Market and Investment

If you want to succeed at Internet marketing then you need to know who you are marketing to. Who is buying your product? How can you sell a product to someone if you do not know who they are? Back when someone had to meet you in person, aka a brick and mortar store, you always knew who your customer was so this was a non-issue.

If you do business exclusively over the Internet and do not have a brick and mortar store, you need to do a few steps to find out more information about your prospects.

I erroneously reasoned that my customers were most like me. After all, I designed my product with the idea of what would I like to see in a product, if I was my own customer. I would get angry with emails that I thought were stupid. Really dumb questions like how do I order and are you going to send me your software program in the mail?

After months and months of putting up with frustrating emails I discovered that most of my prospects and customers were Asian females! I never would have guessed that in a million years. It now made sense why I was getting those frustrating emails. I had used the “kings english” on my website, real big words and impressive language. This was a big mistake because it confused my biggest customer base, Asian females.

I immediately switched to smaller words and shorter sentences in my sales copy. I also started paying for articles for my blog that were written by women on my subject and if possible, Asian women.

It worked! Just like magic all those dumb emails vanished. I had wasted years of my life replying to these dumb emails. I must have spent thousands of hours over the years answering dumb emails. As it turned out, I was the dumb one. I thought I had Internet marketing all figured out. In reality, I had nothing figured out. In fact, I did not even know who my customers were.

You need to find out who your prospects and customers are. To do this, you can use an awesome free tool called Quantcast.

Quantcast has a free signup form on their website. They provide Internet marketers with free visitor profiles for millions of websites.

Here is what I found out about my website.

My website caters to a younger, more Asian, heavily female, more educated audience. The majority of my visitors are between 12 and 17. The majority of my visitors live in a home where the household income is less than $30,000 per year. Most of my customers are Asian. Next, they are Hispanic. Next, they are African American. Finally, there are the Caucasians. Remember, I thought that beyond any doubt, most of my customers were Caucasian males just like me. Caucasians turned out to be the smallest percentage of my sales.

I discovered that most of my visitors come from California’s Los Angeles. So if I advertise offline, I should do so in the Los Angeles market.

My entire world was rocked when I learned who my customers really were. The entire view of my business and the services I provided changed after that. It was a low point for me. For then, I truly realized, I didn’t know Jack. My own arrogance hurt my sales for some 6 years and cost me thousands of hours of extra work responding to emails that I really did not need to had I known who my customers really were.

I can not emphasize enough the importance of knowing who your customers are. Do not be arrogant because, in the end, it is only you that will suffer.

Written by Lance Jepsen. Learn how to triple your websales in 30 days with an easy to follow step by step approach. To learn more about this top selling book, see internet marketing book