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Read Your Markets Mind - 3 Great Market Research Resources
Starting a new online business, developing a new product, launching a new marketing campaign, buying advertising can all depend on how well you are able to research your market.
All business is based on demand.
The formula and 40 techniques for finding demand we list in "The Ultimate Information Entrepreneur's Success Package" at http://www.infoproductcreator.com show that there are many ways to discover and test demand.
One of the leading ways is to look at magazines, journals, and media sources within a given market or on a specific target.
Specifically, what you want to see is evidence that:
1. There are multiple magazine titles focused on your market and/or proposed business idea. If there are no magazines targeting your market, that is a surefire warning sign that you may not have your market segmentation or problem statement correct.
2. You want to see evidence that the magazines targeting your area of interest are healthy. How often do they publish, what do they sell for, how many pages are in the latest issues, how are they supported (what is the subscription price and how much is it to advertise), what is their circulation, how long have they been publishing, has their format and topic been consistent over time?
3. You would like to see an active advertising section that shows evidence of other business owners within your market spending money on advertising, consistently. The presence of recurring advertising is one sign of a healthy market. Look at what they are selling for signs of what products are in demand.
Personally, I make it a habit to visit a large bookstore at least once a week to take note of new magazines, new issues, article patterns and advertising patterns in magazines within my markets.
Another approach is to research these magazines online. Here are a few resources that can help you perform this research online:
1. Publist - free media guide search, they require your contact info first. Good for researching titles, publishers frequency, etc...
http://www.publist.com
2. Magazines.com is a great (and massive) source for finding out rankings of magazines within given subject areas.
http://www.magazines.com
3. MediaFinder is a super online resource, but requires a fairly steep fee - $49/month, which may definitely be worth it for 30 days when you are researching new markets.
http://www.mediafinder.com
Finally, don't discount making it a habit to wander through your favorite large bookstore once a week to take note of magazine titles, health of the magazine (#pages, price of advertising and subscription, how long published, #subscribers, etc...)
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