It is a truism that "you have to have the right traffic" to convert.  Convert people to what? Well, it depends:

• RSS readers
• Subscibers
• Ad clicker-throughers
• eBook downloads
• And so on....

At the end of the day it is about converting people to a vaulable asset.

And I don't disagree with any of that because we have been experimenting with traffic a bit ourselves.

First You Need A Goal

When we started this division of company the goal was to build a good base of regular readers by offering targeted and high quality blog articles (*cough*) and unusually useful free tools.  We would then convert some percentage of this group to paid subscription members interested in advanced SEO tools.  We estimated that with 1,000 unique readers a month we could flip the switch on our subscription service and have the business go profitable due to natural conversion.

Getting Started

We did the obvious stuff - we identified where our target market (SEO'ers, e-commerce store owners, etc) congreated and started, politely, building a presence.  This was designed to complement our market research and help us trim and adjust our rollout schedule.  It has also helped us identify some additional places where we can deliver tools and automation.

And so a trickle of really high quality traffic starting coming in, with little increases here and there and no drops.  Reassuring!

Moving Stepwise

In the early days we got a few Stumbles and a bit of a Digg rush, but the base of our readers didn't really increase very much.  Duh, no tools and not much content.  So we decided to keep up our social authority efforts at the SEO watering holes and ignore traffic for a while.  This let us concentrate on building out the initial SEO tools and making modest announcements about our intentions.

For example, our Free Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer is an extremely poweful, Yahoo store specific SEO tool.  This brought in a lot of Yahoo merchants and got a lot of attention from the SEO community focused on that market.

And several thousand people have used our Digg Friend Finder to increase and improve their Digg friend network.  Presumably a fair portion of these folks are people using social media for SEO fashion.

Each of these tools bumped up our regular visitors, as we expected.  We suddenly had both content and tools, and people were responding to it.  I discussed how powerful this was in my post on SEO Tools vs. SEO Content.  Basically tools deliver a lot of repeat traffic and to the extent that they are unique they provide stickiness.

Time to Get Some Bulk Traffic?

People love lists, so we released lists in the last two weeks:

• 117 SEO RSS Feeds Worth Reading
• Downloadable List of 2,162 Social Bookmarking and Networking Sites

BAM! as Emeril would say (sold to Omnimedia for $45M, BAM indeed!), thousands of new people show up.  And keep showing up in a reducing curve over the next week.  Which is exactly what happened before, so we were curious to see if the outcome would be different.

What's New Pussycat?

Our RSS readers took a big jump.  And the number of people navigating to our site directly from bookmarks (that is so 2001!) jumped considerably too.  We're watching the waves of Digg and Stumble traffic subside, but unlike in the early days, we're seeing more readers washed up on shore: there is enough here to keep them coming back.

Google SERP Inflection Point

I know we all live in the google matrix and so we have to try to deduce causes from the visible effects, but there is no question that our google traffic started jumping as well for the keywords we're most interested in.  We notice that, right before we released the list that we'd gone from pariah to PR3 in three months.  And we had been seeing some additional google traffic so that change didn't totally surprise us, but it was really almost a week after the first list that we saw the dramatic increase in google search traffic.  So clearly there was some confluence of events going on in google-land and it was some aspect of the traffic/linkfest that tipped us over.  We'll probably do a few more Stumble/Digg things in the next month or so and see if the google traffic increases after that - after all, it might be a mighty coincidence.

Monetizing

We've reviewed other tools and criticized them for not having a clear monetization strategy, terms of service, or a privacy policy. We've had several people tell us that we could be doing a much better job of monetizing rather than using Adsense (horrible) and Amazon Affiliate links. They're completely right, and we're going to be experimenting with some other monetization strategies on our free and freemium tools. But we've been very clear that our real goal is to build up a community that will be receptive to paying for a subscription for our premium tools when we roll them out. We figure that if we offer free and freemium tools that are a cut above other free tools ( i.e. they actually work and produce actionable results) and we offer some things for free that other sites require payment for, when we launch our premium service people will see the dramatic increase in value and will sign up.

As Time Goes By

And obviously that sticky effect should continue to improve as we have more tools online and more content.  If we kept, say, half a percent of the Digg/Stumble traffic as regular readers in this wave, maybe we can get that up to one percent in a few months with some of the new tools we've got in test.  Since we're building SEO tools and not MySpace widgets I wouldn't expect that the upper end of capturing readers will ever be very high, but that is ok - if you're running a gossip site you need 40K readers/month, but our targeted sales community is much smaller and more cohesive.

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I ran across that Buck Converter circuit graphic quite some time ago while I was looking at table saws and I have been looking for an excuse to use it!