Do your customers find you via Google? Do they visit your site from comments you leave on other blogs? Do they visit your site through the various social networks you belong to? There are numerous routes your customers can take to get to your site.
Marketing has always been an investment of time and money. Just fifteen to twenty years ago, a marketing department can spend some time to build an ad campaign and then invest countless dollars to reproduce. The good news with marketing on the web is that it costs very little, however the amount of time it takes to be successful has risen significantly.
The importance of knowing how your customers are getting to your site is critical to how you spend your time conversing on the web. It’s impossible to engage in every conversation. There just isn’t enough time. Your job is to be where your potential customers are, speaking the language they want to hear, and becoming valuable to the community.
It’s no longer enough to create the content for one advertisement and pay money to reproduce it as often as you can afford. You now need to reproduce unique and great content every day. But the good news is anyone can afford to do this.
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Greg I could not agree more with you. I have seen what spending an hour a day comenting on industry related forumns can do for my business. I am an account executive for a local lender (yeah business is not what it was). I consistently outperform the rest of the company even though they spend thousands of dollars a month on advertising, I don’t spend any.
I think almost a quarter of my traffic comes from commenting on other blogs. It’s absolutely amazing how effective and easy it is.