On my subway ride to work, I was reminded about an Internet dilemma we should be thinking about more on our blogs & SEO websites: Traffic vs. Sales. I think we regularly concern ourselves with building Traffic instead of understanding how to build it into Sales.

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About a month ago, at the subway transfer station of Yeon-san-dong here in Busan, South Korea, I noticed an area in between the two paths going East and West that they were doing a bit of construction work. I wasn’t sure if it was a temporary fixture or a more permanent one. Eventually, after a week or so of working on the little area (they move fast in Korea!), I saw some Faceshop products and a sign which made me think “Good idea! Great place for almost any store! Lots of traffic to take advantage!” (Faceshop is a Korean version of “The Body Shop” basically).

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Every day as it was being built, I kept on thinking to myself — “smart, very smart…whoever decided on building this here will be getting accolades from Faceshop management. There’s tons of traffic daily here!” However, after it finally opened a couple weeks ago, I noticed that it was empty on a daily basis. Day after day, the store looked beautiful, but no customers. The location was amazing with lots of traffic, but the space was never being taken advantage of.

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Why no customers? Why no business? Why no Sales? The one thing that perhaps the Business Development Managers or whomever was in charge of the new stores here in Busan thought of is that people are “transferring from one station to the next.” Many times more than not, the commuters are in a hurry to get to the next subway car. There are many times in the past where I was running from one car to the next because I heard the warning that the train had just arrived. People are typically in a hurry at that junction. I don’t think the people behind the Faceshop store thought more beyond the traffic.

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So, the morale of the story is to figure out “why there is a bit of traffic” at any location. If you don’t know the “why”, you may not be able to take advantage of it. In essence, you can create traffic for a reason through viral marketing or via another controversial topic, but when it comes down to it, are those visitors going to be “repeat visitors?” Will the folks who come to a site via some ploy or traffic generating cause be people who “convert?” Don’t forget to understand the why and simply focus on the traffic. If you do, over the long term, that traffic will simply dwindle down to a trickle while your hosting fees, your annual escalating domain registration fees and all the other fees going in keeping up your website will outrun your “great idea.”