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Posts tagged market research
Free And Easy Ways To Do Initial Market Research
Dec 24th
Finding a profitable market is one of the most sought after information that most marketers encounter. There is a lot of software available and monthly sites you can join to help with this. But it’s not real hard to get a good idea of whether or not the niche you’re considering is worth investing time and money into. One big mistake is to ONLY look at keyword search volumes to decide if a market is profitable or not.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because I have done this myself. The way it worked for me is that I started with keyword research and found keywords that had a lot of searches. I figured that if a lot of people were searching for these keywords, I could make sales. So I set up web pages and wrote articles around these keywords. There are two things I failed to do.
The first thing was that I didn’t check to make sure that the keywords I was targeting were keywords that led to sales. What I should have done was to make sure that there were several people advertising on PPC. Then I should have looked at the top search engine listings to see what came up and noticed whether or not there were sites selling products that targeted those keywords. I could have gone to Amazon.com and looked at the top books and magazines related to my keywords.
The second thing was that I didn’t take the time to see where my potential customers were located What forums did they frequent? What blogs did they comment on? What newsletters did they subscribe to? What products were they buying and what problems did they have that they were trying to solve?
The solution is easy, but from what I’ve been reading in the marketing forums, it’s a point that is often missed. As I mentioned, I missed it too.
The reason it’s so important to take the time to do this research is because it will save you time and money. You will ultimately save time because you will be working on offers, ads, and content that will bring you paying customers. Getting a lot of traffic won’t do a lot of good if most of your visitors are looking for free stuff.
It’s also important because once you know that there are people that are willing to pay for what you are promoting, you want to spend all of your time getting their attention. You can do this in several ways. You can find the forums they visit and start contributing. You can do the same thing with blogs. Add your comment to blogs relating to your niche and include a link to your site. In the case of blogs and forums, you can see if they accept advertising, and consider putting up your ads there. Find out what newsletters your market subscribes to and advertise there.
You can only do these things once you know what your market is buying and where they hang out. It’s not hard, and it can mean the difference between success and failure.
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Two Free Market Research Tools You Need To Know About
May 29th
I want to talk about keyword research and market research. Keywords are talked about a lot. There are countless articles and guides about keyword research. There are free keyword tools. There are paid keyword tools. And there are keyword memberships that offer a suite of tools.
Market research is important as well. In fact, it should come before keyword research. The reason for this is that it’s easier to come up with a list of keywords when you know which markets are popular and full of people buying products. And buying customers are what we are all interested in.
Doing market research can give you a lot of ideas and markets that you may not have considered before. And it’s not that hard to do it.
I want to let you know about a couple of free tools you can use to easily get started in your market research.
The first one is Hot Trends from Google.
Go to http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends. Here you’ll see the top 100 searches in the last hour or so. A lot of these results are searches on current events or people in the news. But sometimes you’ll come across a hot topic for a market that you may decide to enter. Each of the 100 listings is a link. When you click on a link, you’ll go to a page where you’ll see what’s called a hotness index. along with a list of related searches. There’s also a graph of the last few hours of search activity.
Below that is a list of the top news articles, top blogs, and related web sites, with links to each entry. Another nice feature of this site is that you can access data from the past. You can look at hot trends for the day before, the week before, the month before. This allows you to see if there is a pattern where a search term that you’re interested in has a lot of historical interest.
The other site is also from Goolge. It’s called Google Insights For Search. Go to http://www.google.com/insights/search
Here you can enter a keyword and get results from 2004 to the present time. You can choose a shorter time range as well. For example you can see the results for the past 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, the past year, or select a year from the list. You’ll see a graph that shows search interest for the time frame you select. There’s a list of the top 10 regions or countries where these searches came from. There’s a list of the top 10 related search terms to your primary keyword.
There’s a filter you can use to customize you results. You can do a web search, product search, news search or image search. You can search worldwide, or by country, and by regions in the country. And you can search by categories. You can click on any of the related keywords and get data for that keyword.
You can get a lot of good ideas and information for free from these two sites.
Once you’ve got a list of seed keywords and you want to do some deep digging to find all of the keywords you need to dominate your market, go to Nichebot X. There you’ll get access to premium keyword tools. Try it out for 14 days to see for yourself what Nichebot X can do. It will only cost you $1 for 14 days. Try it before you buy it. Click here for Nichebot X.
