If you operate a commercial web site you know that how many visitors you get can be a key factor in your success. You may also be spending a lot of time or money on traffic promotion.

But do you spend as much money in getting more from your existing visitors ?

I would like to bet the answer is NO !

Achieving top 10 rankings on Google to get more and more traffic has become the number one task for many web site owners. Numerous techniques have been written about for increasing traffic, but far fewer articles or reports are written about making better use of existing levels of traffic.

Let’s suppose we were to spend 15 hours a month for 3 months, promoting a website and our time is worth $50 per hour, so that’s $750 per month. From those efforts, let’s be optimistic and say we manage to get 1,000 more visitors to our site each month.

Or alternatively we use Pay Per Click at an average cost of $0.75 per click to get 1,000 extra visitors to our site, at a monthly cost of $750.

If 2 out of every 100 visitors sent to the landing page buy our $100 product those 1,000 visitors would provide 20 more orders valued at $2,000. That gives us a net gain of $2,000 - $750 or $1,250 per month after deducting advertising costs. Over 3 months the net return would be $3,750.

Now let’s assume we spend $750 per month for 3 months, not on promoting the site or buying traffic on Google Adwords but on landing page optimization, designed to get more sales from our existing traffic.

Let’s assume that of the existing website traffic, 1,000 visitors are split off and presented with an optimized landing page that converts 5 in every 100 visitors into buyers. Those 1,000 visitors would produce 50 orders, or 30 more orders per month than they would have generated going to the existing un-optimized landing page.

Our landing page optimization has resulted in 30 more orders than would be achieved from our existing landing page. After deducting $750 in landing page optimization costs it leaves us with a net gain of $2,250 per month, or $6,750 over 3 months.

From 1,000 visitors per month driven to the site using traffic promotion, we have gained $3,750 over 3 months, compared to $6,750 in extra income through landing page optimization.

Of course one might argue that with different numbers the results for landing page optimization would be different, or that these figures have been chosen to prove a point. However there is nothing special about the figures used, they are quite average.

Another great benefit to landing page optimization is that you do NOT pay for it month in, month out, like traffic promotion. Once the optimization is done you continue to reap the extra profit every month, at no extra cost.

You can use our handy online tool the landing page optimization qualifier to see if your landing page meets the requirements for a landing page optimization process and determine a payback period. You can also use our landing page optimization test duration calculator to estimate how long optimization would take.

Using traffic promotion, an extra 1,000 visitors per month would cost us $750 every month, with a net gain in income of $1,250 per month.

Using landing page optimization on 1,000 existing visitors we stand to gain initially $2,250 per month rising to $3,000 per month after the 3rd month.

This illustration demonstrates how using landing page optimization on 1,000 existing visitors can be far more profitable than spending money on traffic promotion to drive 1,000 extra visitors to a site.

About the Author: Tony Simpson provides advice and a wide range of web site optimization services designed to make your website work for you.