Back in 1993, when I began designing websites for clients, I knew nothing about marketing. I was a webmaster. I was not a master marketer. The websites I designed used the typical header across the top with links down the left sidebar. In some cases I would use two side bars with links, one of the left side and one on the right side with content in the middle.

In the early 90′s, back when I operated a website design business, I remember a client of mine who had a direct sales website. He wanted a more professional looking website so I created a standard header across the top with links down the sides. He was really happy with it. But two months later he called me and said his sales had fallen by 13% after we put up the new website. This was crazy we thought. His website looked so much better, why did his sales drop 13%!

I was embarrassed to say the least. The problem was the complexity of the website. Where blank, dead space had been, we replaced with the following links: Press Release, Awards, Screen Shots, Books, Magazines, About Us, and Privacy Statement.

We put the old website back up, the less professional looking website. Sales immediately went back up to their former levels.

The lesson I learned in website design is to keep it super simple. Visitors to the website had too many options presented to them which is another way of saying the website had no focus. There was no clear instruction on what we wanted visitors to do. Back in 1993, I do not think we even knew what we really wanted visitors to do, other than click on the order button. The web logs showed that very few people even visited the new links we added.

Internet marketing is a lot simpler than most business owners think. Look, let us be brutally honest here. My research has shown me that people do not care about your business. They do not care about your awards. They certainly do not care about your press releases or your privacy policy. All that people care about is if you have an answer, if you have a product or service, that will solve their problem and, how much will it cost.

Many beginners in ecommerce make the critical mistake of hiring a web designer to design their site. As a result they end up with a beautiful masterpiece, but one that just does not sell.

You only have 8 seconds to get your prospects attention. If he feels confused by 3, 5, or 10 hyperlinks, he will hit the back button on his browser and go to the next website listed on Google. If he can not find what he wants in seconds, he will click the back button and move on to your competitors websites. By the way, the answer to this problem is not to install a script that prevents someone from using the back button to exit your website. This only gets your prospect mad and assures that he will never come back to your website again. Doing this could also lead to complaints filed with Google against your website. Google clearly prohibits you from doing this if you want to be listed in Google. You could get de-listed for adding a stupid prevent the back button script. I do not know of any business owners that want to be de-listed from Google.

A simple, attention getting headline with well written sales copy, and the single option you want her to take, trumps design when it comes to selling.

You must focus all the sales copy on your website onto the single action you want a visitor to take. Stay away from using sidebar navigational links. Have only a single option, the option, you want people to take on any given web page on your site. When you focus your sales copy and website in this way, you focus your visitor on exactly what you want then to focus on. Complex website design is the enemy of sales. If you want to have an effective direct sales website, you need to keep your website design super simple.

A key component of Internet marketing is to know who your customer really is. It is impossible to market a product to people if you do not know who the people are. When there was only brick and mortar stores, you knew who your customer was.

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 made a big mistake when I first began in Internet marketing back in the early 90s. I figured that most of my customers were like me, a white male who speaks English. I would get frustrated with emails I thought were stupid. I mean really dumb questions like how do I order and are you going to ship your software to me by mail?

After years of suffering with these dumb emails, I discovered that most of my customers were Asian females. What?! I could have sworn that I knew who my customers were, white men like me. I could not be more wrong. Everything finally made sense to me. These Asian females were not the best at the English language. I had sprinkled impressive words throughout the sales copy on my website because I wanted to impress readers. This was a huge mistake as my largest customer base could not understand the English instructions on my website!

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 was a terrific success! I no longer received those “stupid” emails. I had suffered for some 6 years responding to “stupid” emails. I must have spent thousands and thousands of hours over the years answering “stupid” emails. It turned out that I was the stupid one. I thought I had it all figured out but in reality I did not even know who my customers were! Do not make the same mistake I did. Know who your customer is.

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

Quantcast provides Internet marketers with profiles for millions of websites.

Here is what I found out about my website.

I learned that most visitors to my website were Asian females between the ages of 14 and 20. Most of my web visitors live in a home where the annual income is less than $28,000. After Asians, then came Hispanics. After Hispanics, there was African Americans. Finally, the smallest visitors to my website were Caucasians like me. So my reasoning that most of my visitors were Caucasians like me was completely the opposite of reality.

I also learned that most of my visitors come from the Los Angeles area.

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.