MAN vs INTERNET…

Hey guys I’m Tommy, this is my first ever blog post! Can you tell???

Create a Survey

Create a survey with programs such as Survey Monkey or Zoomerang. Both have basic versions that you can use for free. If you’re not sure what to write in your survey, check out our recent post on how to create a survey.

Now you need to direct traffic to your survey, so you can get as many people as possible to answer your questions. Here are some tips how to do this:
• Post a link to your survey in forums (some forums have sections for media research that get a particularly good response rate)
• Email your survey link to your database. If you don’t have a database yet, send it to friends and family who fit into your niche.
• Post a link to your survey on relevant facebook groups
• Use Google Adwords to direct traffic to your survey. If you use this strategy, be aware of the cost and your return on investment (ROI).

Forums

There are forums for just about every single niche market you can imagine -from “underwater wrestling” to “how-do-you-know-if-you’re-a-Vampire”. You can usually browse these forums, without needing to register. It’s called lurking.

This way you can find out what problems and frustrations your potential customers have, and whether they actually spend money on this niche. When researching a niche, I saw someone posting “I buy every book I can find about [XYZ].” That’s when I knew that I had a market that would buy my product.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a fantastic tool to research what your market wants. Why? Because people actually go there to ask questions! Browse or search your niche topic and see how many questions are being asked, what kind of questions they are and what kind of responses people post.

Hardcopy books

Print books are an amazing research tool for you. Publishing a book normally costs thousands of dollars and the publishers want to make sure they meet market demands as much as possible. You can either go to the book store and scan the index pages of books in your niche, or you can go to Amazon and use the ‘Look Inside’ function, to browse through the index, foreword and cover of the books.

Magazines

Like the book industry, magazine publishing is also a million dollar industry. To make sure readers keep buying, the editors and publishers of the magazines do constant market research. They also need to determine what the market wants.

You can either browse the shelves at your local newsagency (newsagencies near airports and train stations usually have the biggest selection), or browse online subscription services (such as www.magazines.com) to see what magazines are available. If magazines continually cover the same topic (something like ‘Get a bikini body for summer’), you have found a great angle for your niche market.

Which methods do you use to research niche markets? Leave your comment and share your experiences.

Brett McFall’s 7 step system to building a successful online business

Brett’s presentations focused mainly on the details of his ’7 Step system to building a successful online business’. I won’t go into details here, but you will read a lot more about this in the weeks and months to come.

Barnaby de Palma’s Powerful Push-Button Traffic Building System

Barnaby de Palma delivered an excellent presentation on using Web 2.0 strategies to increase traffic to your Website. Here is his 5 Part strategy to generate social media traffic:

1. Market Research
2. Generate Traffic
3. Convert traffic into sales
4. Test your strategies
5. Product Development

Steven Essa on Cause Marketing

Steven delivered an engaging, funny and genuine presentation on Cause Marketing. He told us how he raised 30K in 30 days for his local church, using his internet marketing skills. Steven runs free regular webinars, which you should check out here before he becomes too famous and too busy!

Nikhil Parek on Affiliate Marketing

Nikhil is a regular on the speaking circuit with Brett and I have seen him a couple of times before. Nikhil is one of the most genuine people I have seen on the internet marketing circuit, he always takes time to answer questions and speaks to everyone. The very first time I met him, he gave me  great advice although I didn’t even know what to ask!

Nikhil had revamped his presentation for this weekend, which I found very impressive. Unlike some other presenters who re-use the same material over and over again, Nikhil stays on the cutting edge of affiliate marketing and shares his ideas with his audiences too.

Here are Nikhil’s 5 essential elements for a successful affiliate marketing business:

1. Be Passionate – treat affiliate marketing as a business if you want to make a business income
2. Follow a proven system
3. Focus on one thing at a time
4. Learn Marketing
5. Drive Traffic

Unfortunately the technology let him down towards the end, and Nikhil was unable to show us his website generator and Google Adwords System.  But he has already vowed that this will never happen again and I am looking forward to his next presentation, because I am sure he will be very motivated to make it up to us!

Alltogether these two days of the ‘How to Make Money While You Sleep’ seminar were fun and action packed. There was not much sleeping though, and we worked very hard learning new strategies, reiterating old ones, practising techniques, and, of course, networking!

As they say, networking is an integral part of these events, and this time it was the most important part for me, too. Tom and I came up with the idea for this multi media blog documenting our Warpspeed Journey during the event. We are glad you are joining us on this journey and are going to share the excitement, laughter, successes and failures along the way. Introduce yourself by leaving a commment below, we would love to get to know you!