Internet Marketing

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 not have a brick and mortar store and do business exclusively over the Internet, then you need to find out as much information as possible about your customers.

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 many years, I found out that most of my customers were Asian females. Wow! I never would have guessed that. It immediately made sense. There was a language barrier problem. Here I had reasoned that because I was selling to very smart people, teachers, I had better sprinkle impressive words throughout my sales copy. What a mistake that was!

I had to re-write the sales copy on my website. I dropped all the big words. I started using smaller words and shorter sentences. For my blog, I started buying articles that were written by females or Asian females.

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 is the only open internet ratings service. They provide advertisers with audience profiles for millions of websites and services. The service is free to everyone.

This is what Quantcast told me 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 also learned that most of my visitors come from the Los Angeles area.

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.

I can not stress enough how important it is that you know who your prospects and customers are. Do not think you already know and make the same mistake I did.