We are currently living in the age of refinement and innovation.  As the world turns (sounds like a name of a soap opera) one thing is constant, change.  And in the world of marketing and customer acquisition there are a lot of changes as well.  It is getting more and more competitive to find customers, however when we do find them we want to repat the process and do it again and again and improve on it.

Back in 1994 when I was a print broker at Peake Graphics, Inc. a direct marketing graphic arts consulting firm (I printed junk mail) I saw the direct marketing power of the Internet.  I had a parter who was extremely talented with computers.  He saw the world of animation being the next big thing.  This was a fork in the road for each of us.  I went to the Internet and he went into the world of computer graphics.

Fast forward to 2007.  What I see now as the next big opportunity is real estate, ocean front real estate.  Not the kind here in Marblehead, Massachusetts but the online kind of real estate.  Everyone is looking for traffic.  But traffic alone won’t do it.  It has to be "qualified traffic" or "qualified visitors."  Niche marketing is taking off because you can measure the monitization of the marketing efforts.

Doing some research and knowing your market can produce dramatic results.  This is why I think Microsoft will buy Yahoo! because I think they will be able to refine and segment the audience and monetize them.  If they bought Yahoo! for $50 Billion today it would be worth $500 Billion in 10 years due to the traffic explosion online and the population explosion on planet earth.

Create a niche market and drive a lot of interested traffic.  The results will come.