Can you please extrapolate on this? Perhaps this is part of the problem (I'm a programmer) -- someone comes to you and says "I need a website that provides information about my business" or "I need people to be able to chat with each other" or "make it so people can buy stuff from the site" -- and it's very clear what needs to happen (usually a database schema starts forming in my head as the client is talking). However, the "problem space" of traffic generation is not very concrete in my mind. I understand individual aspects of it, but not really able to grasp it as a whole. Perhaps this lack of "overall understanding the system" is what keeps hackers away from these kinds of jobs?
Driving traffic is so very different from building software, because you can do everything right, follow all best practices and rules, build an awesome campaign, and still fail because your competitors are doing it 10% better.
In some ways, different traffic sources are like programming languages. They each have different methods, rules, and tricks, and being a good marketer means being familiar enough with them to figure out the right tools for the job.A lot of that knowledge comes from testing and experience.
You know that you wouldn't build a chat website in BASIC and I know that I wouldn't send international RON traffic to a dating site.
It all boils down to arbitraging traffic and finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the market- you have to answer the fundamental question of "where is the amount and quality of traffic I want priced lower than it would be in a perfect market?"
Obviously, if you can build technology to answer this question in a scalable way, as I and others are trying to do, you can do very well in the space.
There's a reason enterprise-class PPC bid management tools sell for thousands of dollars a month(and 5% of spend).
Thank you for your reply. I have to say I still understand nothing more about the problem space than I did before, though :)
Any stories or examples you can share to illustrate exactly what's involved?
