The next level of sales boosts comes by a broader target. Maybe an optimized selling effort is moving 15% of 500 customers per month, and it can become 15% of 5,000 instead. Here’s the method to expand your target audience:

• Recognize the nontraditional applications. A dealer offering estate auctions, for example, could re-target their services towards storage unit owners and landlords who often have abandoned assets to sell.
• Find low hanging fruit. Especially on a non-traditional market, there’s often cheap ads and easy rankings to be had. $50,000 in SEO may only move you up one or two places in “Real Estate”, but “buy short sales in Scottsdale” might cost only $5,000 to get to number 1.
• Manage risk using landing pages and sub-sites. If you’re a trusted expert in one market, you don’t need to rebrand totally to reach for another.

A frequent theme for these titles was, about 80 percent of the way through the game, your character’s love interest ceases to be an adorable 20-pixel-high maiden, and turns into a screen-filling ball of evil spells and tumors which must be dispatched to move forward.

What does it have to do with the Internet?  A lot.

Often times, you’re the one responsible for your beloved website turning into a similar screen-filling ball of evil.

The tumors tend to come from poorly imagined scope.  What started as a dispatch system for employees grew a login for external contractors.  Then direct sales emerges.  Finance demands to be grafted in.  Within a few years, the original software is barely there beneath the addons.

Now, it’s normal for software to evolve and grow.  However, if allowed to grow randomly, you find yourself wrestling with limitations which made sense in one context, as they become unwieldly.  Perhaps, for example, your order system was product-based.  Each order has one item, one payment method, etc.  Works great until you realize people want to add a split payment.  Or two items on one order.  Soon, you’re making dozens of exceptions to keep the monster alive.

When do you draw the line?

Can you now succinctly define what you need– in terms of data storage or workflow — and does it differ largely from the decisions you made when the site began?

• Are you doing the same job multiple times to keep different parts of the site in synch?
• Have you passed on desirable enhancements to the site since they can’t fit the established layout and data structure?
• Are everyday operations done primarily as “special cases” bolted on later?
• Have you been forced to “hunt down” specialized hosting or developers to keep the site operational?  PHP 4 is dead, yet many people are tied to apps which bomb in 5 or 6.

Slaying the beast can be hard.  You have to fight your locked-in work processes.  But sometimes you can’t move on until you do.