People occasionally say to me to they only want website visitors who fit their prospect profile and who are likely to buy from them.
People who say this are missing a very important point about Inbound Marketing.
Your Website is an Online Magazine
The more you understand the basic idea of your website being a publication, the better you’ll do.
With most magazines, very few of the readers buy the advertised products. But that’s OK because the small fraction who do make it all work financially.
The advertisers sell enough product (or services) to justify the cost of the advertising, which in turn is revenue to the magazine, which allows them to keep printing it.
Let’s Use an Example Website
Let us pretend that you sell solar panels and you want to appeal to commercial facility managers.
You will publish stuff to your website that is of interest to commercial facility managers (some of which is solar power) and at the end of every post you’ll put in a call to action to download your eBook on why solar power makes sense.
By publishing content that has general appeal to facilities managers, more of them will see your call to action.
Why do You Attract Website Visitors Who Don’t Buy?
Because there is an interesting dynamic that websites that are better known, and that are busier, tend to rank higher.
This is a guideline, not a hard and fast rule, but it’s true almost all the time.
To demonstrate this to yourself, perform a Google search for anything that is of interest to you.
It’s almost a given that a Wikipedia page will show up on the first page somewhere, and for most queries news sites (even if they’re industry news journals) tend to outrank business blogs.
You attract more visitors through organic search by creating a better known busier website.
When you broaden the focus of your website it appeals to more people, it becomes busier, and it attracts more of your people than it would if you didn’t broaden the focus.
In nutshell, you attract more people who are likely to buy from you by attracting more people overall.
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