I wonder if somehow we’re all hard wired to make our lives a little harder than they need to be? I know I’m guilty of taking three rights to make a left at times which might be why I notice when others do it.

Today for instance, I was talking to two small business owners about their marketing efforts. I couldn’t believe all the stuff they were doing - I wish I had half their energy. They spent 2-4 hours every day updating blogs, making podcasts, posting on twitter, polishing their website, publishing a newsletter and about a dozen other things.

They’d been doing this for about two years and had a sizeable online community developing. Yet, their business was on the brink of disaster. They had very few customers and an extremely weak sales pipeline. It didn’t make sense to me. You’d figure that any business putting this much effort into marketing would be in a better spot.

These were smart guys who were truly experts in their field so I wanted to understand what was going wrong. I found the answer after asking just two questions.

First, I asked how many people in their online community were decision makers who understood exactly what they sold, needed it and could afford it? The answer was; “we’re not sure”. My next question was how many current customer came from the current marketing activities - the answer was “zero”.

Now I’m a big fan of online marketing (this is a business blog after all). However, the Internet and all the hype around building online communities doesn’t change the fact that marketing needs to influence people who want or need and can afford what you sell.

Now, my marketing pitch. From www.enthusem.com you could setup an automated direct mail program that touched the CEO (or any other decision maker) of the company you’d most love to have as a customer every month for an entire year for just $48. Even better, you’d only spend about 10 minutes of your valuable time and you’d guarantee your marketing was targeting someone who needs and can afford what you sell.