Step 2 - Choosing Your Target Market & Your Products

Step 2 - Choosing Your Target Market & Your Products

by GinaGaudioGraves on June 16, 2008, 03:12:00 AM

STEP 2 -- Choosing Your Target Market

(aka your niche)

Choosing your Target Market – and RESEARCHING it to make sure that it is profitable – is CRITICAL … even if you already HAVE a start in your business.

If you didn't do a thorough job of making sure that you had a "market" AND that your market is PROFITABLE when you first got your business rolling, then this is an essential step.

If you did do some research earlier, then this will serve as a double check to make sure that the market is still hot. It will also help to make sure that you did the RIGHT research.

And if you don't have a business, then you need to find out what kind of business you'll have, right? You’ll most certainly want to make sure that your business is going to be as profitable as possible as well.

So, how do you pick your market?

In order to achieve the success you are dreaming about, you need to:

Reach the right market ...

With the right message ...

At the right time.

If all 3 are not present, your success is in jeopardy.

I'll never forget something that I read in a book by one of my friends, Mark Hendricks, many years ago. Mark said:

"The absolute easiest way to catch fish is to put your bait in a barrel that contains ...

'A whole bunch of hungry fish.'

Now I know that sounds like an over-simplification, but it's the truth, isn't it?

They're all grouped together. They're hungry. You've got the right food. You drop bait in. They bite."

What you're looking for in a market, is the exact same thing:

A grouping of people (i.e. you can find them all in one place)

Who are hungry (i.e. they want a solution to a problem or they are trying to fill an emotionally compelling need)

With the right food (i.e. a product that is the solution to their problem or that fills the emotional need)

If you have this in your market, then you merely drop in your "bait" (i.e. a free report), and they'll bite!

It's as simple as that!

Where do you find that market?

To start out, you want to examine those areas that you are passionate about.

Then go and do your research to make sure that you can make money in that area.

You hear a lot of experts talking about how important it is to be passionate about the topic that you focus on in your business. But do you really understand WHY it is so important to make sure that you are passionate about the topic that you build your business on?

The reason that it is important to build your business on your passions is twofold. You’ve got to make sure that you’re building your business on your passions because:

1. Building your business is a lot of work. When you can build that business on your passions, it will seem like it’s a lot more fun. And, quite often, because you are so passionate about the topic, you tend to push on even when you’re tired. This helps to make sure that you will be successful. In fact, many times, you’ll be successful in spite of yourself … all because of that passion.

2. When you are passionate about your topic, you are much more likely to be able to talk like an expert on the topic. This one is a biggie … especially online. To understand it, take a look at the article at:

http://www.askggg.com/influencers

What you are essentially trying to do in your business is to become an INFLUENCER.

As you build your business, you’re going to need to develop a relationship with your audience.

As you build that relationship, when you are perceived as an expert … and more importantly, as an expert who is an influencer … your audience will follow your every recommendation.

What you recommend will be the products that you are selling. These can be your own products or products that you sell as an affiliate. In both cases, these are the products that will end up making you money.

In that article, you’ll read about a study done by Bridge Ratings. Back in 1997, they asked 10,000 people if they were looking for the answer to a question, who would they be most likely to turn to? In 1997, the people they would turn to were:

1. Religious Leaders

2. Teachers

3. Family, friends, and acquaintances

But when they repeated this same study in August 2007, they got very different results. In 2007, people were most likely to turn to:

1. Strangers with experience

2. Family, friends, and acquaintances

3. Teachers

The reason for the shift was because of the internet and info products.

On today’s internet, “Strangers With Experience” are the “experts”. Those experts, as true Influencers, are who people are following. This is precisely what you want to do in your business.

That means that Info Products are going to be essential, no matter what niche you decide to choose.

That also means that a blog, social networking, social bookmarking, and other aspects of Social Marketing, are going to be essential for you in terms of building that relationship with your audience.

This is the EXACT same process/system that I’ll be sharing with you throughout the 30-Day Challenge.

So how do you determine which of your passions may be profitable?

You want to take a look at:

1. Your passions and interests. These are the things that you enjoy so much that they can keep you up late at night and wake you up early in the morning.

