Website Traffic - Quality or Quantity?

Do you know what really gets my goat when it comes to all this talk about internet marketing? It's the incessant messages about driving more traffic to your website. It seems all these "experts" want to talk about is the quantity of traffic, how they can increase flow of traffic to your website. What seems to be missing is a few words like, relevant, targetted and interested traffic, people who have an interest in what you have to sell or say. To give you an example, I run a number of sites for testing purposes, and from the results I've achieved I can tell you that it is far better to have fewer visitors to your site who are looking for what you have to offer than a whole heap of "sniffers" looking for the next freebie. A set of results I checked out recently showed that running a banner ad on a general purpose site produced thousands of visits, but virtually no sales, whilst a link (that cost nothing) on a special interest site produced a healthy number of purchases. Moving on, with Web 2.0 developing at the rate it's going the website owner now has many more effective marketing tools at hand to drive significantly more relevant traffic to his/her site than ever before, but there seems to be a lack of guidance from the experts who are still promoting web 1.0 (the old style web) tools. What makes the difference with these web 2.0 tools is that they can put your site in the way of your relevant traffic - thus increasing your chances of doing business with a greater percentage visitors. Now isn't that what we all want?