Is it just me or has anyone else been bombarded with emails, banners and pop-up advertisements for products and services that will supposedly blast your website to 18 BILLION people? What? Really?
Do you find this as insulting as I do? It implies that we"re all too stupid to know that the population of the entire planet is only around 6 billion. Who are the rest of these emails going to? Has ET dialed up? Are they going to a galaxy far, far away?
The world internet population is around 1 billion. But before you start salivating over the prospect of 1 billion people beating a path to your site, let"s look at the facts behind this number.
First let"s assume that we"re talking about an English speaking site. And we all know that everyone in the world speaks English, right? Of course they do....they all want to be us (right). So if English is the "language of the internet", why do only 30% of the people on the internet speak it? Do the math - that means that only 300 million people out of the 1 billion can read your site. Did you know that the second most prevalent language on the internet is Chinese? You might want to invest in that Rosetta Stone Mandarin course after all!
Now, the 300 million figure represents the total number of people, not households. That means Mom, Dad, little Jimmy and Lucy are all counted as "potential" customers for you. Mom and Dad, mabye, but we all know that little Jimmy is probably spending most of his time surfing for free nudies and when Lucy"s not on the phone or at the mall, she"s probably on MySpace and not searching for the newest internet business opportunity.
Take the 300 million, divide it by 4 - the average number of individuals per household - and you get 75 million - still a huge number. But how many of these 75 million people are truly prospects? How many of them will actually click on your opportunity? How many of them are looking for what you"re peddling at this particular point in time? Plus, how many of them have joined a safelist or a traffic exchange or an FFA site?
I realize it"s a numbers game, but give me a break. Who let the used car salesmen onto the internet?
This is just one of my gripes....I"ll be back with more.