When it comes to selling products & services online – the QUALITY of your traffic is much more important than the quantity. In today’s blog post I will share with you my favorite tools for driving high quality traffic and a lot of it!

When we’re talking about the “quality” of your traffic, we’re talking about:

1. Buyers intent – are these buyers?
2. Demographic match – is this traffic your actual target audience?
3. Cost effectiveness – can this traffic reach my CPA (cost per action) goals?

If we get 50 comments on this post, I will release 2 more of my favorite webites and tools to drive more traffic!

Web Traffic Tools You Should Be Using!

1. Google Analytics

First and foremost, Google analytics is absolutely crucial in driving quality traffic. The ultimate mistake in driving traffic is not tracking your results. Google Analytics allows you to track conversions (goals), tells you which traffic sources are converting the best, and lets you segment your data so that you can go out and find more high quality traffic. As far as I am concerned, it is the most essential tool in internet marketing. Visit Google Analytics!

2. Quantcast

After tracking, you need to make sure you’re doing your market research. If you don’t know anything about your demographic or target customer, you’re going to end up driving untargeted, low quality traffic to your site that doesn’t convert. Quantcast gives you a demographic profile of your site, or, if you’re too small, your closest competitor – so you can get a feel of what audience you should be targeting. We also use it for buying advertising – it tells you what demographic usually visits whatever site you want to advertise on, so you know if your traffic is going to be targeted or not. For more on quantcast and market research, check out our Market Research series over on our blog. Visit Quantcast!

3. Google Website Optimizer/Visual Website Optimizer

The thing that really sets apart top tier internet marketers and the rest of the crowd is simply this: split testing to increase conversion rates. It not only separates them from the crowd now, but will keep their advantage for years to come. Basically, Google Website Optimizer and Visual Website Optimizer are split testing tools that allow you to test different versions of your website against eachother simultaneously to determine which version generates a higher ROI. The higher your conversion rate, the more you can spend on traffic, the more you can spend on traffic, the better you can compete. For example, if you are able to pay $40 per conversion, and your competitor can only pay $35, you can basically wipe the floor with them. It’s the ultimate competitive advantage and if you are selling something online – if you are not split testing, you absolutely need to be. Visit Google Website Optimizer!

4. ClickTale & CrazyEgg

Another tool in optimizing websites – Clicktale and Crazyegg give you in depth information on how your visitors behave when they get to your website. Crazyegg offers heat map tracking – showing you what places your visitors click on the most. It can show you places where you should have something for sale – for example, you might have an image that gets a lot of clicks – maybe that means you should link that image to something. Clicktale goes a little more in depth, offering actual recorded sessions of how your visitors interacted with your page. You can literally see them scrolling through your site and moving their mouse (a little creepy), and make business decisions based on their behavior. These are both massively useful tools and highly recommended. Visit Clicktale and CrazyEgg!

5. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools basically gives you an in-depth look into how your website is functioning. It shows you what your pageload time is (according to Google), which is a known ranking factor, it shows places on your site where there are errors or broken links, and it shows you your impressions/clickthrough rate/positioning for keywords. It’s a useful tool in determining how well your SEO efforts are going, and we use it especially to see if we need to optimize our title/description tags (if our clickthrough rate is lower than it should be). Visit Google Webmaster Tools!

6. RankTracker

Ranktracker is one of the most powerful tools we use – it allows us to track our organic search rankings for hundreds of keywords at a time. Whenever we begin SEO work, we put in our keywords into rank tracker, and it allows us to see what gets us the best results. For example, we’ll buy a linkwheel package and see how many spots it moves us up in our rankings – and based on those results, determine what kind of linkbuilding we need to continue with. Tracking your results online is essential – and RankTracker is a must-have in your SEO arsenal of tools. Visit RankTracker!

7. SEO Spyglass

SEO Spyglass allows you to see your competitor’s backlink profiles. Now, that might not seem like much at first, but it actually is incredibly powerful. When Google has ranked a site #1 for a keyword that you want to go after, the best place to start is by mimicking that #1 person’s backlink profile. SEO Spyglass doesn’t just give you their backlink profile, it shows you the pagerank of each backlink, as well. Using this data, you can go out and essentially copy their backlink profile, moving yourself up in the rankings and dominating your competitors. Visit Seo Spyglass!

8. Big-Boards.com

I honestly think that forums are highly underrated. Forum traffic is some of the highest quality traffic you can get – you can build strong relationships on forums and a strong brand, and do it quite inexpensively. Forum advertising is notoriously underpriced (we’re talking about 30 bucks a month to reach a highly targeted audience). You can run sponsorships for sections of forums, create sticky posts and interact with your potential customers – ask them what deals they want from you, etc. In the internet marketing world, the biggest forums are WarriorForum.com, WickedFire.com, and DigitalPoint.com. I know a lot of people that have created 5- 6 figure businesses just from their relationships on forums and from selling their services there. It’s one of the easiest ways to get started marketing your products & services. Visit Big-Boards.com!

9. Market Samurai

One of the best internet marketing tools there is, Market Samurai is absolutely clutch when it comes to keyword research . It allows you to masterfully research any niche – you put in your target keywords and it will tell you how competitive they are, and if you really stand a chance to rank. We use it every time we are beginning an SEO campaign to help us to determine which keywords to go after first. If you want to learn more about market samurai specifically, check out our Market Samurai Review. Visit Market Samurai!

And that’s it! Those are 9 of the best tools that we use to maximize our quality of traffic. There’s plenty of other tools out there that you can use as well – what are some of your favorite tools for internet marketing?