TrafficTsar Web Traffic Generation

I live in a pretty small town that relies on one big event every year to keep the business owners afloat. We’re on the route to the big Sturgis Harely Rally and the bikers coming through put about 30% of the annual receipts into merchant coffers in a two week period. 

Gas, food, bike repairs, beer, clean dry sheets in a motel room - these folks are the difference between a good year and a bad year for a lot of people around here. It wasn’t always this way. You see it’s about 100 miles between towns and there was a time when the nearest town to the east and the nearest town to the south were stopping points for the annual road trip.

But our little town needed money, and so the business owners got together and made the bikers feel welcome. Huge banners on every watering hole, gas station, store, and hotel welcomed bikers to the establishment. Biker menu specials, townspeople taking pictures and engaging the riders in conversations - in short everything that could be done to make these folks feel at home and wanted was done.

Pretty soon they started to make this place a stop on their trip. They spent their money here, instead of another place down the road. The other towns still do ok, they get other business, but we own the biker business and we profit from it.

Your site traffic is just like the story of Sturgis week. If you have identified a group of visitors who come to your site and you do everything you can to make those people feel welcome, they will spend their money with you. That’s targetted traffic. 

Many webmasters and marketers look at traffic volume and want to collect as much traffic as possible believing that in doing so, they will get some of that traffic to buy. ANd it does work, but it’s not as effective as laser targetting a specific audience. When you look at your traffic, look at the quality of that traffic. Are they buying from your site? Are they returning to buy again and again? Or are they drive through surfers - whizzing through your front page on their way to somewhere else?

Website traffic is a good thing, but TARGETTED website traffic will be what adds more numbers to your bottom line. And of all the stats we webmasters watch, the money deposited to the bank account every week is the only one that really counts in the end.

I’m doing market research on several sites to determine the feasibility of a new business I’m working on. Since my project will be web-based, I need to gain good information on the amount and kind of traffic that goes to some other websites.

The question is, what’s the best way to do this? I have tried Quantcast, Alexa and a slew of other sites but they each seem to give differing results, which in turn makes me doubt the validity of the information?

Research tools:
1. Alexa, of course. This will give you Alexa’s score of the site’s popularity. Anything >100,000 is useless since the sample of traffic is too small to discern a proper placement.
2. Compete - also scores the site. Different algorithm, same idea.
3. Quantcast - another score, different algorithm.

Alexa and Domaintools.com will give you a geographic breakdown of the traffic sources to the domain, useful when looking for int’l bizdev.

Compete offers some keywords users use to find the site on search engines.

Quantcast tries to estimate #s on demographics of users (male, female, income, etc)

If you build a matrix of sites you are interested in and then figure out where you can target and be successful, you can turn the matrix into a sales dartboard.

I own a web site (I don’t want to be accused of advertisings so I won’t say which one) and I have tried everything I can think of to increase traffic..

PLEASE HELP!

The best way is to have good, useful content. If you don’t have content, nobody’s going to want to go to your site.

Other ideas (most of which you probably already tried):
Submit your domain to search engines.
Trade links with high traffic related sites (this gets people from other sites to your site and also may raise your pagerank for search engines, making you show up earlier.)
Have relavent keywords for your page, so that it shows up when people search for a topic related to your site..

If you decide to pay for a SEO, make sure you READ your contract VERY CAREFULLY. Some have been known to promise to "try" to raise your pagerank, not promise results.