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.

You need to take a few extra actions to find out who your prospects and customers really are, especially if you do business exclusively over the Internet.

I naturally assumed that my customers were most like me, a white male fluent in English. I became frustrated with what I thought was really stupid emails like how do I order and are you going to mail your software program to me?

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 quickly dropped the big words and started using smaller words with shorter sentences on my website. I also started paying for articles for my blog that were written by 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.

So here is how you find out about your web visitors and prospects. Use a free tool on the Internet 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.

A younger, heavily female, more Asian audience visits my website. Most of my visitors are between the ages of 13 and 18. Most of my visitors live in a home where the household income is less than $29,000 a year. The next biggest group of visitors to my website are Hispanics. Then, there are African Americans. And last, there are Caucasians like me. So what I thought were my primary visitors were actually the smallest. I could not be more wrong about who I thought my target audience was.

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.

Learning who my prospects and customers were changed my entire business. The entire perspective I had of my business and who I was helping and providing needed services for was never the same. It is still causes me pain to think about to this day. Pain in that my own arrogance cost me thousands of hours worth of my life responding to emails that I can never get back. Pain in that my sales were hurt for years.

Do not make the same mistake I did. Do not assume that you already know who your prospects and customers are.

Tags : Business
Categories : Business