You can have the worlds greatest product, but if you can't locate your crowd of hungry buyers it won't mean a thing, and you won't make a cent. Finding your market is crucial. Having found them, you need to find out exactly what they want and just give it to them. Sounds easy, right? And it is if you know how. Get this right and online marketing almost becomes an exact science.
Here's a few tips to help you do this.
First, go to Google Groups and type in your niche keywords. Or type in "Niche keywords/forums or discussion groups." Forums are great places to find hungry buyers and enthusiasts in whatever your niche is. Use a bit of common sense and patience here. If you suddenly turn up from nowhere and start trying to sell to all and sundry, you will come unstuck - people aren't that stupid, and you'll just annoy them. Spend a week or two reading the forum posts. You'll find a few people asking questions, and if you happen to know the answers this is where you step in. (If your business is based around a hobby this will be easy.) You could of course always research the answers on line, but remember there is a lot of rubbish on the internet, so check your sources before you commit yourself!
This achieves two things;
1/ You become part of that online community and
2/ You begin to establish yourself as a subject matter expert - very important! This gives you credibility.
Meanwhile, you create an online survey. Use either surveymonkey.com or askdatabase.com. People don't want to complete a 20 question survey that takes hours to fill in. Accepted wisdom is to ask just one question - when you have enough answers collate them, and arrange from most popular to least popular. These will form the outline of your e-book!
A few tips re the survey - give people a reason to complete it. Go to the forums and post something like..."Hi, I'm just about to create an exciting new e-book about Guinea Pig care (or whatever). Please go to my online survey at (clickable link is best here) it won't take more than 5 minutes and I'll send a free copy of the completed e-book to everyone who completes the survey." Ask for answers to be in the format of "open ended essay". You will get all sorts of useful feedback here. Worst case, if you get no answers this tells you that you shouldn't go ahead and create that product, because there isn't demand for it, But you've found this out at no cost, which is far, far better than getting the thing built and then finding out nobody's interested.
I don't totally go along with just asking one question in the survey - here's why.
Say your most asked question about Guinea Pig care is "How long does a Guinea Pig live?". Can you create an e-book around that? I doubt it. I suggest two questions;
1/ What is your most important question about Guinea Pig care and
2/ How difficult have you found it to get information on that question? (You could even ask them to rate difficulty from 1-10)
This technique is used by Glenn Livingstone, one of the top marketers in the USA. If your customers have a really difficult question they want answering (or better yet, several questions) and you can answer those questions, this greatly increases the perceived value of your product. It should also make those filling in your survey think more carefully about their answers, which will help you.
Next, we'll look at creating the actual product itself.
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