Imagine yourself in a wide, open ocean with a net in hand.

You know that there are millions of fish swimming underneath your boat, and you are dead-set on catching a lot of them today.

Here’s the catch: how will you catch them if you don’t even know what your fish are doing?

The same goes for web traffic generation.

You won’t be able to ‘catch’ any site visitors if you do not even define them in the first place.

Of course this is not universal.

You can go ahead and design your website or business with everyone in mind. You could even just do whatever you want and hope for the best.

Some people got really lucky with this approach, managing to make a decent income at the end of the day.

The problem here, however, is that you risk a lot when you don’t know who you are trying to reach out to.

Here are a couple of possible outcomes that will happen when you don’t define your website’s target audience: You won’t sell anything

Think of it this way: you shoot an arrow in the air and hope that it lands on target. If you hit your mark, then you are an extremely lucky person.

The problem here is that not all people are blessed by luck – they actually have to look at the target before they can hit it with an arrow.

The same goes for any website.

You have to set your sights on a specific target audience.

Otherwise you will end up missing your target; overlooking the people that are actually willing to spend some time and money on what you have to offer. You’ll advertise, but will not get results

Think of it this way: you may notice a huge billboard on the street, but that doesn’t always mean you’ll take the time to read it.

What do you this means for your own advertising schemes?

The proper placement of advertisements, not just the volume of passers-by, will determine their efficiency. People have the ability to become ‘ad-blind,’ unconsciously tuning out advertisements that they do not deem relevant to themselves. This is even worse than not advertising in the first place.

The advertisements you are paying for are simply ignored by people who don’t care about what you’re selling. In the end, you will be spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month will be for nothing. You run the risk of being a spammer

Think of it this way: you will get in trouble with the police if you slap your paper ads on every building in the city. This also applies for the Internet, where your web traffic comes from in the first place. Mass-sending e-mails to mailing lists and ‘spamming’ people out of the blue is a great way to collect ‘eyeballs’ to sell to, but will backfire on you if you don’t choose the people you do this too.

People have learned to become wary of others contacting them out of the blue, choosing instead to delete or ignore anything that pops up uninvited in their faces.

This is unless, of course, they were already interested in what you have to sell from the very beginning.

You may get traffic, but you won’t earn

Think of it this way: there may be a gazillion people in a car show, but very few people will be interested in your crochet kits.

The same goes for website traffic. You may get a million hits a month by luring unsuspecting people to your site, but you will get squat unless those hits are people that really care about what you’ve got.

What you have is ‘fake’ web traffic, where a lot of people find themselves on your website’s doorsteps but will not even bother to look into the site. They end up leaving within a few seconds of visiting, which does nothing for you in the end.

Okay, so now you’ve seen the gloom and doom of not identifying your target audience.

You don’t want to waste your time and money, and you are ready to learn more about identifying your target population.

But how do you do it in the first place?

We’ll talk more in Part 2.