Thriving online businesses have shown that the more specific you are about who you are targeting and what you are selling, the more success you’ll have. Because the online world is dominated by search, specificity matters. If you can’t accurately predict what your customers will type into search, you won’t get found.

This can be confusing because most local offline print companies go-to-market in the opposite manner. They have a core offering but they will and often do entertain just about anything that is asked of them. Their product offering becomes diluted by years and years of exceptions. In the 1990’s I worked for the privately held retail copy shop chain Kinko’s. Just about every month we would get a “new product” to offer in our stores. The products ranged from Notary services, to conference room rentals, to the oversized fax (yes, every Kinko’s got an oversized fax – that didn’t last very long).

With every product we (the retail employees) were expected to understand the offering and “sell” it to our customer base. After about the third product, we started failing fast. More isn’t always better. Kinko’s eventually doubled back and focused on only what was profitable (bound printed documents) which was a relief to all of us working on the front lines of busy retail locations.