When it comes to dominating your niche markets through internet marketing, it won’t happen by accident. Instead, researching everything from your market to how they search the internet is critical to achieving top online marketing results.
For instance, here is just a small list of the research functions that go into a successful internet marketing venture:
- Identification and refining the definition of your niche market
- Understanding your niche market’s demand and motivation behind that demand
- Knowing what they want to buy and what their key value indicators are
- Getting a handle on how they go about finding products to buy online…
- Knowing the keywords that they use when looking for your products using search engines
- Determining the right price point and value play to dominate your niche market
- Finding the exact language that triggers your market to pay attention and then take action on your offers
- Knowing your competition and what they are offering
- Uncovering the best partners to help promote your content, websites and affiliate offers
The first week of the Six Week InfoProfits Internet Marketing Course inside InfoMarketer’sZone focuses heavily on the quickest, most effective research tools and methods to make sure you are targeting highly profitable markets with winning offerings.
If you are operating without research in 1 or more of the areas listed above, you are setting your internet marketing business up for failure.
So, where will you find the top sites to use when researching for your online business?
1. Discussion Forum Directories
An online business succeeds based on uncovering the thoughts, emotions and buying triggers of your target audience. I have found that discussion forums offer a very powerful and unique perspective into markets, who they are and what they find interesting including key challenges, frustrations and desires they have. You can find relevant discussion forums in a couple of different ways…
a) Google search your topic + discussion forums
b) Use forum search aggregation engines like BoardReader or Omgili
2. Who’s Talkin
A very comprehensive site for searching the latest social network, blog and forum discussions – an extremely powerful, one-step-shop search research tool for your internet business
As our business is primarily selling information online, Amazon is a key research technique for uncovering pockets of demand, new markets ,refine our niche markets, watch comments from buyers and check out the top sellers in any given niche. Use Amazon search or dig through the main categories to begin your research.
Great place to get a good sense for what people are asking, how often they are asking and how much participation there is in answering…good clues to demand for content and products online
5. Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
The Grand-Daddy of the keyword search tools, still very important for tracking down how your market will seek to find you, your content, your website and your products online
Instead of surfing the broad amazon listings, why not dig in to the top sellers. What is so great about Amazon is it is the biggest store (by far) on the internet for most things and information…you can learn new markets with the directories and definitely gain knowledge on patterns of what is selling as well as competition in the top sellers lists
Great tool that combines the best of keyword research with relational search giving you ideas for niches, products as well as a pretty good, free keyword tool
Given that there are now half-billion Twitter users generating over 50 Million Tweets a day, Twitter search (the ability to search through those tweets or monitor trends) has become a very powerful research tool in itself.
I use Google News daily to keep tabs on our various niche markets, find new ideas for interesting content, identify new product ideas and keep a handle on current events so I stay plugged in to my markets. You can setup daily alerts with new search results so they are delivered to you – a very convenient way to keep tabs on your market
One of the best ways to track down powerful niches, top selling products and strong messages into markets is to follow the trail of media advertising. MediaFinder (use the free trial) offers you in-depth research into the media market (who targets who, advertising rates, etc…)
Have We Missed Any?
Anything else you find valuable for online research in your internet marketing business? Leave us a comment.