2. Your skills and competencies. These are the areas that you are pretty good at. They don’t need to be areas in which you are an expert. But, they should be areas in which you know enough to relate to others with the right language and the right tone.

3. Your resources. This includes things like money, tools, etc. If you’re into knitting, your knitting needles can be a resource.

4. Your networking resources. These include your contacts, contacts of your contacts, and contacts you can reach through organizations you are associated with.

Create a list of all 4 of these areas. Then go back through all 4 lists and look at the overlaps. The area that appears on as many of the lists as possible is what I call your “Potentially Profitable Passion”.

Once you know what your “Potentially Profitable Passion” is, that’s when it’s time to do your research to make sure that it really is a “Profitable Passion”.

What kind of research am I talking about?

This is the research that tells you:

Who your audience is and
What that audience is buying

Some examples of Potentially Profitable Passions include:

Pet owners (especially horse, bird and dog owners);

Martial arts fanatics;

Dieters;

Stock market and futures traders;

Real estate investors;

Parents of newborns;

People who've just moved into a new house;

People with specific ailments;

Magicians;

People who want to learn how to play musical instruments;

The list could go and on.

Now it's time to move into the research phase.

NOTE: In my ebook, "Abundant Info Products: How To Make Big Bucks On Info Products … FAST!", I talk about this topic at length before sharing with you how to increase the profitability of your business by using info products. It’s a very good read for anyone working online.

You’ll find it at:

http://www.AbundantInfoProducts.com/30days

RESEARCHING Your Market

This is the fun part for me, in part because it's SO EASY! Here’s what you want to look at:

a) Is there a FORUM in this market?

Pick a term that describes your potential market and go to Google. Type it in and add the word "forum" after it. In other words, you first want to confirm that you can reach these people in a group.

b) Are there any SOCIAL NETWORKING sites in this market?

These are sites like MySpace, but they are just for people interested in that niche. Dogster is a great example. Repeat your search in Google but this time, add "SOCIAL NETWORK" to your keyword.

c) What KEYWORDS do people use to find the forums and social networks in your niche?

Once you know that there is either a large forum (i.e. 5,000 or more members) or a large social network in your niche (i.e. 3,000 to 5,000 or more members), then go to http://www.compete.com and open an account.

For your first search, you'll want to search for Keywords that people are using to find the largest forum and the largest social networking site in your niche. Make sure that you save the top 250 to 500 keywords that people are using to find those sites!

Those will give you great ideas about what problems these people have!

d) Determine WHO your market is (i.e. get to know what your ideal customer looks like).

Go to www.Quantcast.com and again, put in the URL's for the largest forum and the largest social networking site in your niche. If you can find a few other sites in Google that are in your niche and that have plenty of traffic (i.e. an article site, blogs, etc.), look at those as well. What you're looking for here is: WHO are these people?

Let’s take a quick look at what you can find using Quantcast.com. Assume your market is Internet Marketing. This would mean that one of the biggest, busiest forums is The Warrior Forum.

Go to Quantcast and search on them. This takes you to:

http://www.quantcast.com/warriorforum.com

Don’t be concerned when you see that Quantcast doesn’t have enough information to “quantify” the site. Quite often, you’ll see this message and yet you’ll get the data anyway (as in this case).

What do you learn about your market on Quantcast?

A TON!

Here’s what this search tells you:

“This site reaches approximately 11,566 U.S. monthly uniques. The site is popular among a primarily male, primarily older, more educated audience.The typical visitor buys from snapfiles.com and uses DMOZ.”

More specifically, you learn that most of the visitors are males, aged 65+, who make $0 to $30k per year, mostly African American, many have Graduate Degrees (although this is fairly equal), most have no children.

You also learn that over 52% of the visitors are “addicts” meaning that they visit more than 30 times per month. When you see a site that has a large number of addicts, especially on a site that sells something, this tells you that the site has developed a strong relationship with its visitors and that those visitors are much more likely to be willing to buy something the site recommends.

Your screen will look like this:

Quantcast Data

That demographic data is found in the middle column and the “addict” data is in the left column.

In the right hand column, you can learn a WHOLE lot about what these visitors are doing on the internet and what they are buying.

