Start your market research online
Many people makes the mistake to start creating, before they even figured out what they'd like to achieve.
Market research is essential step before you make your decision about the look, the features, and even the copy of your future website. Many people misses out on the endless opportunity that has been given to everyone by nowadays biggest library, the internet.
When someone thinks about market research, they often think about expensive and time consuming marketing surveys that must be made by marketing agencies for a bundle. Fortunately, using only public information which you can find on the world wide web, you can get to know a lot about your targeted market.
 I can hear the marketing professionals jumping up from the seats now 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 found online. Is it 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 whether there is demand 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 box and see what results pop up. For `online business advisor` 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 been looking for. So what you need is narrowing down your search to get more accurate results. - While you are doing that keep your eyes open and take notes, because these keywords will be useful 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 phrases could belong to the same business. You need to find the best one that 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 that 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 look for. Click on the link below to Google's keyword research tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This is great help for you to find out what people really look 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 sort the results accordingly. The results as follows:
- business finance
- business ideas
- starting a business
- starting business
- etc.
These don't exactly cover what this is about so I have been mistaken when I've chosen this phrase... Here we go - I thought of something myself that actually turned out to be wrong. This is an excellent example of how much reality is different from what you think about your business, sometimes. Anyway, never forget, making a mistake is actually to be one step closer to the solution!
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 what I was talking about in this article so lets try to work around these...
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