Market Research Matrix I

A Simple And Fun Way To Find Your Business Models

It is a great position to be in to be able to do marketing research and make a living on the Internet in your field of knowledge, but what if you aren’t interested in creating a business out of your hobby or you don’t have passion for your current expertise? You can still find hundreds of areas you are interested in, but you will need to do some reading. It is very possible to create a site and product for niches you know absolutely nothing about. How do you do that? It is a matter of learning about your niche as you go. Here is a method for doing market research to begin to target a niche of interest.

Passion of Subject: Brainstorm as many ideas as possible. Write down everything that comes to mind. There are no bad ideas at this point but all the marketplace ideas you want to list should be based on your own passion and interest. You must have a passion for your niche or at least an interest, but a passion will take you further. These things are not exact they just help you to choose easily. Just do a complete brain dump onto a spreadsheet in an “Idea” column. To get started here are some things to ask yourself:

• What am I passionate about?
• What subject do I have knowledge about?
• What am I interested in learning more about?
• What do people come to me for advice on?

You should get at least 10 ideas during this process. Once you have 10 or more ideas you will make sure they are all listed in a spread sheet such as the one I made below. One way to figure out areas or niches to target for marketing is to use the following formula: My niche is people who are (action) + (your niche interest). Let’s look at a couple examples for this:

• My niche is the elderly who are looking for legal advice.
• My niche is coin collectors looking for advice and a way to sell and buy coins online.
• My niche is racing enthusiasts who want formula one collectibles.
• My niche is active healthy people who want whole food vitamin advice and supplements.

If you cannot create a statement for your niche as we have just shown you with the above four examples then you have not focused your target and who it is made up of enough. If you get stuck finding ideas to list and cannot think of 10 ideas you can use a method in an upcoming article. In fact you should use this method anyway and try plugging in some of your 10 ideas into it and see what Google reveals.

Difficulty of Product Creation: How difficult will the niche be to create a product in? In the Difficulty column place an D, N or E in the column for each idea. This indicates how difficult it will be based on your experience and skill to create a product from this idea. This is based on “your” knowledge of the niche alone. (D = Difficult, N = Normal, E = Easy). Determine how hard it is for you to create this product and place a D, N or E next to each idea then go to the next step.

Level Of Knowledge: It will help if you have knowledge in a niche, but don’t let your lack of knowledge of it be the deciding factor just keep it in mind when choosing your niche. In this column place an E, I or N next to each idea based on your personal level of knowledge about each marketplace or idea. If your idea is in a niche in which you are an expert place an E. If your idea is in a niche where you have intermediate (some) knowledge place an I. If your idea is of interest, but you are a novice in the niche place an N. Complete that step for each idea and go to the final step.

Level of Competition: Use Google search as one way to check the amount of competition for the niche ideas you have selected. You will type in your project idea to see how many related pages come up. You can type it in as a phrase which would look like this: “elder legal advice” (in quotes).

Also use an in url and in title search on Google to see how many sites use your keywords for your passion market in the uniform resource locator. A url is the web address of a site such as www.google.com. The in url search would look like this: inurl:elder legal advice (type as shown).

This will show you how many sites have those words in that order in their web address (domain name). If only a couple use those keywords in their address then you have an advantage of getting natural search traffic from the search engines when you make your site and it’s web address. There are many ways to get site traffic but I am explaining how one would gain site visitors for free from the search engines. This is known as natural or organic search traffic. This is only part of how to gain rankings for particular keywords in the search engines. The in title search would look like this: intitle:elder legal advice (type as shown).

In title search will show you how many web pages on the internet are using this as a title for their page content for these keywords. Using your keywords as part of the title in your home page will also greatly help your rankings for your web page, but what you will also see is how many competing pages you are going up against for your keywords.

I will go into great detail later on researching markets based on the type of traffic or promotions you are targeting for your web site. These things will at least allow you to see your competition level for this type of traffic. Your competition will be totally different if you are targeting some other type of traffic online. Do not let it scare you if there are 100,000 pages with a title that includes your keywords in a phrase, inurl or intitle search. Look for sites that have all three in them at once. If there are more than 10 you can bet it will take work to get free traffic for those keywords “elder legal advice”.

Phrase match in quotes will show the most relevant sites with that combination of three words in that order anywhere on a site’s page content. Phrase match sites are going to be your direct competition. This is good information to know, because you don’t really have as much competition as you might have thought. Additionally these listed pages probably aren’t using your keywords in their url, title and even in a the exact order you will.

Now rank the level of competition as H for hard M for medium and E for easy. This depends on how relevant those pages are. Take a look at the top 100 pages and look only at the site descriptions as listed in Google. You can quickly see how relevant they are to your main niche pretty easily by doing this. If you notice that all the pages in the top 100 are relevant then you have a Hard niche. If there are any pages in the top 10 that are not directly relevant to your keywords then you have an easy niche. Medium might be some amount in between, but also consider in url and in title as your measure.

If you dig a bit further you will realize that even this initial competition ranking is only a starting point for what easy means. You will only want to use this matrix to get a general idea of what marketplace to choose. The Matrix II will allow you to easily choose a niche you can feel highly confident of making a profit with.

Prioritize Ideas: Now let’s prioritize your ideas. You are not only going to judge these categories by your interest or passion level alone although this is important. It may be very difficult to make a product in your niche or know how to monetize (make money in) your marketplace. Top priorities would be: E (Easy), E (Expert), E (Easy) Why? Because this means it’s an Easy idea to create a product about. You have a high level of subject knowledge as an expert so it will be simple for you to think of good ideas. The competition is easy so you can pick the low hanging fruit and make money easier.

It doesn’t get any easier than that. Your Last Priority would be: H (Hard), N (No Knowledge), H (Hard). Why? Because the idea is Hard to create, You have no knowledge so you will have to spend more time learning about it. The level of competition is fierce so you will definitely need to put a lot more effort into the site. You should give a number to each letter so your priorities will be mathematically ranked.

• Easy = 1, Normal = 2, Difficult = 3
• Expert = 1, Intermediate = 2, Novice = 3
• Easy = 1, Medium = 2, Hard = 3

Place those numbers next to each letter in the appropriate columns and then just add up the totals. Your totals will rank anywhere from 3 (lowest) to 9 (highest). Now take your top 5 ideas into to the next article and remember you can take one or two which score higher if your passion in those markets is high enough, but only take your two favorites the rest should be lower scores. This process filters out more difficult ideas except those top 2 that you are most passionate about.

marketing-research-chart

A Market Research Matrix Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog