How To Save Yourself Time and Money

Before you do anything online you need to find out what they want! It is amazing how many times I see people skipping one the most important step of online marketing.

Ask yourself this, how can you sell a product if you don't know where your audience is and if they are actually interested in it? Well technically you could but lets be honest, it isn't going to yield that good of results is it. Wouldn't it be much easier selling something to a group of people who have a problem and they want it fixed? Of course it would so why are so many people not doing it!!

Market research is boring! I get that, it can be a long tedious process which eats a lot of time but it is an essential part of marketing. By spending a few days/weeks actually finding out what your market wants could save you months/years developing a website, products etc... to a market which quite honestly, don't want your product. Then you have spent all that time developing a product when you could of quite easily found out if it would work within a couple of weeks.

But how do you find out what people want?

It's not rocket science is it...

- Forums, an absolute great source for finding out what a market wants. Take this one for an example, just look at what WSO and Services do well, thats a clear indication of what people want. Look for a recurring pattern in question, one overwhelming question which comes up in this forum is, how do I get traffic to my blog. Look at the popular posts and look at why they are so popular... There are so many ways you can figure out what a group of people want by engaging and interacting with them.

- Yahoo Groups and Questions, there are tons of Yahoo groups out there with 1000s of members which are interested in a specific subject, why not join them, interact, engage and you will find their likes and dislikes. Are their questions which are constantly popping up on yahoo answers? If there is, theres a problem, fix it!

- SEO, not even going to mention this because everyone knows about keyword research so no point in going further.

- eBay, Amazon and companies like them. They all have best sellers, they all have people selling products on them. Lets take eBay for an example, if you search tennis rackets, you can quickly see which bats are looked for more then other, this is a good place to start your research, remember not all markets are ebook markets. Magazines!! There are tons of magazines being sold on amazon, if any relate to your niche, buy them and read them!! These will tell you so much for a small small fee. Spend a little and gain a lot!

- Social media, this should of really been first! Facebook and Twitter are market research machines, not only is their groups on Facebook which work similar to a forum, you have real time problems being tweeted about everyday. Figure out how to apply that to your niche and your find lots of problems, real people want fixing.

Not only by engaging and interacting with people in your market and finding out what they like and don't like. You are building up a reputation within the niche which could quite easily be turned into an authority over time.

To conclude this post, get engaged!! Find out what people are looking for and what people want before creating it and spending a boat load of money developing it. Put in the grunt work, the crappy bits and I promise you this will yield you better results then if you went out on a whim.

You should be looking forward to these sucky times ahead