The Money is in the Figures
Posted On: 2008-03-26
Did you realize that you're probably marketing to a minority? If you're one of those hardcore traditional adult marketers who thinks that the world begins and ends at the United States border ... and the only people in the world are those with that dangly bit between their legs ... then your marketing to a minority.
I just thought I should tell you that to make you feel good and to try and put our marketplace into some perspective for you. You see the reality is that women not only out number men in the United States but there are also more women online than men. According to eMarketer there are about 7.1 million more women online in the United States than men. There are also about 5.1 million more women in the United States than males and that gap between males and females is expected to grow even wider in the years ahead.
So what are you doing about expanding the scope of your marketing to include women? If you think that you don't really need to bother about marketing to women then I guess you're happy running around just picking up the crumbs that others leave for you.
On the other hand, if you're really keen to make money you would be interested in other statistics that show that women are no less interested in porn than men and if you show them what they want they'll buy it. See, you don't need to have a penis to enjoy good porn; women enjoy it too and we will buy it if it's worth buying.
Search engine usage
Speaking of statistics, I was just reading some very interesting statistics about search engine usage and it certainly made me think. I'm not going to tell you the exact figures because I'm in a grumpy mood today and I don't want to make life too easy for you, besides doing a little research of your own will make the important information you find seem all the more valuable if you do the work yourself.
What I will tell you though is that you should be looking at just how many searches are done on Ask, Yahoo! and the combination of MSN and Live. Add those figures together and you'll see that if you're only targeting Google for your sites then you're potentially missing out on a huge amount of search engine traffic.
Anchor text
Most of us have come to know that the text that is used in links to our sites is very important when it comes to gaining good positions in the search engines but now it seems that it's becoming even more important. Microsoft now have a patent application that explores the use of anchor text as a way of determining the relevance of a web page for terms that may not actually appear on that page.
The implications of that one for search engine optimisation are very interesting and something that we really should not ignore. How it will actually work in practice and the affect that it will have on what webmasters do is something that any webmaster who is interested in attracting traffic from the search engines needs to watch.
I mentioned before that I was grumpy today and I really have no idea why. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, business is good but I'm just feeling restless. Maybe it's time to look at developing a new income stream, maybe it's time to take our mainstream business to the next level, maybe it's just time to take a whole day off when I do absolutely nothing but read a good book.
Whatever it is I think I need it and if you're feeling restless perhaps you need it too. I know I often talk here about the importance of taking a break and getting away from it all but the truth is that I don't often follow my own advice. Sure I'll do something different but I don't actually do nothing and I'm beginning to think that I need to just spend a whole day doing absolutely nothing.
Of course that will probably drive me totally insane but it could be worth trying. Sadly though I doubt that I'd be able to handle more than 20 minutes of doing nothing before I just have to go and tidy the house or annoy Steve or just do something active.
It's sad when you get to the stage that you can just never be a couch-potato again