Imagine a really cool and glitzy restaurant built on the side of a mountain. The view is breathtaking. The food is second to none. The ambiance is perfect. This new restaurant should be packed from open to close!

However, there is one big problem. The owner of the restaurant forgot about considering how folks will get there. Sure, there’s a primitive road to it but it is hard to find and difficult to maneuver. The owners thought it would be a matter of “build it and they will come”. However, there are other similar restaurants in the big city below which are much easier to get to. Although they may not be as perfect as the new, mountain-side restaurant, their ease of access provides their owners a fine income.

Why didn’t the mountain restaurant simply build the new business down with the rest of the successful ones? It’s simple really. The heavy competition made that option impossible. The concentrated and heavy competition made everything about building the restaurant near the others more difficult and even more expensive.

Here’s what the business owner should have done when building his new restaurant:

First, instead of going all out with offering a full featured restaurant with all the bells and whistles, the owner should have first considered a more conservative approach.  The owner should have opened a smaller, more tightly focused theme café on the outskirts of town. There, the overhead would be lower than prime spots, but customers would still have easy access.

Perhaps the café’s income would be significantly less than the upscale eateries with the prime locations. However, enjoying a little success is preferred over the lost-cause restaurant on the mountain.

I am of course using an analogy here to describe a common error that new Internet marketers often make.

Always remember to consider how (or if) you can get traffic to your new site. Never spend one minute of work on the site until you can answer that question. If you are unsure how to know if or how your new site will get traffic, that’s even more reason to slow down and better learn the process of Internet marketing before possibly wasting time on a dead-end project.