Do you know what really gets my goat when it comes to all this talk about internet marketing?

It’s the incessant messages about driving more traffic to your website. It seems all these "experts" want to talk about is the quantity of traffic, how they can increase flow of traffic to your website.

What seems to be missing is a few words like, relevant, targetted and interested traffic, people who have an interest in what you have to sell or say.

To give you an example, I run a number of sites for testing purposes, and from the results I’ve achieved I can tell you that it is far better to have fewer visitors to your site who are looking for what you have to offer than a whole heap of "sniffers" looking for the next freebie.

A set of results I checked out recently showed that running a banner ad on a general purpose site produced thousands of visits, but virtually no sales, whilst a link (that cost nothing) on a special interest site produced a healthy number of purchases.

Moving on, with Web 2.0 developing at the rate it’s going the website owner now has many more effective marketing tools at hand to drive significantly more relevant traffic to his/her site than ever before, but there seems to be a lack of guidance from the experts who are still promoting web 1.0 (the old style web) tools.

What makes the difference with these web 2.0 tools is that they can put your site in the way of your relevant traffic - thus increasing your chances of doing business with a greater percentage visitors. Now isn’t that what we all want?

We’ve recently bought an epson C46 printer and found the article linked to, via the link at the bottom of this post, very helpful.

Apparently, Epson are now building in an “all flashing lights” warning when the printer has done a certain number of pages - and it stops working! Well, the people at AB Cartridges know how to deal with the situation without it costing you to have an Epson dealer “fix” it.

Check it out here: Printer Cartridges Blog: Tips on solving an Epson Printer “problem”

Go check out this article on “MARKET RESEARCH” - it certainly rang a few bells for me.

It’s not totally negative about market research, but it does make a very valid point.

Having said that, perhaps you’d humour me and add your comments at the end of this post about a difference of opinion I had with a very dear business associate, Clive Catton (BTW, he’s a superb IT support guy) - we’re just not going to agree on this unless you the reader can convince me I’m wrong!

If you were’nt already aware, I work from home and in the main it’s a good thing for me. Now, Clive insists that to attract bigger clients (I’d substitute “bigger clients” for “clients with bigger budgets”) I should have a card without my home address on it. I don’t advertise the fact that it’s my home address, nor try to hide it.

But my view is that by not putting an address on my business card people will wonder what I have to hide. Clive maintains that people won’t mind, and that if they Google the address they’ll discover it’s a residential one and could be put off.

I’m considering reprinting my cards and would really appreciate your views - address or no address - and your reasons… please. :)