Recently I’ve made a post about how to make money by giving away the best you’ve got and the key thing in this method is having to offer something that your target market wants. But do you know what they want?
If you know, that’s great, but it’s not always the most obvious thing and doing your research might be necessary. Furthermore, by researching their wants you may find opportunities you didn’t know about. So how to go about finding what your target market wants?
Here are some ideas to try:
Surveys – the most straightforward and often underrated way to simply ask your customers what they want. The obvious drawback is that you must have a list of subscribers to run a survey, and that might not be an option if you’re yet to build one (and finding what your market wants is the first step to do it).
Google suggestions – you have probably noticed that Google gives you suggestions based on the words you start entering into the search box. Those suggestions come from real searches, i.e. users searching for something. Entering your niche keywords may give you some answers. Here’s an example:
Yahoo! Answers – that’s gotta be every marketers dream. People ask questions about what bothers them, so it’s just a matter of searching for your keywords and identifying the trends. And once you find what they want, you can use Yahoo! Answers to give it to them and use it as traffic source (be careful not to spam it).
Forums – the classic way to conduct a market research. While it can be a tedious task to sift through the forums for common questions in your market, it’s a good way to “infiltrate” and feel the pulse of your target prospects. Once you do that, you can also use it as a traffic source by becoming a go-to guy/gal for the solutions to common problems.
Amazon, Ebay, and other online stores are usually used to find niche opportunities, but you could use them to find common problems too. Assuming books and other products are made to solve specific problems, you can see which products are more popular in your niche. You can also see what feedback the users provide and any problems they experience with a particular product.
So those are a few places to go to. At the end of the day, the whole web is the source for information about your market. Any website in your niche can give you some insight of what you gotta do to become a hero and solve their itching problems (and make money doing so).