I never said I was the brightest bulb in the Marketing universe.
Ok, maybe that’s self-evident. 
But as I work harder and harder to help my clients get more customers, I get smarter. I learn. My marketing weapon arsenal grows. Success (and failures) show my strengths and highlight my weaknesses. With all the whizz-bang Internet know-how, sometimes it’s easy to get side-tracked.
You tend to forget the fundamentals of utilizing the Internet to get more customers.
The real heart, guts and power of Internet marketing is not video or squeeze pages or split-testing or copy or SEO or Google maps or fill-in-the-blank.
These tools -as important as they are- are useless if you use them to build something that does not fulfill a specific pressing need the customer has.
Specific. Pressing. Need. In other words if the customer needs a house and you build a houseboat: no sale!
House or houseboat. They are similar, but then again they not similar.
You nearly understood your customer’s needs but you didn’t listen well enough.
How precisely you understand a customer’s exact needs is by the amount of painstaking analysis of the keywords the customer puts into their browser when they are seeking a particular
good or service.
I know what you are thinking: ‘everybody knows that’.
Question: when developing a project or advertising campaign for a client do you spend at least 40% of your time doing keyword research?
That’s the amount of time Paul Myers of Talkbiz
suggests.
He gave me that advice three years ago and I heard him, but I didn’t listen. It took a painful and costly mistake to learn it.
The school of experience is a hard school but a fool will learn in no other.