All people who have trouble selling want a magic ingredient to fix their sales problems
. To create the best internet business possible what they may need is either a new target market or a new product. Not that the product is bad. Not that the target market is bad.
But are they a good match? That IS the question, isn't it. One solution is to do surveys. You see it all the time now in seminars and online technology. What about you? What does your target market want?
Do a survey with them. But don't stop there. Surveys grow old. You've got to keep them fresh. You can do all types of surveys. You can do product surveys. They tell you what products or services people are most interested in buying.
You can also do price surveys. You can do attitude surveys. These are all ways of letting people give you the answers, so you don't have to guess what they're thinking and you can launch your product with confidence.
WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST SURVEY MISTAKES?
1) getting too caught up in the information. It's too easy to get lost in the analysis of paralysis and do nothing. You must study the results, identify the trends and take action.
2) trying to follow methods developed for advertising agencies. Ad agencies use all kinds of sophisticated research methods that are not particularly useful to entrepreneurs. All you are interested in what products a customer or prospect most want to buy.
3) getting caught up in the technology of surveys. A lot of people want to use fancy software to do surveys. That's OK but not necessary. Plain old email works just fine or you can you a free survey service at survey monkey.
WHO TO SURVEY
The obvious answer is your existing customers or opt-in list. But what if you don't have customers or an opt-in list? You have to decide who to survey after all surveying non customers would seem more helpful for future sales - again its all about thinking it through.
You can then break the results down onto a Pareto distribution so you can isolate the results. Pareto came up with the 80/20 rule that says 80% of problems are caused by 20% of causes. You can and should use surveys all the time in your business.