In this example, I see that these visitors like sites like MyPoints and ways of getting free meals and free stuff. That gives me an idea for doing a contest of some sort that would have prizes like gift certificates for restaurant chains.

I also see that they like to hang out at Free Download Center. Why not consider giving away a free report or free software using that source? That would help you to get more traffic from an extremely targeted source since your audience already hangs out there.

The “Similar Audience” section is one that you really want to pay particularly close attention to. The sites that are listed here are potential JV Partners and affiliates for you!

What this means is that any of the sites listed there are also attracting the same audience as the site that you just searched on. So, you know that if this is your market, and if those sites have similar visitors, they would make great customers for you as well!

Anytime I search for a site in my market, I keep a running list of all of the sites I find in the “Similar Audience”. I then look up the URL in a tool like http://www.domaintools.com to do a WhoIs search and locate the contact info for the website owner. This way, when I am ready, I can contact the person to see if they will promote what I offer.

As you can see, using Quantcast, you can learn a ton of information about who your audience is and what it is that they are buying.

You want to create an Excel spreadsheet to summarize all of this data for each of the sites that you search. You’ll be amazed how seeing the information in a single page can really cause patterns to jump out at you when you may have otherwise missed them looking at one search at a time.

Once you have all of this information, it will tell you whether you have a Profitable Passion.

This information will also be useful to you going forward as it will dictate HOW you talk to your audience, WHAT you say to your audience, what LANGUAGE you use when you talk to them, what PRODUCTS you decide to sell to them, and more.

Without this data, it is even challenging to write a sales letter that will get results. If you don’t know who you are talking to, you have a tendency to try to talk to the masses. And yet, when you do that, you end up attracting no one.

Keep this data close at hand as we progress in the 30-Day Challenge! We’ll refer to it often!

e) What are your competitors selling?

Go to www.Clickbank.com and do some searches for hot selling ebooks in this niche. You want to see that others are already selling products in this niche! Pay attention to how much they pay in commission and the price of their products and make notes on them.

RESOURCE SIDENOTE: In my ebook, “Abundant Info Products: How To Make Big Bucks On Info Products … FAST!”, you’ll find a TON of resources for finding hot markets. It’s a very good read for anyone working online. You’ll find it at:

http://www.AbundantInfoProducts.com/30days

Now is the time to get started doing all of your research. As I said at the beginning of this lesson, even if you already have a business started, you MUST go back and do this research!

I can’t tell you how often this one little piece is missed by people who have businesses already under way. In the end, if they are able to make money (which is sometimes not even possible), they end up leaving literally MILLIONS on the table because they failed to do the proper research!

There are 2 questions that your research should answer for you before you can move into the next step:

1. WHO is your audience?

Be as specific as possible here:

a. Are they male/female, 20-something/60-something, African American/Hispanic?

b. Do they live in the city/country, a house/apartment?

c. Do they have a certain occupation?

d. Do they share a specific interest?

2. What is your audience already BUYING?

Think about this both in terms of the specific products they are already buying as well as in terms of the problems that they have.

HINT: Use http://www.ask.com to do a few searches for Associations thathave statistics about the buying habits of people in your market. For example, if you are in the wedding market, your search might look like this:

Wedding associations statistics “buying habits”

What are people in the wedding market buying?

What wedding associations have statistics about the buying habits of the wedding market?

With Ask.com it is possible to phrase your search as a question instead of using search terms the way that you do in Google.

If you are in the wedding market, your search is likely to take you to BridalAssociationOfAmerica.com. About half way down that page, you’ll see “Fun Stuff” and the last link will say “Wedding Statistics”. On the next page, you’ll see “Online Wedding Market” which takes you to:

http://bridalassociationofamerica.com/Wedding_Statistics/#onlinemarket

Here’s what those wedding statistics will show you:

As you can see, 77% of the people in the wedding market plan their weddings online (lower right hand box). There are an estimated 1.75 MILLION weddings being planned online. In another box that I don’t show you above, you learn that the average cost of a wedding is $28,500. That would mean that the online wedding market is worth an estimated total of:

$49,875 million = $49.8 BILLION !

Do you think that you could make money in that market? I should hope so! It’s just a matter of figuring out what that market is already buying ONLINE!

Notice I did not say “what that market is already buying”. The KEY is figuring out what they buy online and dangle it in front of them.

So we move on to the next segment of the stats. Here’s where we learn about WHO the market is.

Specifically, we’re talking about brides who are around 26 and grooms who are around age 28.

For 92% of the brides, it’s a first time marriage. For grooms, 89% of them are first timers.

One interesting thing to note in these stats is that 12% of all weddings are “Destination Weddings”. In other words, the bride and groom are getting married in some exotic place. Perhaps they’re getting married on a cruise. Maybe they’re getting married on a beach in Hawaii at sunset.

12% is a pretty good sized chunk of the market. Could you specialize in Destination Weddings instead of just weddings?

Now that you’ve learned all this great stuff about who your market is, let’s take a closer look at precisely what they are buying already. Then I’ll tell you an interesting story.

Here’s what the stats show you about the online wedding market specifically:

The first 2 columns tell you how much is being spent online RESEARCHING various aspects of the wedding market. The second 2 columns tell you how much is being spent online BUYING various products.

When you know how much is being spent researching various items, that tells you what you should be creating information products about. Inside of those info products, you then sell your audience the products they are buying already. It’s as simple as that.

Now – take a look at the Wedding Dresses in those stats. As you can see, 55% of those in the wedding market are spending money researching wedding dresses online. Yet, only 19% of the people in that market are buying wedding dresses online.

About a year ago, I met a woman with a Wedding Dress site.

She had done her homework. As many of the “gurus” recommend, she had looked at the keyword research for “Wedding Dresses” which showed her:

Assuming that this meant that there was a market for selling Wedding Dresses, she jumped in with both feet.

In fact, she had even gone to China and found manufacturers to create her own wedding dress label.

Obviously, she hadn’t done the research to tell her what people were really BUYING on the internet. If she had, she would have learned exactly what we saw earlier and she would have KNOWN that people were not buying wedding dresses online, but rather, were buying information on how to buy the perfect wedding dress.

Consequently, her site wasn’t making any money at all, no matter how much traffic she brought in.

Once I showed her this one little “secret”, all she would have needed to do is to change her approach a little bit.

Instead of putting up a website that sold wedding dresses directly, she could have put up a blog. She would have used that blog to build a relationship with her audience. In that respect, she would have become an “influencer”.

As an influencer, she should have recommended an ebook or some other info product that showed brides how to buy the perfect wedding dress. She could do that right on her blog (more on that in a later lesson).

Inside of that book, she could have used the “magic formula” that works in any market:

1. Start out by identifying the “PROBLEM”. Talk all about how hard it is to find the right wedding dress for your shape, your height, your ethnicity, etc.

2. Get your audience to IDENTIFY with that problem.

3. Then show your audience a SOLUTION. The solution is what you want to sell them. In this case, show them the perfect gown for a short figure; the perfect gown for the tall bride; etc.

4. Include links for affiliate products as well. Here, you can talk about how important it is to have the whole “ensemble” put together perfectly. Based on the stats of what people are buying online, you would want to send your readers to buy bridal accessories, bridal veils, bridal purses, etc. You could even talk about how having the groom coordinate with the bride is essential, and send your reader to get grooms wear with an affiliate link. The sky is the limit when you KNOW what your audience is buying!

Applying This Strategy to YOUR Niche

What you need to do from here is go out and find this same data for YOUR niche. Answer these same questions for YOUR audience. In the next lesson, we’ll be covering how you set up your “Profit Funnel” and you’ll need to have as much research as possible done before you get started with that step.

In the meantime, here are your “Action Steps” for Step 2 – “Choosing Your Target Market”:

Your “Action Steps” For Lesson 2

1. Create the lists of your “Potentially Profitable Passion(s)” by listing:

a. Your passions and interests.

b. Your skills and competencies.

c. Your resources.

d. Your networking resources and contacts.

2. Circle those areas in which there is an overlap in more than 1 category and make a list of those areas in which you have the greatest amount of overlap (i.e. the area that appears in all 4 of the lists). This is your “Potentially Profitable Passion” that you will go on to step 3 with.

3. Research your “Potentially Profitable Passion” to confirm that it can be profitable. Do this by:

a. Make a list of FORUMS in your market.

b. Make a list of SOCIAL NETWORKING sites in your market.

c. Make a list of KEYWORDS people use to find the Forums and Social Networking sites in your market. Do this by looking up each site in #3(a) and #3(b) at www.compete.com.

d. Determine WHO your market is by searching for each of the Forums and Social Networking sites using www.Quantcast.com .

e. Create an Excel Spreadsheet that summarizes the data you find on Quantcast.com.

f. Using www.Ask.com, Search for Associations that have Statistics about the Buying Habits of your market.

g. Use www.Clickbank.com to determine what your competitors are selling in the way of information products.

4. Re-visit the Forums, Social Networking Sites, and also Blogs in your niche and read what the audience is saying on those sites. Specifically, you are looking to see what the greatest problems are for people in that market. You will want to find products to solve those problems when we get to “Step 3 – Planning Your Profit Funnel & Your Products”.

5. Create a new Excel Spreadsheet that lists those problems. (Make sure that you include the link to where you found the problem in case you need to refer to it later!)

“RESOURCES” For Lesson 2

1. “Abundant Info Products: How To Make Big Bucks On Info Products … FAST!” –

http://www.abundantinfoproducts.com/30days

The most helpful resource to you at this point is my course, “Abundant Info Products: How To Make Big Bucks On Info Products … FAST!”. In this course, you’ll find a TON of resources for finding hot markets. It’s the resource that my Apprentices use to learn all about researching their target market.

The course will be an invaluable resource to you in completing both Step 2 and as we move into “Step 3 – Planning Your Profit Funnel & Your Products”. To help you even more, I’m even going to give you a $10 discount and drop the price to only $17. The course comes not just with an ebook explaining every step of finding your target market, but with 35+ tools that are ESSENTIAL for building your business online. You’ll find the 30-Day Challenge Special at:

http://www.AbundantInfoProducts.com/30days

You'll even get a free month of hosting, complete with an autoresponder, shopping cart, and affiliate program! That will save you more than the cost of the course!

Price: $17 ($10 off of the $27 regular price for 30-Day Challenge Participants!)

2. "Miracle Motivational Package" - http://www.AbundantPositivity.com

Inside this package, you'll not only learn exactly what I did to overcome the death sentence my doctor's gave me and explode my business in the process ...

You'll also learn how to use Goal Setting to put together your Strategic Plan for your business.

AND, you'll even get immediate access to "The Master Key System", a strategy used by multi-millionaires like Bill Gates to achieve THEIR success.

The Goal Setting audios, report, and worksheets should be essentials for every entrepreneur!

Price: $27 (Special Offer for 30-Day Challenge Participants!)

3. DIA Flowcharting Program – http://www.askggg.com/dia

This is a completely free, open source program that allows you to create stunning flowcharts. You can even save those flowcharts in .jpg, .gif, and even in .pdf format. It’s an essential tool for planning your business.

Price: FREE

4. Quantcast – http://www.quantcast.com

Price: FREE

5. Compete – http://www.compete.com

Price: FREE

6. Traffic Sources Worksheet – http://www.askggg.com/trafficsources

Price: FREE (I regularly sell this worksheet on it's own for $97. Liz Tomey says that she can't live without it!)

A Look Ahead to "Step 3 – Planning Your Profit Funnel & Your
Products"

1. Assemble all of your TOOLS. In Step 3, the tools that I listed are:

a. ThirdSphere’s Automation Station – http://www.askggg.com/recommends/hosting

b. aWeber - http://www.askggg.com/aweber

c. Direct Response Jobs – http://www.directresponsejobs.com

2. TAKE ACTION and start turning your plan into reality!

When you have everything in place, and you’re ready to show the world, make sure that you tell me too!

If you have questions, comments, etc. about the 30-Day Challenge, leave a comment or jump into the conversation on my blog at:

http://www.TheIMUniversity.com

Or, jump into the discussion on the 30-Day Challenge Forum at:

http://www.TheIMUniversity.com/forum

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