But…. if you want to make money with a website getting targeted traffic can be more than a struggle.

I recently built a website for a gentleman who had a pretty good idea. Generally it was a membership website that allowed people to vote on current political issues. The results of these polls were then automatically emailed to all government officials letting them know what real people thought of bills, laws, government spending, taxes, and all things political.

I wasn’t sure if this would take off or not but promoting it was not my job. My only responsibility was to create the site and make it easy for the owner to post the daily questions and allow him to edit an editorial type page. Once the site was live he decided to hire an emailing service to do the initial promotion. He paid ~8k to have a mailing of one million sent. The emails were very professional and straight to the point.

The cost to become a member of the site was $20 a year. However this was not mentioned in the email. The email was a teaser crafted to simply get the users to click through to the website where the sales page was waiting.

Results of the campaign? All 1,000,000 emails were sent. The “open rate” was calculated to be 60%+. However, “open rate” in this case was defined to be a “view”. In other words, they were counting how many times an image was downloaded in the html email. This is pretty arbitrary in that it doesn’t mean that the email was actually read. Only that it opened in a preview pane in an email client. But still, this means that at least 600,000 emails had a chance to get read.

Out of these 600,000+ emails, a little over 40 people clicked through to the website, and of those one person joined. Not very good. The owner of the website was very discouraged.  I let him know that there were better methods to drive Targeted Traffic to the site but by the time the email campaign was over he was so disappointed that he simply shut the site down and refunded the one subscriber’s membership fee.

So clearly, getting views of his offer was not a problem. After all he did get 600,000 unique “email opens” in a matter of a week. So what happened?

The problem was the fact that this email campaign was not targeted at all. The list was very general, while his offering was very specific. Now granted, targeted email list mailings are very expensive, but in this case if he could have found a list of people with above average interest in current politics I’m sure his response rate would have been much better. In the long run he could have spent much more per lead but would have had better sign up rate.

So what would I have done differently in this case? In hindsight, I think I would have tried to find some ezines catering to people with political interests. The is one of those cases where a joint venture would have been perfect. Simply contact the ezine publishers and ask then to run your ad. Many times you can get them to do it on a 60-40 cut. Since this is a annual membership he may have given up 40% of the first year profits, but aside from attrition, and considering the membership shows value, the follow on years membership fees would be pure profit. Another thing he could have done was to make the membership free and monetize the site with ads and/or AdSense.

He could have started posting in related forums with a link to his site in the signature. He could have also wrote a few political articles and posted them to the article directories. Both of these methods are perfect for a sub-niche such as the one he was working. The fact that he was passionate about this niche was certainly a plus and he had every opportunity to succeed.

The biggest thing I would have done differently is I would not have given up so soon. There’s no way to tell if a service like this would take off in a big way. I’ve been surprised with ideas that I thought had little chance of success proving me wrong in a big way. I’ve seen way too many ideas such as this tried then given up only to see something very similar come along and make a killing.

So what have we learned?

Not all advertizing methods are good. Targeted advertizing is king and Targeted website traffic even if its not near as much, is 99.999% better in 99.999% of the cases.

If I had my choice between 600,000 general website visitors and 50 that were very interested in my offerings for the same price I’d take the fifty 99% of the time.

Keep your sights on your goals and here’s to your success!

Ken