#52- Easy Ways to do Market Research

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Welcome to podcast #52! Today we’re looking at how to research for your website and where you can go to find good information. We’re going to dig a bit deeper into what you really need apart from some good keywords.

What did Andrew and Heather learn this week?

Andrew learnt that Google has enabled the ability to email people who are in your Google+ circles from your Gmail account, even if you don’t have their email address. You can type their name into the ‘to’ box and it will bring them up via Google+. You will not get their email address unless they reply to you.

Heather has been doing loads of testing on Facebook, with a combination of different types of posts. Of course we’ve all been hearing that images work best on Facebook and get the most engagement; we have found that that is not entirely true. A combination of things seem to work at different times and often it seems to be the one-liner that gets the most engagement.

Research

We’re going to share a few tools with you. Bear in mind that you should always talk in your own voice and aim to talk the language that your target audience understands.

Amazon.com

Look into magazine subscriptions and sort by the most popular. The reason we say this is that it is difficult for print magazines to keep going and turn a profit. The most popular ones there are the survivors and are a good indication as to what people are wanting to pay money to read. Check out any within your space and use that to gain ideas – check out their website. If there are no magazines that cover the ideas you were thinking, there probably isn’t a market for it.

Secondly, search under books and use a few keywords based on what you are thinking of doing for your website. Sort by the most popular to see what people are buying. Click into some of those books and read the reviews. That way you know what it is that really pushes people’s buttons from that book. You can even base some blog topics on comments that you read.

Alltop.com

This is a content aggregating site and you can search through virtually any topic. This is a great place to identify the top blogs in your niche and get ideas.

Feedly

This is an RSS reader that will let you know when there’s new content on your favourite blogs. You could find these through Alltop and add the URL to your Feedly account. This way you don’t need to check different websites every day for new content as Feedly will let you know.

Social Media Research

The more you know about the interests and needs of your target audience, the better. Facebook Graph Search (the search box at the top left of the Facebook page), can allow you to narrow down a search based on people’s likes, jobs, interests and more. For example, you could search for personal trainers who live in Sydney or ‘interests of people who like Autopilot Your Business’. You could even search to see what your competitor’s followers interests are.
What does this mean? You could start to run Facebook ads that are targeted to those interests.