Who Are Your Customers?[back to quick facts]

You already know who your current customers are because they have been patronizing your business for several years. When you get on the Internet you open yourself up to other demographics and audiences. When starting out you really don't know who will be your customer. Is it someone in your local community or someone in another country? Depending on the product that you sell make sure to keep your options open. In 10 to 20 years you may have developed a particular sausage or sauce that someone in Germany would like to purchase.

There are tools on the internet to help identify your customers? Web tracking software is used on the server-side and analyzes the number of hits of your web pages. This sometimes is an additive service provided by your web hosting company. Some hosting services don't provide these capabilities. Information logged from this software can tell you what time of day, week, month you get hits from particular machines addresses from different domains. For example, can determine if the machine was going through a *.com, *.edu, *.mil domain. It can also determine what country they came from. It can also rank which pages are being hit the most. The downside to the server tracking software is that it accumulates huge amounts of data on the server. Larger web hosting companies can afford to keep larger drive space available therefore, will probably offer better service.

Set out and investigate new audiences. The United States is becoming a melting pot. Traditional America is coming into new cultures and ethnic groups. Are there particular products that can be arranged for these entities. For example, certain cultures have special celebration events at particular times in the year. Do have a particular food product that they use for these events? Market your web site directly to these groups with your product information. You can do this through email or direct mailings. You may want to develop a special page for the group with additional attractions that their culture enjoys.