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Launching your online business is a huge milestone for any entrepreneur. Your website is now live and you are officially ready to sell your products to thousands of people around the world. Then reality sinks in, and you realize sales aren't just going to come in by themselves! Don't worry though, its not too late to build a marketing strategy that will take your business to the next level.

This post is all about finding your first few customers. These customers will give the motivation and momentum you need to grow your business. While some of the tips below won't work for 1000th customer, they will be perfect for 2nd or 5th customer.

1. Who is Your Ideal Customer?
Before we can even start searching for our first few customers, we need to define what those customers look like. To do this, we will build an ideal customer profile. While this may sound complex, its really just a description of what your ideal customers do and say. Imagine someone asked you to describe your ideal customer, as a person. You want to be able to describe this person just like you could describe your best friend. Some useful questions are:

• What does your ideal customer like to read?
• Where do they hang out?
• What kind of work do they do?
• Who do they listen to (influencers)?
• What do they like to purchase?
• Why do they purchase certain items (specially products like yours)? Is it for pleasure?

Once you have a solid customer profile, you can then start thinking of ways to find them and reach them. While you may not have all the answers to the above questions, any kind of thinking you do in this area will help you in the next step.

2. Go to Where You Customers Are 
With the ideal customer profile, you can start to look for clues of where your customers could be hanging out. Perhaps you realized that you have seen them on Instagram and Facebook. Perhaps there's also a magazine or newsletter that you have seen come up quite frequently. Start exploring those sources and see how you can engage the community and its members. The important thing is not to waste time on channels that you may personally like. For example, you might love Twitter but if you customers don't hang out there, it would be a waste of time to spend time on Twitter. Find 2-3 "channels" where you think your customers are hanging out. These marketing channels will be your main focus over the next 90 days.

3. Systematically Work Channels 
Now that you have 2-3 channels that you want to explore deeper, its time to create a system that will help you work through each channel effectively. Since your assumptions might be incorrect (perhaps your customers aren't on Instagram), you need a way to quickly figure out if your marketing efforts are working. You don't want to waste time and money on channels that just aren't working. As a part of your foundation, create a series of metrics which can help you judge all channels against each other. Examples of these metrics are:

1. Unique pageviews to your site
2. Orders i.e. sales
3. Leads generated i.e. people who give you their emails

You can then rank Instagram against a magazine and see which one gave you more orders, leads or unique pageviews. You will quickly develop a baseline of what a "good" channel is, making it easier to judge any new efforts against this baseline. Give each channel 60-90 days of solid effort and then decide if its worth pursuing further. There are tons of channels out there so don't waste time hoping that a channel will get better!

Next Steps plus a free eBook

If you enjoyed the above article, I have some awesome news. We recently published an eBook on how to build a "marketing machine" by creating systems and the right foundation to promote your products. We also created short videos for every chapter to show exactly what we are talking about, step by step. We are selling this eBook for $49 but we wanted to give this out for free to 100 E-junkie blog readers (that's you!).

Just go to the following link: Download Free eBook And use the following coupon: ejunkiereaders

You will get the eBook plus the videos for free, no strings attached.

If you have any other comments or tips, I would love to hear them below.

Author Bio 
Ruben Daniel is with Edukaans, a video platform that makes it easy to sell video content. Be sure to visit our blog for more educational content on how to make money from your digital products.