An Easy Way to Test Whether Your Traffic Sources are Working

Basically, you only need two things to make money with internet marketing.

1. an offer
2. targeted traffic

As long as your offer generates more than the cost of your traffic, you are in profit.

If you're promoting an offer with free traffic generation methods, you are in profit as long as you convert at least one sale.

Whilst this business model sounds really simple, consistently generating an income with it is very difficult.

Firstly, you have to present your offer in the form of a digital sales funnel which converts enough of your visitors into leads and customers to cover the cost of your advertising.

If you're using free traffic, your funnel has to convert well enough to make the time you spent getting the visitors worthwhile.

For example, spending a week creating and posting content on social sites or clicking for advertising credits at traffic exchange sites to earn one $4.95 affiliate commission is something most people would consider to be a waste of time.

Secondly, the other really essential skill you have to cultivate is the ability to measure the quality of your traffic sources.

This is true for both paid and free traffic sources.

For traffic to be profitable, it needs to consist of REAL people who are genuinely interested in your offer.

This is what is meant by the term ‘targeted traffic'.

In order to measure the quality of your traffic sources you need to be able to track conversions.

Conversions are simply measurable steps that your visitors take which show they are interested in your offer.

There are some types of conversions besides just sales that you can track to evaluate the quality of a given traffic source.

These include:

• lead capture form submissions
• clicks on a call-to-action button or link

Today, I'm going to go through the call-to-action-clicks conversion tracking method that I have been using a lot lately with my advertising sources to assess how many of my visitors are actually showing an interest in my offer..

The way it works is as follows:

1. You create a splash page like this one, with at least one call to action.
2. Your call to action should be linked to a tracking link. I am using a premium WordPress plugin called PrettyLinks to create my tracking links but there are lots of link tracking services you can use for free.
3. You create duplicate splash pages for each traffic source you want to test, each with a different tracking link connected to the call to action on your splash page.
4. Each splash page and tracking link should be used for just one traffic source.
5. The number of clicks you get on the tracking link connected to the call to action on each splash page will be automatically recorded as you send more and more visitors to the splash page. This gives you a measure of how many of the people who land on your splash page actually respond to the call to action on it.
6. A traffic source which is highly targeted to your offer will give you lots of clicks on the call to action which are recorded by your tracking link.
7. If you are paying money for, or spending time on a traffic source which does not yield many (or any) tracking link clicks, this would indicate that the traffic source is not right for your offer.

This method enables you to evaluate a traffic source more quickly than would be possible by measuring events which occur less often in a promotional campaign like squeeze page submissions and sales conversions.

The above conversion tracking method is best suited to traffic sources where you are guaranteed a set number of clicks to your website.

Examples of this type of traffic source include pay-per-click solo ads where you pay a set amount for each click, or traffic exchanges where your visitors are incentivized to visit your website so that they can earn credits to promote their own.

If you are using a traffic source which does not guarantee clicks to your website, that is, where your visitors see your content or advertisement and then decide whether to click through to your website, it is not necessary to create a splash page.

You can test traffic sources like these by simply posting your tracking links and measuring the number of organic clicks your content or advertisements generate with each traffic source rather than using a splash page.

A social post where people only click through to your offer if they want more information about it is an example of this type of traffic source as these clicks are made by people who have already shown that they have a genuine interest in your offer.