How to Find Customers Online

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Do you really “get” how to sell your services or products online? If you are failing to reach your customers online, then there is something going wrong with your marketing efforts. Today’s Internet world is supposed to help you sell more of your products and services.

It doesn’t matter if you are a web designer, dog products wholesaler, provide language translation services or write books. Your customers are online.You need to intercept while they are there and add quality to their lifes to stand ahead of your competition. With no real system and implementing “quick fix” methods will never help you find leads or customers for your business.

The first and foremost thing you need to do is pin point where your targeted customers are and what they are doing. Then try to get in their path. Dont wait for them to come to you. Instead go to them. Now, how exactly do you do that?  Let us pause here for a while and look at the statistics.

Statistics: According to the US Census Bureau, three out of five households are online which is 110 million households and almost half of them access to high speed Internet. Now isn’t easy to find your customers online?

What are people doing online? This is important as it helps us finding out how exactly we can come across our specific customers.  Almost 58% of Internet users are reading or sending email. 50% are using search (this includes all kinds of search engines). 38% use Internet to get news, 38% are online for fun, and, 27% are using social networking sites.  If these are the top four activities people make online, then obviously, you need to be where that’s happening.

Promotion: You should be sending periodic emails to your customers. Your site should be showing up in search results. You should be in “news” by distributing the press releases of your services and products. As the usage of social media sites is increasing exponentially every year, you should be promoting your site there.

Start with a primary marketing strategy. That could be advertising, article marketing, video marketing, podcast marketing. Then explore ways to make money from existing customers. It is easy to pin point your customers online if you know what they’re doing and where you need to be to be connected to them. Then all you need is a backend system to keep bringing the visitors consistently.

Here is a small method I use to promote my articles in high profile, authority websites.

Article marketing: If you want to promote your site with your articles, there is an excellent way to find out high profile sites which accept your articles. Here is the procedure.

1. Go to www.delicious.com 
2. Find the articles that have atleast 100 bookmarks by searching the site with your keywords and copy the article titles.
3. Open google.com  and enter the copied title in the search bar with quotations. For example, “Six Useful Tips for Web Designers and Developers”
4. Now, you can find hundreds of websites that published this article, which are usually authority sites having a page rank of atleast 5. You can request the site owners to publish your article too. But your article must be unique. These sites are highly targeted and can send you thousands of visitors to your site who are your potential customers.

You can repeat the above procedure with Stumbleupon and Digg. You can implement the same procedure for video marketing and pod cast marketing too.

Forums: Another excellent way to find your customers is by using forums. You can find n-number of forums for almost every niche with tons of like minded people talking about every topic every day. There are a couple ways to find these forums, the easiest being to just go to big-boards.com  and look up your topic in their forum search box. Register in the forums and provide great content.

Remember that the best way to attract your customers is to provide great, valuable and unique content.

This article is written by guest author Indu Priya, an online marketer from theideashome.com.  She is a traffic expert and offers traffic building services to small business owners. Get her FREE ebook on how to drive 100+ traffic per day. You can also do guest blogging on QOT and share your expert opinions.