Issue 5 - October 26, 2010
Hey Genc,
Today you're in for a real treat. A look into two invaluable processes I use to keep in touch with the pulse of my market, and to keep up on trends and changes in marketing and online business.
I rarely share these processes with anyone but clients.
So print out today's issue and keep it handy. You'll find it a useful reference that you'll turn to again and again.
After our last discussion about giving your customers what they want, I felt it was important to give you some strategies, and my process, for getting to know them better.
I'm talking about getting to know them on such a deep level, that you understand their needs, their problems, their wants... and all of the emotions that drive their desires. Along with the emotions that keep them up at night.
So today in Part 2 of "Using Your Business to Create Your Ideal Life"... we're going deep into market and customer research. Using some of my favorite "spy tools", online hangouts, and "crystal balls."
Actually, there's no dirty or mystical work involved. Just leveraging the Internet, and some other useful resources, to do some good old-fashioned "sales detective" work.
Next, in today's Reader Q&A Session below, you'll discover the process I use to retain and recall the latest trends and news, as I speed read up to 5 books a week, every week. This process is very effective, one you can use to recall important information at will.
Embrace these processes, and they will help you build a strong and reliable online business!
To higher profits,
Rich
 Using Your Business to Create Your Ideal Life
Part 2: Getting to Know Your Customers
The other day, I told you how critical it is to know your ideal customer. That's the only way you can know which products to offer. It's the only way to make money. It's the only way to create a business that will give you your ideal life. And to know your customers, you need to do some research.
Unfortunately, the majority of entrepreneurs who research their customers (and most don't even do any research) approach their research all wrong.
The purpose of your research is to figure out the core complex of your ideal customers. (The "core complex" is composed of the beliefs, feelings, and desires that drive your customer's buying behavior.) But most entrepreneurs expect to come out of their research with a fully-formed picture of their ideal customer and what she wants most.
In reality, you need to sift through your research for little clues to your ideal customer's core complex. Collect every little piece of data no matter how small or insignificant it may seem. Later, you can sift through all the data looking for clues about your ideal customer.
In other words, first collect, and then reflect.
Approaching Your Research the Right Way
You can easily find golden nuggets of information that'll grow your business if you approach your research correctly. You've got to know what you're looking for and how to organize what you find.
First, remain on the alert for the following as you sift through your research (create a separate list for the bold items):
- Product ideas
- Biggest frustrations
- Problems consistently experienced
- Biggest competitors
- Popular websites & blogs
- Topics of interest
- Words used and any special lingo
- Likes and dislikes
- Level of sophistication
- Common enemies
- Recurring themes
- Demographics (age, sex, education, occupation, income, marital status, children, etc...)
- Psychographics (hobbies, lifestyle choices, purchase behaviors, media habits, values, etc...)
Let's dive in...
10 Ways to Surf for Buried Treasure in Your Market
There are 10 steps I take to find out everything I need about a prospect. You probably haven't heard of most of these strategies. But this is some of the most important work you'll do for your business. The better the information you gather here, the more likely you will achieve the success you dream of.
Buried Treasure Finder #1: Build a Better Keyword List
If you don't know which keywords represent 80% of your market, you need to figure it out. Your keywords are what bring your prospective customers to your site.
You need two resources: Google's keyword research tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and KeyCompete (http://www.keycompete.com).
First go to Google's tool and type in your most popular keyword to see what Google recommends and the amount of traffic it receives. Choose the 10 most popular, relevant keywords.
Next, head to KeyCompete.com.
1. Type the first keyword you got from Google into the search box.
2. You'll see all the domains bidding for that keyword, so click on one of the top sites listed to see all the keywords that site is bidding on.
3. Write down any interesting keyword phrases - those you've never thought of - and click on them to see which companies are advertising with those terms.
4. Repeat with all 10 keywords.
At the end, you'll have a killer keyword list based on the efforts of your competitors.
Buried Treasure Finder #2: Stand on the Shoulders of Your Competitors
You can learn a lot about your prospects right from your competitors' websites.
Go to Google and type in your primary keywords one at a time. Check out the pay-per-click ads (the sponsored listings) that appear when you search for each keyword. Are there any common themes? You should certainly pick up some clues on this page; it's a goldmine once you've done it a few times.
Scan the ads until the ideas and insights start percolating. Then record all your thoughts.
Next, click through to your competitors' websites.
If your competitor happens to have sales letters on hi site, you've just hit a jackpot. If he happens to have great copywriters writing those sales letters... then you just hit the mother-lode. You see, if you read a sales letter through a few times, you can easily tease out the beliefs, feelings, and desires the writer was trying to target. When first starting out, you might have to read each sentence and think about it for a second. Do it anyway, because with a little practice, you'll eventually be able to read the sales letter faster and still get what you're looking for.
