Many internet marketing techniques are somewhat akin to throwing a dollar bill out on the street with your phone number written on it. The person who finds the money may come in and spend it at your store if you leave it right outside the door, or they may notice the phone number written on the bill and call to see whose number was written on the money. Either way, the link to getting your dollar back and adding more cash to it is pretty slim. Most people will see the dollar, put it in their pocket, and continue on with whatever it was they were thinking about before they found the currency.

There are lots of reasons to think that people will be interested in what you have to offer on your web site if you can only find ways to get them to stop by for a look. Unfortunately, when it comes to random site traffic, there are many more people looking for ways to sell something, or get something for free than there are people who are seriously searching for ways to purchase products and services by scanning through a sea of information. Internet business can be very tricky. One might spend a lot of money trying to build traffic, only to learn that hundreds or thousands of visitors are coming and going on web sites without doing one penny's worth of business. As a platform for providing goods and services, the internet is a wonderful way to service targeted customers, but it is also a difficult medium to use for measuring and creating targeted customers.

One reason for this problem can be seen in understanding the stages of making a sale. In the real world, information about products and services are part of a package of tools that are used to move people from curious, to interested, to sold. Taking customers through these steps is rarely accomplished by simply providing information for them to absorb on their own. With most successful businesses on and off the web, the power of having good information must be augmented by a skilled interaction between people. It is the methods used by people delivering good information that actually results in successfully accomplishing a sale. Information alone cannot find out what motivates a customer to look at a product or service, and it cannot detect what thoughts or objections a person may have about engaging with a company.

The power of interaction between people to create and exploit a target market can be easily missed by businesses that do nothing but create a web site as the primary approach to creating business. Even with so-called turn key internet businesses, somebody has engaged in personal interaction at some stage of the process, and must continue to do something to keep the business growing and alive. Creating free downloads of products and information can have some positive impact on web based customers if the products are readily available, cleverly presented, and offer clear benefits to the end users. Certainly, offering a line of minimal resistance to getting your information into potential customer's hands

is one vital step toward building a relationship with them. Yet, even promotional offers without interaction can present some less than obvious drawbacks.

To illustrate the proper value of promotional items, consider the following analogy. Suppose you have decided to create some promotional pens with your company name written on them to give away free to potential customers. Once the product has been delivered to your business, you decide to take the boxes of pens, put them out on the sidewalk for anyone who comes along to take for free. The only interaction you have with your promotion is to come back to the spot where you dropped the pens every morning to see if there are any pens left in the boxes. It does not take much imagination to recognize that this sort of planning would be a waste of time and money. Your campaign would be far more successful if you gave the pens to your sales staff and had them personally deliver a pen to people working in the companies that do business with you on a regular basis.

If you are trying to build an internet business with no customers, chances are that all the free promotional items in the world will not have much impact if you do not have people involved with promoting your promotion. Unless you can go out and find people who want what you have to offer, and use creative ways to have someone personally convince them to come to your business to get it, the process of conducting a random access internet venture will continue to provide a never ending source of puzzlement and frustration. Your best bet for a thriving internet site is to create a channel for people to convince people to come to your business and become impressed with the information you have to share. It is far more valuable to have a skilled salesman walking a potential customer through the information on your website than it is to let customers wander around on their own with nobody to talk with about what they are seeing. The same concept holds true if you have engaged, loyal customers telling their friends about your business, and showing them how to get hooked up with you. Either way, it is people rather than pure information that will get your business off the ground, and you must find a way to get that personal interaction started. Choose the right tools to equip the audience you are building with an effective way to spread the word, and the motivation to keep the ball rolling.

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