It is a big day in an Internet marketer’s life when she realizes that she really doesn’t want everyone in the world coming to her site, despite what she had been telling herself all these years. It represents a quantum leap in her thinking when she admits to herself that it is actually to her advantage to keep certain people away from her site (especially if she is doing pay-per-click marketing, but that is another story).

This realization is both liberating and a little bit scary. For, by recognizing that you don’t want everyone out there “on the Internet” coming to your site, you are forced to look more closely at exactly whom you do want and how you should treat them once they get there. And, then of course you may find yourself going back to your old college marketing textbook and flipping to that long chapter on market segmentation. Market segmentation, as I define it, is the art of dividing your prospects into meaningful categories so that you can go after them in different ways.

The way I see it, there are five types of traffic out on the Internet insofar as they relate to your products and services. Here they are:

Type I: people who want your services and already know your name

Type II: people who want your services and have heard of you – but who can’t quite remember your name

Type III: people who want a service like yours but who don’t know you exist

Type IV: people who want a service other than yours but who, if they learned about your service, may consider using your service as a substitute for the service they are looking for (oh yeah, and they, too, don’t know or don’t yet care that you exist)

Type V: people who don’t want your service and likely never will, even as a substitute for something else they do currently want

There you have it. As you start to think about the implications of all of this, you’ll realize that the way you should go about targeting these five types of people is (or should be) very different.

In a future post (Part B), I will discuss more about why and how you need to target these potential visitors differently – both from the perspective of SEO/SEM and from the perspective of once they arrive at your online doorstep (your site).