Spend some time on the site. Read the ads, skim any articles or blog entries, and look for anything that may be a clue to what your competitor believes about his visitors. Sign up for any free offers or newsletters so you can study your competitor's marketing strategies.
When you are done, head over to compete.com, do a site profile, and pay careful attention to their search analytics. Then head over to quantcast.com and check out the site's demographics. The site demographics may not be 100% accurate, but I do believe they're right more often than they're wrong. And if you look at the demographic data from each of your big competitors you should get a very accurate representation of who your competitors' prospects are.
Buried Treasure Finder #3: Use Amazon to Reveal Your Buyers' Thoughts
You can learn a lot about your prospects at Amazon.com. Simply use your keywords to search for the best-selling books associated with your market. Read all of the customer reviews (both positive and negative) of the books. Pay careful attention to the words the readers choose - and to the reasons they either liked or hated the book. Write down any observations or insights you have.
Buried Treasure Finder #4: Leverage Your Own Site's Analytics
Do you already have a website? Does it get any traffic? If so, you're sitting on heaps of highly-prized data that's guaranteed to grow your business. (If you aren't running analytics on your site, you should be!)
Look at your keywords report. This will show which queries brought visitors to your site. When you look at each keyword phrase, ask yourself, "What are my visitors looking for? What type of language brings them to my site? What does this tell me about my visitors' motivation and goals?"
After that, look at your referring site report. This will answer questions like, do my visitors come from search engines or other sites, or do they arrive directly with no referrer? What do these answers tell me about their online habits? And, what does that tell me about who they really are?"
You'll also want to segment between new visitors and returning visitors to discover:
- ...which content repels first-time visitors and which content sucks first time visitors into your circle of influence. Just look at your new visitor segment, then look at the most popular pages in order of their bounce rate. Those with the highest bounce rate aren't working - since more people are bailing off this page than any other (by the way you should fix these as soon as possible). At the bottom of the list (the lowest bounce rate) are the pages that are resonating the most with your visitors.
- ...which pages are most popular with visitors who've been to your site before. In other words, why do visitors return to your site? Your analytics program tells you the answer, which gives you a glimpse into their core complex.
- ...the keywords that bring visitors who stick around or return to your site. Just sort the most popular keywords drawing return visitors to your site and compare them to the most popular keywords drawing single visitors to your site.
And that's just the beginning. Analyze the differences between these two groups on every metric you study. You'll be amazed at how much insight you'll gain in a short time.
Buried Treasure Finder #5: Find and Mine the Forums
There's a goldmine of useful information to be mined from forums. To extract some really juicy information at breakneck speed, you need to find the popular forums in your niche. The easiest way to find them is to go to Google and search "(your primary keyword) and forum."
A totally overlooked, fast, and easy way to get some overall market knowledge is to get the visitor profile on each of those forum sites. This is priceless information every marketer wants to know and this is how you get it: Just go to www.quantcast.com and get a profile of each forum you identified by typing in the URL of the forum. Go through the forum's demographics by clicking the demographics tab. Make sure you print out the demographics and cut and paste it into a Word document.
Before diving into each forum, summarize the visitor based on the profile from quantcast. Then put everything you uncover on that forum into a list below your summary.
Now you have to drill down deep into the forum. Pay close attention to the threads that get the most action in views and posts. There's a lot to be found by sniffing around. Remember, you're looking for clues, not answers. You should be able to find clues about:
-- Their purchasing hot buttons. Identify the most common questions, what they consistently ask for advice on, and the words they use to describe themselves.
-- The real reason they are buying what they are buying. It's easy - just uncover the posts that mention their goals. Pay careful attention to how they describe their goals. What do you think they'll get out of achieving their goal - how would their lives be different afterward? How would they feel after each accomplishment?
-- How best to communicate with your prospective customers. Record the words and phrases they use. Identify what gets them excited (most active posts). This will help you form a bond with them and get them to like, trust, and most importantly, buy from you.
There are many other profit multiplying insights you can glean from a forum. Keep going and explore.
Buried Treasure Finder #6: Use the Most Popular Blogs
Blogs are another amazing resource. And once again, they are overlooked by almost everyone. If you want to know the topics your prospects get excited about, and the words they use when they are excited, you can easily get it all from blogs.
1. Locate the most popular blogs on your topic by going to www.technorati.com. First type in your main keyword in the search box. Then filter your results (it'll show up in a green box right there on top of your results) by changing the first dropdown menu from "search posts" to "search blogs."
2. Next, run their visitors' profiles by going to www.quantcast.com again. (If you're game, the same summary and list method I described in the forum section applies here and it is just as powerful.)
3. Scan old posts and approximate the average number of comments. Any post with significantly more comments tells you a lot about what turns these visitors on. Read those comments and you'll know the words they use to describe what gets them excited. For example, if you were to study StrategicProfits.com, you'd find that any time I write about procrastination we get lots of comments. In other words, procrastination is a hot topic for our readers. Don't dismiss the posts that have far fewer comments than average. They'll give you a clear direction on which topics to avoid.
