Start your market research online
Many people make the mistake to create before they even found out what they want or should be creating.
Market research is essential before you make your decision about the look, the features, and even the copy of your future website. Many people misses out the endless opportunity has been given to everyone by nowadays biggest library, the internet.
When someone thinks about market research, they often think about an expensive and time consuming marketing survey that will be made by some marketing agency for a bundle. Fortunately using the public information you can find on the internet you can get to know a lot about your targeted market.
 I can hear the marketing professionals jumping up from the desks saying: "this is not a representative research!"
They might be right, but let's just thing for a second - we are talking about the online market not the general market. On the general market you need to consider people who don't or just rarely use the web so an online based research could not be representative. On the other hand establishing an online business is choosing the online community as your primary market. You can easily base your numbers on the data you've found online. It is not accurate? It might not as well, but it will be accurate enough to get an idea about who your customers are.
While doing your research you will realize, most of what you think is not, or just partially true. This knowledge could be a crucial factor of your later success or failure.
What to look for?
First of all you should find out what the demand is for your product or service.
There are many ways to do that.
As a first step you can type your product or service into Google's search and see what results it gives you. For `online business advisory` you get nearly 20 million pages. "The more pages there are the bigger the competition is" - could this be true? Yes and No.
Google's results will give you everything relevant to your search term. It means you are not only getting businesses but blogs, news, any other type of information that has been considered to be related to what you've looked for. So what you need to do is narrowing your search to get more accurate results. - While you are doing that keep your eyes open and take notes, because these keywords will be important later. - Now typing in "online business advisor" (with brackets) you get only 2.700 results. Searching for the phrase match is a lot better approach, but never forget different phrase could belong to the same business. You need to find the best one suits your business.
Before I tell you how to do that, let's narrow the search a bit more.
Most likely your business has some geographic relation. It is quite unlikely you can start out your business world-wide immediately, so let's see what you get for the term "online business advisor" and put UK after the phrase (outside the brackets). Now you have around a thousand matches but it still includes jobs for example matching the term ´online business advisor´.
How to find the best phrase?
I suggest we ask the people what they are looking for the most. Click on the link below to Google's keyword research tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This is a very useful help for you to find out what people are really looking for on the net. Simply type in ´online business advisor´ and see what Google knows about your market. If you click on the column header 'average search volume' the tool will put the results in order accordingly. The results as follows:
- business finance
- business ideas
- starting a business
- starting business
- etc.
These don't exactly cover what I do so I have been mistaken when I choose this phrase. It is fantastic! I thought something that turned out to be wrong. This is an excellent example of how much reality differs from what you think, sometimes. Anyway, now I know I have to adjust my phrase to get closer to a real search term.
Let's say: "start online business". Somewhere in the middle I have found 2 popular phrase "internet business" and "make money online". Both of them is very relevant to my business so lets work around these.
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