I have a site where I'd like to double how much money I'm making from it. The instant reaction to that for some people is "Good luck. Doubling your traffic won't be easy." But that's wrong thinking. Traffic is just part of a two-pronged formula in which each prong multiplies the other.
Whether you're selling stuff, running CPC (cost-per-click) ads, running affiliate deals (getting paid when your visitors click a link and buy something or sign-up at the linked site), etc., you need to look at your earnings per visitor (EPV). That's taking the amount of money you made in a specific period and dividing it by the number of visitors you had.
If you made $100 on 10,000 visitors, that's an EPV of $0.01. Now, if you keep EPV at one cent, then to make $200, you'll need 20,000 visitors. But if you can raise EPV, you'll need less. If you could earn two cents per visitor, then that means you'll make $200 on 10,000 visitors. You've doubled revenues without changing traffic at all.
But how do I increase EPV?
Well, for each site that's different. If you're selling stuff, you want to look at ways to increase the average purchase. That can range from offering a special impulse buy at checkout to improving the way you market. For example, at Amazon, when you add an item to your shopping cart, they show you things you might like based on both your purchasing patterns and the purchasing patterns of other people who bought that item. That doesn't double EPV, but a percentage of buyers add one of those items to their carts. Those buyers would have just bought the item they came for, but the recommendations helped inspire them to buy more.
If you're doing CPC ads, you want to look at ways to make people click more ads and increase the amount you get for each click. This can be done by optimizing your ad placement to generate a higher click rate. It also helps to optimize your page content to ensure you're getting the most appropriate and highest paying ads.
If you're doing affiliate deals, experiment with your messaging and the selection of affiliate deals you're offering. If you're just doing buttons or banners, consider doing text-based ads with testimonials and personal recommendations from yourself. Think of ways that you'll not only get your visitors excited enough to click, but excited enough to buy once they have clicked.
Increasing your traffic is all well and good. But increasing traffic is like trying to reach the speed of light. As speed approaches c (the speed of light), mass approaches infinity, so each gain becomes that much harder. It's the same with traffic. If you're trying to push from 10,000 visitors to 11,000 visitors, that's just 1,000 visitors. If you're trying to push from a million visitors to 1.1 million visitors, that's 100,000 visitors. Both gains are 10%, but one of those 10% gains requires 100 times more visitors to achieve than the other one does. That's when EPV becomes even more important. If you've got 10,000 visitors or a million, but you're still at one cent EPV, getting that EPV to two cents is about the same amount of work.
I'm not saying that you should just forget about increasing traffic. Increasing traffic is good, but it's even better when you're increasing EPV. Always be thinking of ways to get more value out of your traffic. If you want to increase revenues 100%, you could increase traffic by 100% or increase EPV by 100%, but the cool thing is that if you increase traffic by 50% and EPV by 50%, you'll increase revenues by 125%.
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