Effectively Research Your Market, Understanding Your Audience & Put YOURSELF in THEIR shoes

my previous post. Or else you’ll find a “brain disconnect”  Markets are a dime a dozen, the world evolves around markets that are inhibited by specific demographic and psychographic groups of people that shape a market – sometimes by choice, other times because they have to. Without markets – life, as we know it, would simply not exist. Was that deep, or what ;) But, seriously, think about it for a second. Everytime you leave your house to get something – anything – you are entering someone’s market. Somebody, who chose to be a “supplier” for that market, is now making money from you – simply because there is a want or a need on your end to get something that’s on offer in this market. It can be something as trivial as bread (or other food and beverages) that you simply have to go buy or else you would die. Or maybe it’s that eBook about “Getting La*d” because your most primal senses force you to perform that “act” but you are missing a partner, and it drives you bananas. Or maybe it’s a new Mac or the new iPad because you’re such a fanboy and a “regular computer” simply doesn’t cut it for you. All of the above are markets that have a significant group of people as loyal followers. One is driven by the need to survive, the other one is driven by testosterone and, in a sense, you also need “that” to survive and the third one is driven by passion and emotion and, to be totally honest, you also need that to survive. We haven’t even mentioned the markets that sell solutions based on certain problems people face. What I wanted to make clear with these last few paragraphs is that, behind every sale there is a reason and the reason is very often based on some type of emotion, passion, deeply rooted urge, want or desire. The “product” is never the reason, it’s what the product does for/to you that makes you flip open the wallet and plunk down the cash. You’re buying an experience when you buy your next Mac/iPad – if you just wanted a “computer”, you would have just bought the cheapest PC at Best Buy and be done with it, no need to pay X times the price. The same goes for my friend’s business I described yesterday in my post, if all these women wanted was a “haircut”, they would have not come to his salon. They could have picked one of the salons that were trying to compete on price, He built his salon based on customer experience and customer satisfaction. That was his “sticking” point. Massive difference and an excellent way to diversify yourself and your business from the “me too” crowd. Makes sense? OK – all of the above may sound all sweet and sexy but how do you go about figuring out who wants to buy and at which price? I wish I could just send you to some website or resource that has all this stuff pre-figured out for ya. As you probably already know, there is no such resource – but some logic and common sense will take us on the right path and will limit our chances of focusing on the wrong crowd or the wrong market. Everybody always talks about market research – there really is never a need to “research” a market. It’s already there – you just have to “discover” the opportunities and offer “something” that will earn you money! That something could be – getting the people in the market on your list first (if the market permits) and then monetize with affiliate offers, your own products, !CPA offers or even contextual clicks like AdSense (which, by the way, is not dead at all). In order to discover a market you don’t need a keyword tool. What good are keywords if you don’t have a single clue about what a market’s wants/needs/pains are?! First you go and find the people in the market! Keywords are crucial if you’re doing PPC or if you want to target certain terms for SEO – not if you’re a smart marketer. Let everybody else fret about the so-called “commercial intent” and what not! Smart Markerter’s don’t find keywords – they find people. Keywords don’t buy products – people do. You want to find out what the market talks about – something that the offline business world can never find out. They can only guess. Online marketers, on the other hand, can find out every single little thing that drives the people in a market with just a few keystrokes. I’ll talk about the resources I use to discover conversations that people in a market are having in real time! I use omgili.com to brainstorm by just looking at the hundreds of markets that are mentioned there (there’s a “recent topics” on the homepage). It’s a real goldmine and I’ve found few highest earning niche set-ups by “accidently” coming across topics I had never deemed profitable before! Omgili.com reveals discussions about products unheard off before! You can find links to popular forums, popular products, even tweets that are being done in real time. One very nifty feature is the real time Omgili search (enhanced by Google) – you can find it here – http://google.omgili.com/ If I type in “wedding” – I get back regular Google results but on the side there are these little call out boxes. These callout boxes point to “discussions” or conversations about that particular site. Click on one of those boxes and you’ll get!a scrollable box that lists websites, blog posts, Yahoo answers, forums, tweets, etc. with one thing in common – they all mention that particular website. All of these links point towards people who have asked questions, provide tips, talk about their frustrations, etc. Those are the people that populate your market. Those people ARE your market! See! – you did zero research. You typed in a query and you’ve been given all the things you’ll ever need to know about the market, and you got it from real people talking about real things that keep them busy! “ Market discovery is not about keywords, it’s about finding and observing the people in the market. “ Don’t overthink this stuff too much – just type in the query and follow the links. Very quickly you’ll discover the potential in the market, ready for you to jump in and profit from. In the wedding market it can be (and I randomly picked these topics from some of the links I followed) wedding dresses, wedding parties, wedding hairstyles, wedding ideas, bridal showers, wedding plannners, etc. In this market alone there’s hundreds more topics – just type in the main query and follow the “people trail”. Now that you have a more solid idea about the market (an idea you wouldn’t have been able to !form if you would have just used Google’s keyword tool) it’s time for you to figure out whether or not the market is a viable one. In other words – is there money to be made? Are there CPA/affiliate offers available I can present to these people? You can find out @ offervault.com. Maybe an information product on Clickbank or a physical product on cj.com? Go to each of these different networks and – again – type in your market. When I did this for the wedding market, I came up with dozens of products in the various affiliate networks! All of these products are a perfect match with the target audience. I could go ahead and build a super-profitable set up right now in this market. Other resources you can use besides omgili.com: Advanced functions @ Google.com – you can access these features by going to Google.com and doing your search ie. “Wedding Planner”, then clicking the “Show Options…” tab on top of the page. On the left hand side you’ll see the following options you can use: 1 – Videos 2 – News 3 – Blogs 4 – Forums You can also use the very helpful: http://blogsearch.google.com/ A massive tracker of many forums is: http://v2.boardtracker.com/ I hope it gets your juices flowing  ]]>

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