I just read book from problogger.net. The author made a good and well known point that you should know your visitors. He provide many questions you should ask your self or even maybe directly your visitors. I am curious how can you use answer from each question. Take a look at question and how would you use informations from each question to develop your site? • What are they called? • Who do they think they are? • Who are they really? • Who do they want to be? • Who do they like? • Who don’t they like? • Who is their peer group? • Who do they not identify with? • What are their beliefs? • Where do they live? • Where do they work? • Where do they learn? • Where do they want to be? • What are their needs? • How old are they? • How youthful do they act? • How conservative are they? • What are their driving ambitions? • What are their wants and needs? • What are their pleasures? • What are their pains? • What do they love? • What do they hate?
Can you really afford to waste time on-to finding out such information from them? Plus, if you know that much about them, then should they be called 'visitors' or 'friends'?
haha - I've got a lot of sympathy with this, plus the original post reminds me of meetings I've sat through in a past life in 'conventional advertising' where a committee has decided that the typical customer for company xyz is called Rebecca, lives in Hove, likes Girls Aloud more than the Saturdays and is a size 14. So that's who we're going to pitch car insurance to
Was it written by Darren Rouse, the owner of ProBlogger.net? He is big on polling and providing content people are interested in. Getting to know your visitors is a big advantage when a comes to offering products to them. I'm a big believer in email marketing and building relationships and certainly social bookmarking and blogging has become a large part of that as well.
You shouldn't know everything about other people. That's personal. Plus you shouldn't always please the customer. Sometimes they might walk all over your dignity. Agreeing with such people isn't being a good salesman. It's being a little puppet. Such customers are not worth your time.
the only way to know that much about someone is to get them to join your list by offering them something and then asking them, which isn't necessarily a bad idea. its a good way to make one time customers, customers for life and maby even partners.
What you should have is an ideal visitor. This is your target market. Some marketing textbooks tell you that you should have an ideal person in mind. You should know how his or her typical day is. What you expect his/her job to be, how many kids in the family, etc... If you don't have a good idea on who you're targeting your message to, someone else might get it and interpret it differently.
Researches are always started by questions. And you may want to see this article: Start Research by Asking Questions. Thanks for sharing.
If they click on my ads, and they stay at my sites for X number of minutes, that's all I care about. I don't need to ask them any of those questions. They are irrelevant.
I don't think that answering those questions is going to waste hours of time. In fact it could save you time in the long run. You won't know all the answers, but those you do know you should use to your full advantage. It only takes a few minutes of brainstorming to come up with the basics. I think ProBlogger is trying to make the point that we simply don't consider many of those questions - and we really should take a few minutes to do so.
If you are building a list it is important to try to build relationships with these people. However, I agree with the points that all of this information is probably not needed. To me it is more important to help people and find out what I can provide for them from a business perspective. This leads to a satistfied customer and more money in my pocket. It becomes a win win situation for both parties involved. I do not need or want to know everything about my visitors.
Yes, I agree with you. Take advantage form the powerful of email marketing. Rather than wasting your time asking yourself about those questions, you should ask the visitor by yourself.
This is a general concept but many people ignre it. It happen on everyway, not only your visitor, but your famil, your friend, your client and everyone surroundding you....This is relationship management
Not really worth answering any of those questions, unless that 'visitor' of your site, DDoSs it very often.
I think the sole purpose of asking those questions was to make you, the reader, think that he - who asked the questions - is a professional. In my opinion, when it comes to internet marketing, all I have to do is to bring my website on the number one spot in the search engines, for the keyword that is the most relevant to my content.