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.