This post is a guest post from Jordan Fried, The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Higherclick KFT.

Follow Jordan Fried as he talk about internet marketing, among other things, at JordanFried.com

Let’s be honest – we all want more traffic, right? Regardless of whether you’re a website owner, a blogger, an internet marketer or a business owner, we all have wanted some additional web traffic at some point. However, more traffic to your website is most likely not something you need. All too often I meet domain owners who feel inadequate or insecure about their web traffic and for no good reason.

After all, like a beautiful woman’s age, traffic is nothing but a number. More importantly however, it’s not the size of your traffic that matters; it’s what you do with it (let’s call this rule #1 of web traffic).

Not only is this true – it’s something to live by.

Let’s setup a “Would You Rather” scenario to hit this point home.

Imagine having 10,000 visitors come to your site this month. Each visitor checks out 2 or 3 pages and then leaves.

Now imagine having 1,000 visitors come to your site this month. 680 visitors leave your site after viewing 2 or 3 pages but you manage to capture 320 new subscribers to your mailing list.

Which would you rather have? The 320 new subscribers of course!

The thing about traffic is once it has left your site – it’s gone forever unless you’ve managed to complete a sale or capture some form of user information. This could be a name & email, a phone call to your toll-free line, a mailing list subscriber or even a new facebook fan or twitter follower. Without some action from your visitors, what good is the traffic?

So, let’s get rid of the common misconception that we all need more traffic to achieve all of our online goals. Instead focus on the many ways you can turn your current traffic into something of value. This way, when you do finally get that traffic spike you’ve been hoping for, you’ll be able to convert as much of it as possible.

Here are some very innovative ways of capturing and converting traffic.

#1 Chatting With Your Visitors

If you’re selling a product or service online, you may have visitors who have questions but are too shy to ask, or too lazy to figure out who to contact. HigherClick.com provides premium SEO services to companies. No doubt some of their visitors will have questions about the service that HigherClick provides and thanks to the chat box in the bottom right hand corner of the site, visitors can interact with the company. The chat box is provided by Zopim.com which is a great tool if you feel your visitors could benefit from this added service. Another alternative to Zopim is Olark.

#2 Optin Box Header

Powerful headers are another great way to interact with your traffic and capture it in the form of a name or email address. Take a look at what Heather Allard does with her site, TheMogulMom.com.

The header is a bright call to action that entices visitors to sign up to receive a free daily email. It’s colorful and it’s the first thing you see on this site. It’s a great way to convert incoming traffic.

#3 Sidebar Optin

Here you see CopyBlogger.com offering up their impressive social proof numbers to entice new visitors to join an already large community of subscribers. Here they’re offering free updates as well. Everyone loves freebies!

#4 End of Post Call To Action

Another great way to capture traffic is by a call to action at the end of a new blog post of page. Take a look at this example from ViperChill.com. After reading an awesome post on this site I’m likely to respond to a call to action like this by sharing with friends or signing up to get free updates.

#5 Popup Optin Box

A great way to capture your traffic is to throw a free gift in their face. A wordpress plugin called PopupDomination helps create a popup like the one you see above. This “lightbox” popup offers a guide called “The Blogging Profit Formula” to visitors for free as a way to build their list. This is a very popular incentive.

Could offering a free ebook or ecourse to your visitors help capture some of your existing traffic?

#6 HelloBar

HelloBar.com allows you to add a top bar to your site to direct your visitors to where you want them to be on your site. Definitely a useful tool!

These are just a few of the many creative ways to turn your website and existing traffic, however small, into something tangible. Remember, the worst thing you can do is let your traffic come and go freely without somehow interacting with them.

Have other ideas on how to better convert traffic and get more optins from your visitors? Would love to hear from you below!

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