How To Apply The 80/20 Rule In Internet Marketing
Posted on Tue, Jan 03, 2012
The 80/20 rule states that 80% of consequences are the result of 20% of the causes. It was noticed by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto that 80% of the wealth in the early 1900s was owned by 20% of the population. Why is this important? This ratio has been proven to work in many other areas, including internet marketing.
To see the 80/20 rule in action go and take a look at your website's analytics. When analysing the analytics for your website, 20% of your visitors will surf to another page.
80% of the conversions will come from 20% of your visitors. 80% of your traffic will come from 20% of the total organic SEO keywords.
What this magnifies is the need to monitor these numbers as it is possible to just focus on the 20% of the activity that achieves 80% of the results. This is where the power of online tools such as hubspot comes in to play. For every inbound marketing activity you want there to be a result of more traffic, leads and sales. Therefore if you have the statistics on what 20% of the activities are producing 80% of the results you can just focus on doing more of that 20%. Then only do the other 80% activity if you have more time or able to throw more resources at it through outsourcing or taking on more staff.
Here are some inbound marketing activities that will produce 80% of your conversions:
- Creating Content (for blogs, emails, article marketing, products, etc)
- Creating marketing campaigns (SEO, PPC, Facebook)
- Studying courses
- Optimising conversion on sales letters
- List building
If you're not yet making money from your website or are unable to track conversions using analytics as you are not transacting online, it's pretty hard to guess what might be your highest payoff activities (although not impossible).
However, start tracking stuff daily, if you do have ecommerce enable but are not making money, then work on building traffic. Start tracking daily what is driving traffic, focus on the sources that provide the most conversions.
With the 80/20 rule anyone can get extraordinary results without extraordinary effort. If you want to learn more about the ratio and how it applies to your business, the book “The 80/20 Principle” by Richard Koch is a good start.