic that you really want.  You want people visiting your website that have a genuine interest in your product/show and are inclined to make a purchase, not just surfers.

For example, one of my most heavily trafficked sites is MyFirstTimeThePlay.com, thanks to a link on MyFirstTime.com (the site which provided the source material for the show).  That site gets oodles of traffic thanks to its “sex appeal,” and it sends a lot of folks our way from all over the world – and I’m pretty positive not one of them has bought a ticket.  Think about it this way.  If you’re having a birthday party, the people most inclined to give you a present will be the ones that know you.  You don’t want random people showing up just because they heard you were throwing a “rager.”  They are the ones who will trash the place and get the cops to come.  Sure, the bigger the party the better, but spend your time inviting quality guests.

• Get people to STAY on your website as long as possible.The longer the “time on site” per visitor, the longer your marketing messages seeps into the visitor’s soul, and the more likely that visitor is going to make a purchase.  It’s like shopping at a mall.  Staring at the home page is like walking by and looking in a store’s window.  Clicking on some links is like going inside.  You gotta get those peeps inside and give them enough to do and look at until they find something so compelling that they can’t leave without taking something with them.
  
  
• Get people to come BACK to your website.
  
  If a visitor doesn’t make a purchase, you want to make sure you get them back to that site as often as possible.  New content, special offers, and making sure you’ve captured their information so you can communicate all this new stuff is all essential.Keep them coming back, and coming back often, and you can increase the frequency and the number of impressions for free until they buy.If they’ve made a purchase, they’ve become even more important to you, because now they’re a potential advocate.  Repeat customers are hard to get in our industry, thanks to the price point and the lack of “updates” to what we’re selling.  But, I’d argue that we have more repeaters at shows in The Internet Age than we did before . . . because websites can re-energize and re-excite faithful customers about a product.  Make sure your site does just that.  Recharge that customer like he or she is a drained cell phone!
• Get people to SHARE your website. The web can spread a message faster than any other form of communication.  And for a marketer, that’s exactly what you want (if it’s a good message).  Give your visitors the tools to do just that and encourage them.  You want your potential and past customers to talk about you, don’t you?  They will . . . but it’s your job to give them a megaphone so they can reach as many people as possible.

Those are my four primary goals.  To summarize:  TO the site, STAY on the site, BACK to the site and SHARE the site.

TO, STAY, BACK, SHARE.  Say it with me:  TO, STAY, BACK, SHARE.  (I’ll let you all figure out your own mnemonic device to remember it.  Mine has to do with back hair.)

How do you figure out if you’re accomplishing your goals?  Anyone with a website should have Google Analytics installed, tracking every movement that visitors make as they crawl across your pages.  Watch those stats regularly and make changes until the stats move more and more in your favor.

Here’s a stat that depressed me from Google themselves:  only 57% of online advertisers have used site analytics to evaluate their campaigns . . . and only 38% have used the data to inform their next steps.

TO, STAY, BACK, SHARE!