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Page 1 of 2 OK, I understand. If you are ignored by the search engines then vast quantities of traffic will never find their way to your site. But, hear me! Unless you spend every waking moment at it, search engine rankings are very hard to lock up. For heavily searched keywords the competition is enormous. For obscure terms the traffic is tiny.
Let's face it, for all the focus on search engine optimization, most of us are going to have to get our traffic the old-fashioned way – pay for it. In dollars (ezine advertising) or in time (writing solid original articles.) Well, thank goodness that's out of the way! The obsession with SEO is a drag on internet marketing, taking your eyes away from the basics of ALL business – on or offline.Offline, the term ‘niche' means a group of customers sharing certain characteristics. Online, it has come to mean a bunch of happenstance folks who accidentally used the same search term!! If you think about it, from a marketing point of view, it is absurd and massively impoverishing of original ideas. However, once you free your mind from the Google-clamp, you can start looking at your web business the way it should be looked at – from the customer's perspective!! If you design you site to deal with10,000 random visitors tossed your way by Yahoo!, then the experience they will get will either be bland (you designed for the lowest common denominator) or off-base for a large portion of them. How would the non-SEO-obsessed marketer, market their business? First, a dose of reality… The vast majority of web home business people are product-driven. That means they create or select a product to sell then they advertise indiscriminately in the hopes of selling it. Their obsession is with the product not the customer. The SEO-phenomenon locks this thinking in place (and encourages the slick and desperately meaningless sales letters that get written!!) A true marketer looks at things the other way round. Even though their interests are in a particular space (say, gardening or celebrities or dating) they come at marketing by asking three profound questions: ** Who is my customer? ** What does my customer value? ** What experience do I want my customer to have? Who is my customer? Am I selling to everyone in the market? Or to a tiny sliver of the total opportunity? Is my customer the sports fan, or the football fan, or the Bronco's supporter, or the young, obsessed, male Bronco's supporter? You get the idea. Focusing down on a sliver narrows your market, but makes your message incredibly specific. Now you needn't worry about excessive focusing. If you want to increase your market you move up a layer and then introduce another group. So instead of just young, male, Bronco's supporters the site is about Football and contains sub-sections focused tightly on specific groups – young, male Bronco's fans on one page, young, male Cowboy's fans etc. Each feels the site is focused on his individual obsession.
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