Traffic needed. Can anyone help?
 

Hi Paul,

I have to confess that I'm not sure whether your post is disingenuous. I
assume it's not, but I've been wrong loads of times.

There are several different approaches that you can adopt to marketing the
services you describe, but the two most basic are to use a blast approach
and to use a tailored approach.

The blast approach is the one taken by companies such as Video Professor.
The product is cheap and inferior and targets the market's least common
denominator. But, as you imply, the law of large numbers creates revenue,
regardless of the product's quality. If you're contemplating that approach,
as it seems you are, you need to examine the cost structure. The fixed costs
can be high: to maximize exposure you need to put some cash on the line.
OTOH, the variable costs can be very low -- it doesn't cost much to copy a
DVD or VHS and stick it in the mail or enable a download. So you're really
betting on the come.

A tailored approach is the one that the smart marketing companies recommend
(admittedly, that's because if you take a tailored approach then you're more
likely to buy their services). The marketers that my company uses insist
that I define my target market as closely as possible. That greater degree
of definition makes the marketing (_not_ advertising, which costs way too
much for my blood) more effective. You're maximizing your available
leverage.

In Excel terms:

I don't want to offer to teach people how to enter a number in a cell, or to
cause the cell to display that number in Currency format. There are already
way too many companies out there selling dirt cheap media that tell you to
"Select A5, then press 8 and then press Enter." I can't compete with them,
nor do I want to. I don't mean to imply that it's a bad approach -- from a
purely revenue perspective, it's a good one.

I do want to offer to show people how to use Excel to analyze a business
case, to use its built-in functions to create a discounted cash flow
analysis and figure where their break-even kicks in. That's a much, much
smaller market, and it isn't real easy to define, but it's plenty big enough
for me, and I'm paying off a San Diego mortgage.

--
C^2
Conrad Carlberg

Excel Sales Forecasting for Dummies, Wiley, 2005