There’s a great article in the January 18 issue of The New Yorker on how entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, John Paulson, and others made their fortunes. Instead of being the risk takers, successful entrepreneurs are risk adverse. Instead of throwing stuff to the wall to see what sticks, they see a problem, do their homework, solve the problem, and make a boatload of money in the process. (Note: A free, online version of the article is unavailable. You can read a summary of it here.)

Paulson, for example, made a fortune in the housing bubble collapse by buying credit-default swaps. But he didn’t just run out there and blindly buy credit-default swaps. Instead, he had someone do research that showed that a bubble was about to burst and made his investments accordingly. The result? His company made $15 billion in profits.

So what does this have to do with filling your sales pipeline with high quality leads?

To get the most from your marketing efforts, you need the right information about your visitors and an easy way on your website for them to enter your sales pipeline. The more you know about their behavior and the more ways you have of turning them into leads, you can better target your online marketing efforts.

Instead of wasting your marketing dollars throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, learn everything you can about your current marketing efforts and what kind of people their bringing to your website. A good conversion analytics program can give you this insight.

You may not earn $15 billion in profits, but you will see more results from your marketing efforts and a fatter bottom line.

Tags: conversion analytics, john paulson, marketing, sure thing, ted turner

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 5:00 am by abelk and is filed under Lead Generation, analytics, conversion metrics, search engine marketing, website conversion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.