Traffic is King? Content is King?

[cj]

This carries on from the 'why are we afraid to profit from free porn' thread where Nick made a very accurate post about the trends of traffic over the years, but he made a point that I am determined to remove from Oprano's bible!!!!

1.) Its ALL about traffic
1.a) Traffic is what gets you the sale
2.) OK, Content helps and is an added bonus.
2.a) Content KEEPS the sale.

Ok ... I've worked with several companies, affiliates, programs etc with what I believe to be in the top 20% of traffic volume's in the industry. I started as a designer, expanded into marketing, branched into affiliate management and today do a combination of all.

In my first few years as an employee we worked on the concept 'build it and they will come', because it was that easy. In those days, traffic was king ...

HOWEVER ... as soon as a site would be launched, we would note the conversion, and I would get instructions 'change this to red', 'make this flash', 'move this to the left', and conversions would improve or decline and we would adjust again accordingly.

So, if traffic is king, why do we tweak the *content* to make the traffic convert better (or at all) ?

It takes 2 elements to make a website - traffic and content. 1 without the other is *useless* ... you could have all the traffic in the world, but its not going to convert on a blank page. Even 'click here' is the content of your web page.

Content isn't how many pics or vids you have in your site - it IS your site. Its the design you paid $XXXX for, its the catchy phrases that catch the attention of your surfer, its the lime green blink text you have on your warning page, its the lists of tgp galleries, its the members area ... content is everything that makes up your site. How it all flows together is what makes the surfers experience good or bad - or what makes them spend money or not.

The stat we rely on like oxygen is *conversions* - not how much traffic, but how well it converts. its all most webmasters care about.

Conversion is how well your traffic matches your content ... its that simple.

If you send 10k hits that were looking for surf boards to a site that doesn't have surfboard content of some kind on it, you may get a few luck sales ... but if you send 1k of surfboard traffic to ebay 'surfboards for sale' page or an amazon surf books page, you could get 10+ sales from less traffic.

In Nick's post in the other thread, he mentioned 2 key things. SEARCH ENGINE ***OPTIMIZATION*** & Mail ...

Optimization: The art of intercepting a surfer the moment he gets online and providing him with or onselling him to the service he was looking for.

How can you make any money off traffic, if you don't have or onsell to matching content?

How can one be king without the other?