Make Money Online - How to Identify Your Ideal Customer

When you first go into business online, in order to make a success of it, you need to make sales. In order to both generate traffic to your business online, and successfully make sales, you need to ask yourself some crucial questions:

** Who is your IDEAL customer?

By which we mean the person who has a burning passion, pain or problem, that your product or service services, solves or soothes. One of the other elements of an IDEAL customer is they must also be easily able to afford your product or service.

So you really need to get a good picture of them: What do they look like, how old are they, are they male of female, what do they do for a living, what do they wear, what do they currently spend their disposable income on, how do they make their money in the first place, how do they live their lives, what do they do in their spare time, what are their biggest frustrations or challenges?

** Where are you going to FIND your customers?

If you have answered the question about the ideal customer fully, you should have a pretty good idea of where you will be able to find them, but I want you to think specifically where they hang out online.

If you think that your ideal customer will be hanging on on Google, looking for a solution to their problem or pain, that's the first place for you to look too.

The best way to find out the size of your market is the Google KeyWord Tool but you need to get into the head of your ideal customer first. I like to think of my idea customers sitting in front of their computer at 11 o'clock at night, with a glass of wine....and imagine what they are thinking.

People either search by the problem or pain, or their perceived solution to the problem or pain.

For example: I've got bad spots (keyword "spots" or "bad spots") or "how can I get rid of my spots" or "fast spot relief" (new keyword "spot relief" or "fast spot relief")

Google will tell you how many of your ideal customers are searching for you right now and what words they are using, specifically, to search with. You might find that quite motivating!

** What product will you sell them first?

So, by looking at the phrases that are getting the most searches per month, globally or nationally, you will be able to think of things to sell them - and the first one of those is your lead product.

You might have a few free products to give away first, but the important one is the first paid product.

Michael Masterson, in his superb business book "Ready Fire Aim" which I highly recommend, says that "until you have a lead product that you can sell profitably, to your ideal customer, you don't have a business.

** How much will you charge them for it?

This is an easy one to answer - you test three different price points, and you do that using a simple bit of code, that fires one third of your customers at one sales page, with a price at X, the second third at a secon page with a price at Y, and the final third at a third page with a price point of Z.

** How will you convince them to buy it?

Now, this is getting a little more complex, but once you know the elements of a sale, you will do very well.

First up, you will need a long-form sales page - and before you groan and say you hate them....we have all tested them and they sell the most so GET OVER IT.

I use Armand Morin's Sales Letter Generator to write mine, then I pretty it up and get it online, then we link to it from emails, from our website, in our ezine. We don't get too attached to our headlines or sub-heads because we use the Google Optimizer tool to split test those.

The sections of the long-form sales page are covered, in logical step by step sequence, in the Sales Letter Generator tool, but the most important elements are:

Social Proof - this means testimonials from happy customers - video and pictures prove that they are real people and if some of them are well known...so much the better!

Proof - this means specific proof that your product or services does what you say it does

Reciprocity - If you do something for someone else, like give them lots of great free stuff, they tend to want to do something for you. It's human nature to want to return the favor.

Risk Reversal - this is your crucially important guarantee and it needs to take all the risk away from the customer and put it onto you

Urgency - people need a reason to buy now or they will never make a decision.

So, perhaps you are sitting there, with a business that is either not doing so well (and looking at the above, you can see why!) or it's doing pretty well in spite of the current market conditions, but you want it to do better, or you are sick of working quite so hard in it.

So what do you need to do? Answer the above questions very carefully - think long and hard about your ideal future customer - and then think about finding yourself an internet marketing mentor because that will accelerate your success online.