I believe we can learn so many things in life through ordinary experiences, things we can apply to our Web sites if we are open to the experience. With me, it seems that almost everything I do can be translated back to Web sites.

I recently picked up a copy of a game and fish magazine and flipped through it. I saw a picture of the bottom half of a hunter dressed in camouflage holding a wooden pop gun. He was walking toward a huge deer. The caption read, “Don’t go out UNDER protected.”

This was a full-page ad for Progressive auto insurance–”the essential vehicle insurance for outdoorsmen.”

I found this fascinating. They created a very targeted ad just for hunters and fishermen and placed it in Mississippi Game & Fish.

Isn’t this what we do when we create targeted pages for specific target audiences on our Web sites? If we sell industrial brushes and one of our target audiences is the janitorial industry, the wording and graphics on the page may be considerably different from the page we’d create for the same brushes being sold for the construction industry. How you’d approach one audience would be entirely different from how you’d approach another audience.

The content wouldn’t be duplicate in any way, and generally neither would the graphics. You would be appealing to a totally different audience. Try it and see if it works for you.

Keep your eyes open to life’s experiences, and see how you can apply those experiences to your online business.

Listen to people talk. What do they tell you about their businesses? Visit Web sites. What Web sites do you like? Why? Read magazine ads. Watch TV commercials carefully. Listen to them with your eyes shut. Look at billboards. How do local businesses advertise?

Be curious. Ask questions . . . about EVERYTHING. We’ll share more of life’s experiences as time goes on.

Robin