The 80-20 Rule in Action

Seth Godin in his book. The Purple Cow, tells the story of a bank that discovered only 10% of their customers were using their online banking service every day. Most were only using it once per month. On the surface it appeared that they should not spend as much money on that service. However it turned out that this group accounted for about 70% of the bank deposits. Don’t make hasty judgments based on volume.

This information made me think of the activities of the ebooklet catalog at www.tipsbooklets.com One of the first questions that many booklet authors ask me is "what's the best selling booklet on your site and how many sales does it make?" before they decide whether to offer their booklet for sale on my site. I then go on to say those numbers don't matter, which, at first, admittedly sounds like I'm hedging the answer. The truth is they don't matter because there are frequently many behind-the-scenes sales that come from a single download or not even any download. 500 hard copies of one booklet were sold merely from the title of the booklet! So it continues that volume of the initial experience may have zero bearing on the ultimately bottom line.

Until next time,
Paulette - looking at that 80-20 thing one more time
www.tipsbooklets.com