How To Discover And Understand Your Market

  Written by Forest Marie on Sep 22, 2008 8:42 am

Read More: Marketing

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One cornerstone of effective Internet Marketing is to discover where your market hangs out and what they like. Most people don’t do this as it’s not overly exciting.

What’s their play ground?

Where do they ‘go’ online?

I’ll tell you how you can find out easily.

NOTE: This may be a “mundane” task and “boring,” but it’s extremely important and well help you grab a ton of traffic and learn a lot along the journey.

Forums

Ah, the great forums and message boards. There’s many for just about every niche and are a great way to get a lot of traffic to your Web Sites and meet like-minded individuals.

What you want to do is make a list of 10-20 forums in your niche and rank them by most active users.

You can use Google to do this. For example, in Google type in “* forums” and replace the * with your niche. So if you’re selling insurance, for example, type in: “insurance forums”

After that you can visit the forums and see which ones are most active. Pretty simple, right?

Google Groups

Another place to search is Google Groups. Simple type in the market you are searching for, and you’ll get groups and other Sites that are related to your market. Spend some time to search which ones are active and which ones you can leverage to market your product.

Blog Scouting

Searching for blogs is another great way to find people in your target audience. You can post comments on their blogs and link their articles from your sites and let them know. Most bloggers are very open to sharing and linking and back and fourth to other bloggers.

HOT TIP: Search for blogs with 100-200 comments. This usually indicates a very high traffic blog with a lot of readers.

Go to Blog Catalog and use the directory and make a list of 10-20 blogs you like in your area.

Another great place to search around is Technorati. Search around here and get used to it.

Article Discovery

Check out Ezines and find lots of articles your target audience is reading. Save the Web location of the articles you like. See which ones are getting the most reads and use that as a hint.

Video Search

YouTube is king. I recommend you get a list a list of videos of what is being watched the most by your target audience. Check out the comments they are getting. See what is making them tick and what isn’t.

PR Monitor

Press releases anyone? Check out PR Web and look for competitor’s press releases in your industry. See what type of press releases are done and improve upon them. Get a list of URLs of the press releases to your industry and determine if it’s beneficial to improve them.

Are they missing a lot of information? Poorly written? You’ll find a lot of this as the case, but they’re still effective and getting the author traffic? Why? Because they took action and did what most people won’t do. So take advantage!

Competitive Analysis

Using Google, look at the sponsored ads and sponsored links for your market or company. For example, if you’re selling gardening tools, search gardening tools in Google and look to the right at all of the sponsored links and see who is advertising what and how in your industry.

What you want to do is search your key phrases and look for the top advertisers. See who they are and what they are doing.

Traffic Research

Using Alexa, look at the top dogs in your industry. Write down the top 25 and analyze what they doing, writing about, etc.

And from there, become a link detective. This is really important to do. Using your top 10-20 major players, compile a list of sites that are linking back to them so you can analyze them and understand more of your market. To do this on Google, you simply type:

@”domain”

where domain is the domain of one of your competitors.

For example, you can analyze my Web Site by going to Google and typing in

@”http://www.forestmarie.com”

To do this on Yahoo, you simply type linkdomain:http://www.forestmarie.com.

What’s great about Yahoo is it’ll show you how many - and what pages - are on someones server. Facebook, for example, has over 75 million pages. That’s a nice piece of the Internet to own.

Check it out - you can learn a lot about your market and your competitors here.

Google Alerts

Head over to Google Alerts and set this up and set up alerts for your target audience. For example, you can set an alert for your company or the name of your competitor, etc. The Google bots will crawl and let you know (via E-Mail) of any new developments. Powerful way to get the latest and greatest and be “in the know.”

And there you go - some solid tips to really discover and understand your market. Keep all of this in a spreadsheet and if you don’t have, well, Google Docs has you covered.

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