11 Easy Steps To Effective Market Research

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It has never been so easy to find out what your competition is up to. There are some really simple strategies available for spying on them.

We can find out how they are advertising, we can find out how much traffic they get & we can even see what keywords are working for them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here as I want to share some simple ways for finding out who your competition is. We need to find out who the main players are in our market if we want any chance of competing with them.

We find out what they are doing, and then do it better. This is a concept is called Piggy Backing.

We all have this grand notion that whatever we are doing is original and that no one has ever done it before… I am 99% sure that anything that we can think of has already been done before in some form or other. I understand this statement might upset a few people but I honestly believe it.

I’m obviously just talking about internet marketing here so don’t get me wrong.

So how can we discover what our market is up to?

Here are 11 steps to doing just that:

1. Keyword Research – do some extensive keyword research on your market using Google External Keyword Tool. Create a spreadsheet of all the related keywords. Have a brainstorming session and think of all the things related to your market.
2. Who Are The Main Player In Your Niche? – A good way to find out who they are is to do some Google searches on your main keywords, then note down who the top Adwords advertisers are.
3. What Forums & Communities Exist? Make a list of places where your target market likes to get together online. Use Google and search for <niche> forums and <niche> discussions
4. What Are The Top Blogs? – Again use Google or Technorati.com to find the most popular blogs in your market. Visit the links in these blogs sidebars to find even more blogs
5. Sign up to their Newsletter – or subscribe to the RSS feeds
6. Who is on the Front Page of Google – check out the organic results for your keywords who comes out on top
7. Build a Swipe File of Related Articles – search article directories such as ezine articles and copy all the articles you can find that relate to your market. Just for research NOT to plagiarize obviously
8. What Videos Exist? – Go to You Tube and search using your keywords, see what comes up, note down the videos with the most views
9. Set Up a Google Alert – set up an alert for your name, your company name and some of your main keywords. You will receive an email every time you are mentioned by other people google.com/alerts
10. Who Is Getting The Most Traffic? – Use Compete.com and Alexa.com to discover who has the most traffic in your market. You can set up comparison graphs and all sorts. Good fun this one
11. What Are The Latest Trends? – Go to Google.com/trends to find out what is new in your market

Once you have done this you will have loads of great information on your competition and it will give you a clear picture of what you need to do to get involved AND do it better?

Pure Gold!

Let me know if you have any new ideas for researching your market…

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