Increasing traffic is like a one night stand – wham bam thank you ma’am they hit your site and they’re gone! If you want more, the next day you need to go find more or pay for more. ;-) However when you work on conversion improvements, it’s more like a long term love affair and you are building a relationship that grows over time.

I bring this up because with the current economic situation you may feel the need to tighten your belt and cut back your marketing spend. But if you take this time to work on increasing conversions you can get more revenue out of the traffic you already have. PLUS once things improve and you can ramp up your marketing budget, those conversion improvements can help you generate exponentially greater revenue.

The other things you can work on during a slow-down that will help you long term, are to add elements to your site that increase stickiness and add more unique value. I primarily recommend this for visitors, obviously, but also to help your rankings in Google. I was just reading Google Webmaster support about their view of affiliate sites. It spells out the fact that thin affiliate sites won’t rank well and emphasizes that she (Google) likes unique content.

Google Webmasters Help – Affiliate Programs

Google believes that pure affiliate websites do not provide additional value for web users…

Affiliate program content should form only a small part of the content of your site…

Use your website to build community among your users. This will help build a loyal readership, and can also create a source of information on the subject you are writing about. For example, discussion forums, user reviews, and blogs all offer unique content and provide value to users.

Keep your content updated and relevant. Fresh, on-topic information increases the likelihood that your content will be crawled by Googlebot and clicked on by users.

“Pure affiliate sites consisting of content that appears in many other places on the web is unlikely to perform well in Google search results and can cause your site to be negatively perceived by search engines. Unique, relevant content provides value to users and distinguishes your site from other affiliates, making it more likely to rank well in Google search result pages.”

So in summary, 3 things you can work on during an economic downturn, that will help you build long term success: 1) Conversion optimization 2) Add elements to increase site stickiness 3) Create more unique content or community around your affiliate offerings.

Part of the inspiration for this post, namely the one-night stand analogy, came from today’s Grokdotcom blog: When Consumer Confidence is Low. You can read the rest for more insight… or if you want help building your conversions, the guys over there at Future Now are the guys to see!

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