Day 12 30DC - Painless Research

Market research is a huge, time-consuming effort for anyone who is doing it right. You need to be thorough, and you need to be focused. The Internet provides a huge repository of information, as well as a fast and easy way to gather data for your specific purposes.

A couple of caveats, however:

• Some information on the Internet is notoriously flawed.
  
• There are spoof sites masquerading as legitimate sites, usually in the political arena.
  
• When people post answers to questions in forums or elsewhere on the web, they sometimes post incorrect answers.
  
• Your results are only as good as your search paradigm.
  
• Information without context is suspect and needs to be cross-checked.
• Always validate your sources!

As long as you are aware of these limitations (and there are more, there isn't space for an exhaustive list), and adopt good research habits, you can get a lot of good information from the Internet faster than browsing the reference section of a physical library.

The Internet makes doing market research painless and quick. There are no more excuses for short-changing your research effort.

Day 11 30DC - Relax, It's Only a Test

As more of my niches crash and burn during the analysis process I am reminded that this is extremely valuable work and ultimately it is saving me untold dollars as well as considerable heartache down the road.

Testing, testing, and more testing, has to be integrated into every part of your business. If you are not testing, you don't really know what's going on.

And it should be a joyous thing to see your work fail the test. Better it fails now, when you can fix it inexpensively, than in front of the customer, or after you have laid out plenty of money to launch.

While it is disappointing to see potentially interesting and fun niches splat against the wall, it is heartening to know that those that survive will be more likely to generate revenue.

And that's the name of the game.

Day 9 30 DC - Coming to Terms

Ed and Dan weren't kidding when they said that Days 7, 8 and 9 were the most important of the entire Thirty Day Challenge training. Their techniques have revolutionized how Internet Marketers approach their businesses.

I have already mentioned that having benchmarks, or proven criteria against which to evaluate our ideas in the research and analysis stage, is an innovation in this field that previously was a hit or miss game. The fallout, however, is that all the niche ideas that were developed out of interest and enthusiasm have, one after another, been eliminated because they don't hold up in analysis. You might think that's discouraging, and perhaps it is to a point.

But the real value in these techniques is that we are saving untold hours and dollars by NOT going down the wrong path. Information like we're getting at the on-paper stage is

Much of the work I do in the technical communication field, working with software companies and other product development organizations, is to help them solve user issues BEFORE they become coded or manufactured into being and passed to the customer. When you can eliminate most customer support issues by finessing the design (and the other part is rigorous user testing at the earliest stages possible), you save countless dollars and resources, plus your customers are happier with a product that works well. Unfortunately, the bottom line value of these improvements are hard to quantify, except in the omission. We know full well what bad software costs in terms of customer opinion and loyalty. You might see some feedback on tech support forums and in user communities, and customer support staff can certainly attest to how well the product is going over with the users.

When something works like clockwork, however, who notices? Very few people will stop and think, "Wow, that was easy!". Their expectation is always simply that things will work the way they are supposed to. Without a basis for comparison, one doesn't notice the performance difference. That's one of the reasons these Thirty Day Challenge techniques are turning most of us on our heads. We know what it's like to do things the hard way, the trial and error way. Being able to reliably assess each individual niche for its potential for success is HUGE.

So how did my terms fair in the analysis? Out of 103 potential niches that I had listed, so far 2 (TWO!) have survived all of the tests. I have five others which are borderline and are on the "keep watching" list. I am not disappointed by this. Now when I put effort into these two niches I will know that I have a better-than-average chance of succeeding with them. The stats are there to indicate precisely this.

Do I feel chagrined at my niche-picking skill? Not at all. The niches that didn't make the cut are still potentially good, I would just have to use different techniques to make them profitable. The point about this year's Thirty Day Challenge is that it is intended to cost us $0.00, zero, zip, nada, zilch, you know the rest. If that in itself is not a revolution in Internet Marketing, I don't know what is.

Day 6 30DC - Don't Judge, Just Notice

Even with 2 days of rest and catchup, the clock is still ticking, counting down the magical 30 days of the Challenge. In today's training Ed continued his riff on market research and gave us a couple of new ways to go about it. His emphasis continued to be on noticing, not judging.

It's hard not to employ one's critical thinking skills when looking at niche markets. Immediately the brain tries to edit and evaluate what we're seeing, but at this stage of market research, like brainstorming, it is important only to notice what we're seeing. Essentially, it's a data-gathering phase.

By the way, that is one of the first phases of project management, for any project, the research and analysis phase. Note that the word Research comes before Analysis. You need data in order to have something to analyze. The quality of your analysis will only be as good as the quality and thoroughness of your data.

The term "noticing" also implies that you are paying close attention to what you are seeing. Your market research is not just a factoid grab, but an intelligent observation of the data you are gathering. This means taking in the information on the periphery as well as what is directly in front of your face. What else is on the web page you are looking at? Where do links take you from that page? How many people have been looking for that keyword? What related keywords do they search for?

If you only gather the superficial data, i.e., the low-hanging fruit, your market research will be inadequate, and if you later base business decisions on that market research, you put yourself at risk for losing money.

There is no substitute for the research and analysis phase in project management. (And if you've taken any of my classes you know that project management, product management, document development, software development, event planning, and pretty much every other human activity follows the same Development Life Cycle.) You cannot take shortcuts with this. While it's attractive to rush this stage to get into the sexy and fun part of developing a product or project, neglecting the research and analysis phase creates time bombs and traps that you will have to deal with in the latter stages of your project, and then they will be very costly indeed.

So in phase 1, Research -- noticing everything, judging nothing. Then analyze. No doubt we'll be talking about that tomorrow.