Quality Beats Quantity Every Time
Back in the early days of developing my home based business, Iwent for the big numbers instead of focusing on targetingprospects. It took me a while to appreciate the importance oftargeting (quality) instead of just going for the big numbers(quantity).For online marketing, it helps greatly to get your website infront of people who are actually looking for the product,service, or opportunity that you are offering. This refers tothe concept of marketing your sites to your targe...
...t audience,rather than wasting your time, effort, and money on people whoare not already interested in what you have to offer.Be wary of "massive action" techniques in this era when manyISPs feel their hottest marketing theme is the blocking ofincoming emails, which they decide their customers do not wantto receive (they are the self appointed "information police").Many of the sources of cheap, high volume leads supply you withleads that have absolutely no interest in your particularbusiness (or product or service) and furthermore, have been putinto the list in such a manner that can get you into troublewith your ISP because you are unwittingly spamming (many ofthese bulk lead lists are created by robots that crawl theInternet and harvest email addresses) the recipients.In order to be effective in the promotion your particularproposition, whatever it is, you have to seek out your targetmarket. This is as true online as it is offline. Just becauseyou are able to reach huge numbers of people with your messageon the Internet far more cheaply and quickly than you canoffline, does this necessarily mean you should? What's the point of devoting your time and energies to marketingto a massive group of people without first knowing whether they,as a group, have a general interest in what you are offering? It is much more efficient and effective to first find out whereyour prospective customers congregate, and then target thatcongregation, than it is to use a shotgun approach and hope thatone of your pellets will somehow find its target (you know...throw enough up against the wall and something is bound tostick). You will find that by selectively targeting yourprospects before marketing to them, your conversion ratio (theproportion of your target market that takes positive action andactually purchases your product or service) will be much higherthan the results you would otherwise achieve without firsttaking the time to target your prospects. Once again, qualitywins out over quantity.It seems that a great many webmasters have not stopped to askthemselves the all-important question...What is the purpose ofmy web site? For some reason, many of them seem to think thatthe purpose of their web site is to give away freebies. Or itcould be to be a "showcase" for their products. Or it could beto create links to all kinds of resources. Or it could be tohave fancy flash graphics and build a brand name. One of the biggest mistakes people new to web design make isgoing for more "flash" than substance. They bog down their sitewith a bunch of fancy colored backgrounds, 3-D text, flashpresentations, etc. If a visitor to your site is using a 56Kconnection and has wait to more than 8 seconds for it to load(which can easily happen on sites heavy with graphics), you canexpect to lose about 1/3 of your visitors.If you're a business, the purpose of your web site is to sell aproduct or service. Your web site should have one main focus. Itshould not be selling a dozen products, a dozen opportunities,or linking to a bunch of different affiliate programs.Presenting too many options has a tendency to confuse yourvisitor. When someone visits your site, it should be clearlyobvious what one action you want him or her to take.
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