You can have everything right in your business, and if you don’t have traffic, you don’t have anything. Many of you are familiar with it, you understand it, you understand it.

I think you will make a breakthrough in your understanding of traffic. I’m going to delve into why in a moment.

What is traffic?

First of all: I want to define the traffic. I’m going to use that word, it’s a lot easier than saying the bite: “attract prospects who need what you have for your website.”

If you’ve been following me for a long time, you know I don’t like the word traffic. It is very cold. It’s like assigning numbers to people. Person 661249 just called. That’s what it says when we say “traffic”. I think the word traffic really ruins people. You have the idea that “if I get 10,000 traffic, 10,000 visitors this month, I’ll make a living.” You could get 100 people who really need what you have and you will make a lot more money than 10,000 visitors who don’t know you, don’t like you or don’t care about you.

When we think of traffic, when we use the word traffic, what we generally mean is that we want people to access our website. But really what we really want is to get people who need what we have.

Imagine you have a store in the mall. You sell children’s toys. Frankly, you could say, “I would love to have a lot of people in my store. Let’s have 10,000 people in my store every day. I will make more money.” You probably won’t. There will be people bumping into each other. Hitting each other. You probably don’t have 10,000 moms or dads who buy toys for their children. You have 9,900 teens who just think your store is cool because you’re handing out candy in the front of the store.

You can do that. You can fill your store with a free candy day. Everyone who enters receives free candy. When you bring 10,000 people looking for free candy. Instead of buying toys for their children, they overwhelm their business. I think the same thing happens in a web business.

If all you’re focused on is getting a lot of people to click on your website, but 99% of them aren’t the people you want, then they shouldn’t be there. They will clog your website. They will skew your results when you take a survey. What you want is for people to have a need that you solve. And preferably, the desire to solve that need.

I will use the word “traffic” simply because it is easier. It’s easier just to use the word “traffic.” But please, I want you to mentally translate it to: you only want people who need what you have and want to come to your website. Those are the only people. I’d rather have 100 visitors who need what I have and want it, than 10k people just running my web stats. That’s where your thinking should be.

Here’s the thing, once we have that mindset, we suddenly don’t need that much traffic. Right now, you may be thinking, I had 1500 web visitors last month. You are viewing the statistics of your website. I received 1500 visitors last month. I only have 20 subscribers. I can guarantee you that if you have a decent call to action and you only have 20 subscribers, those 20 people are the ones who really need what you have. If you got 1,500 last month, 1,480 of them didn’t belong there. They just don’t count. The count of 20.

When you are increasing your traffic, you want to generate a flow of people who want to be there. If you spend your money, time, and energy getting the people who need to be there, you won’t have to have as many people visiting your website.

That is principle number one.