You and me both! I think we both made similar mistakes at the beginning – creating a product we thought the market needed, instead of finding out if they did…

Wow, thanks for sharing some great material. I’d never heard of OpenBook.org. It’s a great idea and a very good place to research stuff. I’ve done the same thing using Twitter Search as you suggest.

I’ve been using a strategy not unlike the one you mention for Survey Monkey on the Warrior Forum to build my buyers list. Ben Hulme showed me it (it’s his new course that I reviewed recently).

Cool stuff about Tim Ferris too… Where do you find all this stuff out?!

Talk to you soon.

Matt

Thanks for dropping by!

I think you’re absolutely right in your endorsement of research. It’s one of those things that makes or breaks the business. Even if it’s just basic keyword research and checking out the competition/market, it already puts you in a much stronger position. It’s interesting that most of the same principles can be applied to the offline part of your business as well as the online part.

The problem with IM is exactly what you mentioned – The Next Big Thing or what I call Magpie Syndrome (I wrote about it here: http://www.adventuresininternetmarketing.net/learning-from-mistakes-in-internet-marketing-magpie-syndrome-maintaining-focus/ ).

Your point about traffic is also true. Some of my best traffic sources are the ones I’ve worked at and where I provide a lot of good value. That said, I’m also expanding into more paid traffic sources too, which are faster in terms of results.

Thanks for joining the adventure!

Matt

Thanks for the response to the question. It’s always interesting to hear about the mindset of a Marketer because eveyone has a different personality and therefore a different approach to things. I guess for me, what sums it up was when you said “…i’ve tried both approaches”.

I’ve spent many a year in mainly offline marketing but my current company straddles both on and offline and the one thing that i definately endorse is research, research, research before you do anything !

It’s easy to get carried away thinking you’ve stumbled across the ‘next big thing’ spend months creating an offering only to find out no-one wants the damn thing.

The one other thing that i’ve discovered that runs true whether it’s on or offline is when it comes to driving traffic to your product.

I’ve found that there’s NEVER a silver bullet to success. It’s ALWAYS ‘a bit from here and a bit from there’ (ie a bit of Twitter, a bit of Facebook, a bit of PR, a bit of Forums, a bit of Articles, a bit of print etc etc)….sure, some work better than others but don’t simply ignore the ones that don’t seem to be working at this time because they may ‘kick off’ in the near future.

Anyway, thanks again for the response.
Ian

Loving this post because it makes me think of the classic mistake I made of thinking of a problem which marketers are likely to have and making a product to meet that perceived need. For me, it turned out pretty difficult to even give it away.

Definitely easier to research market desires, then either CREATE a product using your own creativity to make your own product, or simply LOCATE an affiliate product that you believe will help your people (otherwise don’t bother). You don’t want to make just a quick buck – you want to build a long term business.

A couple of ideas to add more value to the incredible amount of value in this post already:

1) Another research tool is openbook.org which can be used to reveal keywords or phrases in Facebook statuses where people have chosen ‘everyone’ within their security settings.

MONEY MAKING TIP FOR MATT’S READERS

There is some luck required with the timing of searches but to show you possibilities…

Go to openbook.org

Type in a service which people need. For example: need a website

The results you get back are recent status updates in Facebook with “need a website” (or similar) returned from people who may have a timely need for that service. Being as though the website is based upon people that have everyone as their security settings, you can assume these people will accept friend requests and contact since they’re liberal with their privacy.

From this point, judge if they are in the market to buy a website now. If they are, make friends with them and offer them the service.

Capture the details of the site they want, take it away and get a quote. Then go to Odesk.com (or other outsourcing provider) and get a quote for the work.

Give yourself a big markup on top for effectively being “Project Manager”. Remember that the website will be built cheap and the people in the Phillipines will be being paid a relative fortune for their economy and the buyer will save a fortune from buying from their contacts, so it really is a win-win-win situation.

You can use this same strategy in Twitter…

Type into the Twitter search: “need a website” -http -www

and see what comes up. Likely there are some tweets about people looking for a website but not providing a link (like sellers would). Links do not appear as you SUBTRACTED them from your results by using the minus operator, so http and www are subtracted from results. You can then direct message them with your offer. Have a separate account for this activity and don’t build too many followers, otherwise your Direct Messages inbox will be too bust to manage and receive the messages you need to get.

Another tip… Ask your prospects (your list, social networks and blog) Ask them what they want using a tool like Survey Monkey. From this point, if you’re really organised, you can segment your list into categories for Aweber, Facebook and Twitter. Offer them something really cool for participating in the survey – perhaps a low priced (but high value) paid product you own for free will get you the best response rates.

This is definitely what I’ll be doing when I get my BUYERS list to a decent figure.

Thanks for the great high quality post again Matt. I think the tendency (and I’ve been guilty) is for new internet marketers to skip the research and get straight onto the fun stuff like building the list, product creation, creating the blog, etc.

As an interesting sidenote, some might not know that Tim Ferris used Google AdWords to test the book title “4 Hour Work Week” which got the most clickthroughs, so he was confident the book would sell the most copies since the book title is the main thing that sells the book.

Speak soon,

Wayne