Research your market for your internet marketing and your web site

In the traditional business sense market research boils down to assessing two main criteria:

How big is the market I want to compete in?

How much competition do I face in this market?

The research for a traditional off-line business normally takes months of slog and is expensive and the result is far from perfect.

Very few people will undertake a new project without first of all understanding some basic facts about the market. However in most web site situations no-one has ever given any thought to the market.

It just seemed to be a good idea to have a web site at the time.

On the internet, however, the challenge and starting point is exactly the same. Discover the competition and size of your market. It just so happens that on the internet it is much easier and very precise and very quick, when you know how to do it!

What is your market on the Internet?

Think of a fruit stall.

On this stall will be green apples, red apples, cooking apples, large apples, small apples, bramley apples, granny smith apples and so on. NOT JUST APPLES.

If you watch customers you will find following:

some buy green apples
some buy red apples
some buy granny smith apples and so on.

Now if you had an INTERNET fruit stall (in other words a web site selling fruit) then your web site must be able to appeal to all these different customers. If the customer does not know you sell green apples and that is what the customer is looking for then he will NEVER buy from you.

Your web site must be designed and created such that you are ALWAYS FOUND for all different sorts of apples. This way you start to dominate the Internet apples market.

This principle and our teaching system applies no matter what size your company is or whatever market you want to participate in. It can be construction, property, travel, selling seminars, health care, NGO's, music or whatever.

We teach you how to discover what your market really is and more than that how big it is so that you can make priorities and target the most important market sectors within your overall market.

We also teach you how to measure your competition and combine all you then know about the size and competitive nature of the market to be able to beat these competitors in a very large majority of cases.

The fact of internet marketing is that 99+% of web site creators do NOT know how to do this. This means you have 2 choices ...

1. Use a web designer who does not know what is important and therefore have a web site that does not work or

2. Learn to do internet marketing yourself so that you can guide your web designer - better still do it all yourself as we do or appoint someone in-house to take control. It is far easier than you might think and incredibly low cost for massive returns.

A real example from my own market:

Here is a very specific real example that I have extracted from my own market - this is very firmly targeted at the large, international and competitive water gardening, pond keeping market. I generate over R500,000 pa PROFIT from this single INTERNET market mainly in US Dollars at an ROI of over 1,000%.

A reasonably important sector or niche within the water gardening market is "goldfish ponds"...

During the month of April 2004 I know that in Google the term "goldfish pond" was searched for 1,288 times. I also know that the term "gold fish ponds" was searched for 306 times. For the phrase "goldfish pond" there were 84,600 competing websites and for the term "gold fish ponds" there were 74,700 competing websites. Now this is valuable information.

Just as a single example it immediately tells me I should target the people searching for "goldfish pond" before I target the "gold fish ponds" searchers. Could you have guessed that one phrase was 4 times more popular than another one?

As I write this article my website is number 12 and 13 on Google for "goldfish pond" and number 1 for "gold fish ponds" ... go and check at Google (domain is www.practical-water-gardens.com.

Here's another example ... "pond designs" searched for 2,688 times in April, 570,000 competing web sites. My site is number 7 at Google.

Because I know my market in terms of size and competition I can (and do) arrange my internet and website marketing efforts accordingly.

Do you know this kind of information for your target market? If not you are wasting your investment in internet marketing and website development. You cannot even create the right Title (discussed last week) for your website

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