Let’s imagine that one morning, while you prepare breakfast, you get this sizzling idea: What if I opened a morning restaurant, serving bacon and eggs for busy business people?
This might work really well. So you grab the newspaper and search for small restaurants for rent, and you find one you can afford.
What will your next step be?
Hopefully, you said, “market research” before you invested money in renting the restaurant, hiring people, cleaning up the place, maybe even paint and repair… Only to find out that you’re in the middle of an orthodox jewish quarter.
Now, if instead your idea was to set up a blog about a topic close to your heart – would you start out by doing market research?
Well, you should.
True, the invested money isn’t going to blow your budget, but you’ll have to invest a lot of time in the project. Even if you’re a one-man or one-woman operation.
Here’s a short overview of what you can do.
Check the Interest in Your Topic
If you’re really passionate about your topic, and you love the sound of crickets, then you don’t have to do this step 😉
On the other hand, if you would love to share your topic with others, you should start out by making sure that your interest gets shared.
You can check the interest in several ways:
- Use a keyword tool to see if there are searches.
- Check Amazon.com to see if there are books or magazines written about your topic and if they are selling.
- Check Magazines.com to see if there are magazines about your topic.
- Check ClickBank.com to see if there are products about your topic and if they are selling.
Check If You Can Make Money With Your Topic
How do you do that?
The quick answer is to use the same means you used to check the interest. This will work for most topics.
However, sometimes it will still be hard – if not impossible – to make money with that topic. I’ve experienced this with the topic “World of Warcraft”. At first, there were plenty of ways to make money, for example with an eBay partnership and “loot cards”, but Blizzard has more or less taken over all business now, so there’s only very few ways to make money with that topic.
Now Find Out Whom You’re Targeting
Who is your ideal customer?
How old is your customer?
Does your customer have children? What about education? Income?
Is your idea customer a man or a woman?
The more you know about your customer, the better you can write your content and reach him.
You can use Facebook Audiences to discover nitty-gritty details, and you can get a nice overview with Quantcast.
Oh, This All Sounds Very Complicated
Yes, but the more you know about your market, the better prepared you’ll be, and it will save you a lot of time and money later.
Come up with a plan – you don’t have to do everything on day one.
As an alternative, you can hire people to do your market research for you. One such team who’re specialized in market research is Redshift market research. That would make the task hands-free for you.
If you’re looking to free yourself up for more important things, then this is a good task to outsource.
What are you doing right now when you do market research? And are you doing market research at all? Tell me in the comments.