In the early days of developing my home business, I went for the numbers instead of focusing on targeting prospects. It took me a while to appreciate the importance of targeting (quality) instead of just going for the big numbers (quantity).

For online marketing, it helps greatly to get your website in front of people who are actually looking for the product, service, or opportunity that you are offering. This refers to the concept of marketing your sites to your target audience, rather than wasting your time, effort, and money on people who are not already interested in what you have to offer.

Be wary of ?massive action? techniques in this era when many ISPs feel their hottest marketing theme is the blocking of incoming emails, which they decide their customers do not want to receive (they are the self appointed ?information police?).

Many of the sources of cheap, high volume leads supply you with leads that have absolutely no interest in your particular business (or product or service) and furthermore, have been put into the list in such a manner that can get you into trouble with your ISP because you are unwittingly spamming (many of these bulk lead lists are created by robots that crawl the Internet and harvest email addresses) the recipients.

In order to be effective in promoting your particular proposition, whatever it is, you have to seek out your target market. This is as true online as it is offline. Just because you are able to reach huge numbers of people with your message on the Internet far more cheaply and quickly than you can offline, does this necessarily mean you should?

What?s the point of devoting your time and energies to marketing to a massive group of people without first knowing whether they, as a group, have a general interest in what you are offering?

It is much more efficient and effective to first find out where your prospective customers congregate, and then target that congregation, than it is to use a shotgun approach and hope that one of your pellets will somehow find its target (you know?throw enough up against the wall and something is bound to stick). You will find that by selectively targeting your prospects before marketing to them, your conversion ratio (the proportion of your target market that takes positive action and actually purchases your product or service) will be much higher than the results you would otherwise achieve without first taking the time to target your prospects. Once again, quality wins out over quantity.

Many webmasters have not stopped to ask themselves the all-important question?. What is the purpose of my web site? For some reason, many of them seem to think that the purpose of their web site is to give away freebies. Or it could be to be a ?showcase? for their products. Or it could be to create links to all kinds of resources. Or it could be to have fancy Flash graphics and build a brand name.

One of the biggest mistakes people new to web design make is going for more "flash" than substance. They bog down their site with a bunch of fancy colored backgrounds, 3-D text, flash presentations, etc. If a visitor to your site is using a 56K connection and has wait to more than 8 seconds for it to load (which can easily happen on sites heavy with graphics), you can expect to lose about 1/3 of your visitors.

If you?re a business, the purpose of your web site is to sell a product or service.

Your web site should have one main focus. It should not be selling a dozen products, a dozen opportunities, or linking to a bunch of different affiliate programs. Presenting too many options has a tendency to confuse your visitor.

When someone visits your site, it should be clearly obvious what one action you want him or her to take.