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Find the best customers for your business, online

Before the internet, marketing for many, was more difficult, more expensive, and more time consuming. most of the metrics were gathered manually, by using surveys and polls among other methods. They also tracked trends based on what was purchased based on the specific advertising used, such as coupons. Advertising in its most basic form, word of mouth, was still the most effective and the most successful business owners were those who needed little advertising because they got plenty of repeat business and referrals by building relationships with their customers

When the internet became a popular way to market a product or service, many small business owners begin having grandiose thoughts of becoming a global business. They saw the overall potential instead of the relevant potential for their business, and thought globally, many before they even mastered their own neighborhood.

In 1998 I remember building a websites for existing small businesses whose goal was to sell their products globally through an e-commerce website, even before they had ever shipped a product to a customer before. Their site bombed not because it wasn't visually appealing, but their focus for their advertising was too wide for their business. They wanted to reach everyone regardless of whether they were a potential customer globally instead of focusing on finding the best customers and then building a relationship with those customers.

Today the internet offers better opportunities to widen your focus of your business while still being able to build relationships. Through social networking, list building, and blogs to name a few, you can keep a continuous dialogue with your current and potential customers. These are all great ways to keep communication going while widening your focus on who would be your target customers.

The best way to use any type of internet method is founded in the same principles to build any successful marketing and advertising plan:

1. Start with your business objective, not the methods used to achieve it.
2. Then define your goals of your business and your target market.
3. Then choose the methods as well as the tools you will use to achieve it.

After examining this process what you may discover that it will take several methods and tools to achieve your goals. For example, you may want to build an email list from your current or previous customers. To launch how a new offer you have will benefit them you may want to use email and pay per click advertising, to draw in new customers. In most cases a combination of tools will bring the maximum return for your advertising dollar.