Internet Marketing Tips &Tools Blog

By Mark Widawer 

One of my favorite uses for surveys is to help guide product development.

There’s no better way to figure out what products to build, create, or sell than to ask your customers directly. The logic here should be apparent — find out what your customers want, and then give it to them.

They’re much more likely to buy that way.

But let’s take that a little bit further.

* The Wrong Way to Develop a Product

The traditional way to develop a product is to say something like “I love birdhouses. In fact, I love to build birdhouses, and I’m pretty darn good at it, too. I think I’ll start a birdhouse company and sell them on the main road around the corner from my house.”

And then you go do that.

You invest all your time, your money, and your passion into birdhouses. You design these beautiful finch birdhouses, and some other ones special for canaries, and a few more for doves and pigeons. Everything seems great as the first ones are coming off of the garage-based production line.

So you pack up your car with all your birdhouses before dawn and drive around the corner and set up shop along the side of the road. You put up a sign “Hand-Made Birdhouses On Sale Now!”

And then day breaks and the traffic increases. With high hopes you wait . . . but no one stops. They whiz right by you.

Day after day it’s the same thing.

Whiz. Whiz. Whiz.

Maybe you need a bigger sign? Maybe you need more signs? Maybe you should have a sale! Maybe you should set up on the other side of the road next time. . . but. . .

Nothing seems to work.

And it doesn’t occur to you until just now that maybe the highway traffic on the road in the California Desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas isn’t really interested in buying birdhouses.

They want water, gas, and a bathroom.

This story is not as uncommon as you might think. Every day, people start businesses and develop products based on all of the wrong reasons. Passion is great. Trends are terrific. But if you aren’t giving your traffic what it wants, you aren’t going to have a business for very long.

I had a private consultation this week with a very gentle man who was still trying to make a go of his first online business. He wanted to sell cuckoo clocks online.

We had a long talk about that, because believe it or not, there are thousands of kinds of cuckoo clocks. The problem with this man starting an online cuckoo clock business is that he is going to have to work very hard to find the right kind of traffic in any fast, reasonable way so that he can get some good, quick, and satisfactory results.

So I’ll share some of the advice that I gave him, and expand that into a better way to select or design a product.

* The Right Way to Run a Business

Rather than developing a product and then going out looking for the traffic, how about you first start with the traffic, and then figure out what products it wants to buy? Once you figure that out, you get that product and throw it in front of the traffic.

I know, it seems backwards, but it works FAR better and is far cheaper than doing it the other way. In fact, you’ll be able to go into this new business with much greater confidence because you already know what the traffic wants to buy.

* The Reasoning

So here’s an outline of how you can use surveys for product development.

Let’s say you’ve got an existing business selling gardening-related products, and a small list of subscribers. You’ve got a small but steady stream of traffic coming to your website, and a few people buy your existing products now and then.

You’ve got to do something to increase sales, or your spouse is going to make you get a job. (Oh, the Horror!)

Here’s what you’re going to do.

1) Build a survey page
2) Build a Thank You page
3) Drive traffic to your Survey

Once we do that, we’re going to add one more element to it to really make it powerful.

* The Question

The most important part of any survey is the question you ask. In the case of product development, you can ask a question in any of these three forms:

- Problem Oriented: What’s the biggest problem you have with X?
- Solution Oriented: What’s the one thing you need to know the most with X?
- Question Oriented: What’s the single most important question you have about X?

Depending on your own goals, you can choose any one of the three, or come up with something different. The idea here, though, is not to ask a multiple choice question where you pick the answers ahead of time. What you want is the free thinking of your potential customers.

Now, there is a time and place for multiple choice questions, but in general, you’d want the answer to be a lengthy stream of consciousness from your respondent.

Here’s the important part: You now have a clear cut path to use surveys in creating a product you KNOW has a better chance of selling. But you must take action. If you can follow the instructions I just laid out you will save hours of time and money in the product creation process.

This article is by Mark Widawer. Mr. Widawer authored Prospect XRay, an ebook designed to help you quickly and easily understand the wants and needs of your customers so you can sell to them more effectively and more frequently. You can learn more by going here: http://www.ProspectXRay.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mark_Widawer

By Sean R Mize

Ezine publishing is fast becoming one of the most sought-after content-based marketing solutions these days. It helps entrepreneurs in building profitable business relationship with their potential clients through distribution of information.

Here are the 4 efficient ways to make more money with ezine publishing:

1. Expand your email marketing list. The more people you advertise to, the higher your sales potential. Strive to attract people to subscribe to your list by utilizing effective list building techniques. These include article writing, the use of squeeze page, posting of opt-in forms to your blog or website, throwing away freebies, and the use of your autoresponders. Focus on the quality of your list and make it more targeted by attracting the right kind of people or people who are most likely to buy from you.

2. Content. Why would people want to receive newsletters from you? They either want to be informed or get special promotions that are only offered to registered members. Thus, send newsletters only if you have valuable information to share and promotion to announce. Otherwise, don’t bombard your subscribers with newsletters that they will not find useful or beneficial.

3. Advertise. This is the easiest way to make money through your ezine publishing. Advertise your products and services by sending product reviews, unbiased recommendations, or testimonials of your most satisfied clients. Don’t forget to include your product photos, studies or researches that back up your products’ efficiency or recognition they have received from industry leaders, if any, to make your offer more credible and enticing.

4. Be consistent. Extended period of absence can make your subscriber forget about you. To avoid this from happening, write your ezine content ahead of time and load them on your autoresponders. By doing so, your subscribers will not fail to receive your newsletters even if you are away or don’t have internet access.

To learn more, download my free guide, “How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online” here: “How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online”

Sean Mize is an internet marketing mentor who teaches people to generate over $15,000 per month online via automated systems and product funnels.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_R_Mize