DareDevil Marketing

You already know how absolutely critical effective online market research is to a successful promotional campaign. But there’s no reason to bog yourself down and postpone  productive, profitable action by spending too much time on research. Trust me, it’s very, very easy to spin your wheels by succumbing to the dreaded “analysis paralysis” affliction. I’ve been there way too many times. I use these strategies to research a potential target market so that I can determine whether or not I can turn a profit in that market and, if so, what information products I can deliver that I can be certain is EXACTLY what they want.

*NOTE* You may have read about using some of these techniques before so I cannot take credit for all of this information being completely unique. However, this stuff works for me and you’ll most likely find that it will work for you as well and save you a ton of time to boot.

Here’s a few methods that I employ to discover *EXACTLY* what my target markets want:

1) Searching for my relevant keywords in Yahoo Answers to see what people are asking about (answers may contain links that can net you research material for creating reports used as opt-in incentives and even full-fledged information products as well).

2) Browsing through forums related to my niche and becoming familiar with recurring problems members are talking about and then finding a solution.

(Note: just because these members are talking about the problem doesn’t necessarily make them your target audience to which you want to market. You can pretty much guarantee that any forum dedicated to a niche will have several resident “experts” and “regulars” that will eat you up and spit you out if you try to sell your product there. To be safe, just leave the forums alone except for researching into looking for problems to address and finding research material to help you develop your own, unique product. There are plenty of other ways to promote your products without spamming forums.)

3. Yahoo Groups and Google Groups – same thing as above.

4. Major sites and blogs in your niche – what are they talking about? If they have a lot of traffic, you can pretty much guarantee that they know for certain that any topics they address frequently are “hot topics” for their site visitors. Take Consumerist.com, for example. If you’ve ever visited it you’ll probably know for certain that they constantly beat up on several companies as much as possible including BestBuy, Comcast, American Express, and just about every airline and cell phone company. And their regular visitors EAT IT UP.

So you could take note of those hot spots and then search around for any “loopholes” or “hidden savings” that may be posted there about those companies. Then go search for those companies’ names in places like Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller, etc. and look for bookmarked sites that may reveal that kind of info as well. People LOVE to share that kind of information on companies on their blogs and sites. Compile all of this info and rewrite it and you can have a report or even entry-level information product with this title in no time:

“17 Leaked Confessions of Best Buy Insider Shows How to Save Thousands on Hundreds of Items”

(ok, the headline needs work but it’ll do for this example )

5. Set up feeds from places like Google News, Yahoo News, Technorati, etc to display news items relevant to your market. You can use this news for material to update a blog you have in that niche/market, to use as a launching pad of ideas for information products, and even to identify your competition by monitoring their press releases and other promotional criteria. Yahoo Pipes is a great tool for this but there are dozens of others as well.

The point I want to iterate that making your own, unique, and valuable information products can be so EASY and FAST and will sell hundreds of times better than material that’s likely been over-used to death and back.

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