Web pages and advertising on the web only work one way: you have to know what you want before you see web pages and adverts for it.

This problem is maybe the biggest elephant in the room with regard to the web.

If you don’t know something exists, you won’t search for it and you won’t see adverts or web pages for it.

It could be the biggest thing since sliced bread but you’re blissfully unaware of it.

There’s no easy answer that I’m aware of but let’s at least examine the problem:

Taking a small step back from the issue, most internet marketers – myself included – will target things that people are searching for.

You’re probably the same – you might use Google’s suggestions, you might use their keyword planner, you might use a different method.

But they’re all based around words and phrases that people are searching for.

If Borat hadn’t worn a mankini. no-one would have bought one. And the world probably wouldn’t  have cared.

But that had the luxury of being featured in a cult movie and the shock value of the pictures of it being worn.

There are several problems with basing your web content around existing search phrases.

• You’re competing with everyone else who thinks that phrase is a potential winner
• You’re basing your pages on the phrase you’ve found – whether or not it’s the best or most popular phrase for that search term. Maybe your target market have done their research on WebMD and Wikipedia and more of them are looking for emetophobia than are searching for fear of vomiting. But either way you’re almost certainly missing out on the large section of the market that has that problem but doesn’t think anyone could offer them a solution. So they’re not searching for a solution in the first place.
• You can’t go off at too much of a tangent on your web pages or your email list, otherwise you run the risk of alienating visitors or subscribers.
• Random searches are fairly rare. I’ve not been able to find a recent estimate on the number of people who click the “I’m feeling lucky” button but back in 2007 it was around 1% of searchers. A big number but a small percentage. Sites like StumbleUpon serve the same kind of purpose but in my experience are used more by people who are just momentarily bored than they are by people wanting to do something specific.

Which brings us to the conundrum: if your potential customer doesn’t know that the product you’re selling exists, are you able to reach them cost effectively or even at all?

Quite honestly, I’ve no idea!

I’ve had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind for some time that it has to be possible. Mainly because most things are possible.

And I’m sure Google and others would love to tap into the potential revenue that’s there.

And maybe it’s a red herring.

Maybe there’s a big enough market for most things to be able to survive just with the people who know they want to buy them.

Maybe there isn’t.

If I hadn’t mentioned fear of vomiting earlier, would you even have thought about it or the possibility that if you suffered from it then you could overcome the fear?

Or would you just have chalked it up to being “one of those things” and done your best to avoid vomit and vomiting so you didn’t deliberately put yourself in the situation in the first place?

That happens with a lot of markets – you don’t know you want or need something unless you know it exists.

Sometimes that means you search for something until you accidentally find the words you needed to ask to get the answer you wanted.

But often it means you just remain blissfully ignorant.

Mail order is one of the few advertising mediums that I’m aware of that gets over this but it’s not always cost effective to use.

Here in the UK there are a few mailing houses that offer what they call hybrid mail. You upload a document and a mailing list, they print and mail it for a total cost that’s below the price of buying a second class stamp in a shop.

But you’d probably only find that solution if you knew that hybrid mail existed – searching for cutting postage costs just seems to lead to sites offering franking machines which do offer lower postage prices until you cost in the price of the machine and the labels and the ink.

Finding an affordable mailing list is another hurdle. If you’re targeting business, you could probably find a low-ish number of names and addresses online and most of those would be still current.

But it’s unlikely you could do that here in the UK outside a handful of industries where you could rent a mailing list.

I gather from various Dan Kennedy products that the USA is better served with mailing lists.

But it’s still expensive to get the word out via the post.

The same goes for magazine adverts – they’re expensive to create and test.

The only other thing I can think of would be to drum up publicity. In theory, a press release would work OK and could entice a few journalists both online and offline to write about the product. In turn, that should lead to increased searches and you should then be able to use the regular “pull” methods of creating content and adverts.

If you’ve got any other thoughts on how to get round this conundrum, feel free to share them below.

It’s been bugging me for quite a while and whilst I’m not totally convinced there’s a viable solution that isn’t akin to pushing string uphill, I still like to think that something is possible!