Buried Treasure Finder #7: Magazine Stand Magazines
If there are magazines in your niche, you should be analyzing the covers every month.
You'll also be able to spot areas of interest to your ideal customers, and gain insight into the ultimate benefits they are looking for. Some sophisticated magazines have different cover copy for different groups of subscribers. If you can identify any of these advanced marketers in your niche, pay very careful attention to both covers. What's the same and what's different? From this, you can identify the different bait that attracts your prospects and retains your customers.
Buried Treasure Finder #8: Delicious Search
Delicious is a great resource. Simply type in your top keywords and read through the content that's been bookmarked the most (you can find that information in a blue box to the right of each result). Read the top bookmarked content carefully to identify what about it got it bookmarked so much. Just go to delicious.com and search under your main keywords--it's that simple.
Buried Treasure Finder #9: Q & A Sites
Question and Answer sites are great resources for learning the problems and issues your prospects want advice on. There are tons of these sites: answers.yahoo.com, wiki.answers.com, answers.google.com, pointask.com, and many more. Just search for your keywords and see what you discover. The information you find here can easily boost your profits.
Buried Treasure Finder #10: Clicktale
How would you like to peer over the shoulder of each and every visitor to your website? Watching what they read and what they skip over? What gets them to do a double-take, and what triggers them to start scrolling? Clicktale offers a free service to get started with and you'll love it for everything you discover. This is such a valuable tool - it's the closest you can (legally) get to being "Big Brother." You can learn all about it here... ClickTale.com
Who's Your Ideal Customer?
Once you've used the 10 "Buried Treasure" tools, you'll be closer than ever to answering the question, "Who is my customer?"
You really can never know too much. Knowing your customer is the central leverage point of all marketing, product development and improvements, sales, and profitability. It really is the primary determinant of your business success.
Consistently be on the lookout for clues that define your customers as accurately and precisely as you can. Try your best to know their age, education, income, position, background, etc... What do they value? What are they willing to pay for? How much are they willing to spend? What does your customer want or need that they feel they're not getting from anyone in your industry? Why do they buy from your competitors? And what would you have to do to get them to switch to your products and services?
The big challenge for you is to do this research now.
Remember, your ideal customers are the people who are going to pay for you to live your ideal life. You owe it to yourself to know as much about them as possible before you design your profit model and build out your business blueprint.
The choice is yours. What's it going to be? Greatness or mediocrity? Only you can choose!
Resources To Grow Your Online Business...
Today's Question and Answer with Rich
Question: Hi Rich, This is Curt, in your answer about your reading and learning strategy, you made the following statement: "I am consistently repeating and revisiting the notes from the books that I've read. That's how I absorb the material. It's through the constant repetition of the highlighted material that makes absorbing a breeze." My question is, concerning this statement - do you take notes on the highlighted material after it has been formulated into an ebook and then review that or do you use some other process?
Rich's Answer: Great question Curt. When practicing my speed reading on my book notes I generally take one of three approaches. Each has a different purpose, but all are extremely useful. Let's call the first one 'Review + Creatively Combine', the second 'Surfacing Solutions', and the third 'Topic Mastery.' Here's my explanation of the three...
Review + Creatively Combine - in this approach, after I finish each book, I stop and either say aloud or write down the big idea, and the most useful information I remember from the reading, and how I might use it during that day. I'll do the same for each book-notes I speed read. Then when I am done I think through how these books are connected, or could be made to connect to generate more powerful and profitable ideas. I find this approach builds my ability to recall more and more of what I've read, enhances my creative abilities and helps me generate breakthrough ideas.
Surfacing Solutions - in this approach I'm looking for a solution to a problem or a new approach for a specific area of my business. In this case I select the book-notes I believe I have the best chance of stimulating the answers I am seeking.
But before I start speed reading my notes, first I'll formulate the question I am trying to answer. This way I am priming myself to spot anything that could be leveraged. When I am done reading each book, I will write down the solutions I surfaced during the reading plus I'll consider if this author had any personal advice on how I should approach the challenge - what would he or she say? And I'll force myself to come up with an answer. Then when I've done this for all the books I've chosen, I'll think through what other ideas occur to me while reviewing everything I've already surfaced.
This approach really helps me solve problems effectively or come up with new angles or approaches in the specific areas that'll grow my business. It also, enhances my creative skills by pretending the author was giving me personal advice.
Topic Mastery - Once I've read quite a few books on a topic of interest I will then create a new set of notes on the topic itself. The way I develop these notes is first I speed-read each book-notes and take new notes on the overall topic after each one. Then I review all the book-notes back to back and then review my notes and think up other important concepts that should be in my notes.
So, that's my approach Curt. Hope that helps you. The trick with learning is to figure out the best processes for yourself. That requires experimenting and noticing which approaches work best for you.
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