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How do you get
customers?
That is probably the number
one question we get after a website has been open for a couple of
months.
Everyone expects customers to
show up at the website. While at one time that was true, today
there are billions of pages and millions of people. Your chance
of winning the lottery is better than your chance of getting web
traffic.
Anyone that tells you they can
get you search engine traffic or they can maximize your site for
search engines is full of #$*%. If they could get the traffic,
they would not be doing it for you. They would be building pages
and making millions from that traffic. If they are selling you on
the idea, they can't actually deliver.
If you do the math, you will
see the light. Find the number of searches for any given term or
sequence. Its true there are millions of searches every day. But
if you are selling mattresses, how many people are searching for
mattresses?
The grapgh below shows the
search volume over 2 years for the word mattress on google.
You will see that the searh
peaks based on certain news events that would give people a
reason to search for that particular word.
A
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Missing Jogger's
Husband Bought Mattress Day She Vanished
Boston Channel.com - Jul 23 2004
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B
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Simmons mattress
trust Q2 revenue sags to $32.9M, profit plumps up to $2.9M
Canada East - Aug 12 2004
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C
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Baby found alive
on floating mattress
Sydney Morning Herald - Dec 28 2004
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D
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Providence
presents 'Once Upon A Mattress' for annual spring musical
New Albany Tribune - Apr 15 2005
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E
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Mattress fire
burns RWC hotel
San Mateo Daily Journal - May 9 2006
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F
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Munster troupe
presents 'Once Upon a Mattress'
Gary Post Tribune - Nov 5 2006
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As you can see, none of the
news events that affect the search frequency for searches of the
word mattress are actually generating anyone that is looking to
buy a mattress.
so with a daily search volume
of about 20,000 searches, filter out the porno searches looking
for nasty mattress photos and the people looking to invest in
mattress company stock and the number of people looking to buy a
mattress is maybe 2,000. Now divide that up by the number of
cities in the United States, since a store in Los Angeles wont be
selling to a buyer in New York. If you were #1 on google for
"mattress" you migh expect 20 -30 clicks a day.
From that if you get one sale
every week, you are doing well.
On the flip side, if you spend
$100 for an add in a local newspaper, you may get 100 people that
go to your website an could potentially get 100 sales.
There is no substitute for
advertising. If you want customers, you need to go get them. They
wont come to you. You need to advertise and advertise and
advertise.
If you spend money looking for
free traffic from the search engines, it wont come. And, it wont
be free if you paid to get it.
You can spend money on googles
ads or overture ads that will charge you per click. That means
you have real customers to your website for just a few dollars.
If you are not
prepared to get people to your website, then you are not ready to
start an online business.
If you already have a business, then you
already have a customer base and will need to capitalize on that
base to build a base of website clients.
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