Customers. The life blood of every business. When you stop and think about it, everyone plays two roles throughout their life. Those roles are customer and seller.

We all buy products or services from someone or some company. If you are hungry, you may buy food at a store or a fast food restaurant or sit down restaurant or you may even eat at home.

But even the food at home you had to purchase from some place. Which made you at that time a customer.

The clothes you wear on your body you had to have bought from a store or made them yourself. Even then you were a customer.

There were and perhaps are times in your life when you played the role of a seller and not the customer. If you have not, then you are a rare person because we all have.

We have been sellers when we were kids and we were selling items for our school or church or sport group or perhaps to raise money for the band.

You are also a seller when you are at your job. In a way, that is true. You may not be selling a product, but you are selling your time and service to your employer and in turn they are paying you for your time and service.

So, you see, we are always either a seller or a customer in various times in our lives.

With that being said, you need to know your customer when you do decide to go in to business.

I have said it many many times, in order for a business to stay alive it must advertise. When you stop advertising you go out of business and your business dies.

Advertising and customers are together the life blood of all businesses.

The reason you need to know your customer is because you need to know where they are. Are the people you are trying to sell to male or female or both?

Are they young or old? You would not want to promote for example, an older adult community in a publication that only teen ages would only see.

If you are doing a resume service, for example, you need to advertise your service to people looking for a job. It would not be good advertising to try to sell your service to someone who is not looking for a job.

When you place a classified ad, you need to make sure that it is in the right category. You do not want to place a car that you are trying to sell in the pets for sale column. The people you are trying to sell to will not see it and the people who will see would not be interested.

You need to advertise where your customers are likely to see the ad.

Make sure that where you do advertise that the people you are looking to sell to will be the ones who will see the ad. It makes no sense to place your ads in places that those people will not see.

You would not want to advertise lose weight products in places that advertise products that have nothing to do with weight loss.

For example, a magazine that caters to magicians would be ideal for selling stuff about magic tricks but would not be a good place to advertise for auctions.

Just make sure you place your ads in places where your customers will be sure to see them.