Archives for October 2006

Does more traffic to your web site (or store) mean more sales? Not necessarily.

According to this CNN report, a company “which sells used machinery for making tubes to clients worldwide, has seen its site utube.com knocked off line by millions of online searchers looking for video site (YouTube.com)”.

Traffic alone is no good. What you want is targeted traffic. What happened to uTube is that thanks to GoogTube, they got millions of “un-targeted” visitors who had no interest in what uTube sells. So, the visitors just left, leaving the site with a huge bandwidth-bill, lost productivity and absolutely no sales.

Skyrocketing your sales is nothing but a product of this (rather over-simplified) formula:
1. Remarkable product
2. Targeted traffic
3. High Conversion
4. Repeat sales

Leave out any of the highlighted keywords – and all you have left is mediocrity – an (average) product, with (worthless) traffic and (pathetic) conversion.

Remember that the rocket science is not in the formula – it’s in the implementation.

No one saw this coming. Almost no one.

It doesn’t seem so surprising when you think about the fact that Google has never been good at building a huge community (other than for search).

And they didn’t get invited to the “Social Networking” party. So they figured, if you can’t get an invite, then throw your own $1.65 billion pool party!

While only the future will tell if Google can successfully make a profit on this newest, craziest takeover, I have no doubt that the G-kids will, at the least, figure out a way to further their brand, improve their market-share in search, and provide advertisers with more pages to put their ads on.

Video-on-demand is the future of entertainment, no matter how lame the entertainment seems.

People want what they want. Get used to it.

And instead of making predictions about whether Google will fail or not, start figuring out how you can get a piece of the action.