How to Perform Online Market Research

Which is a more popular term: internet marketing or web marketing? There are a few online tools that will help you make decisions like this about YOUR products.

OverTure Search Suggestion Tool

This is our favorite, because it is free: market research tool. There are others, but we recommend Overture because it's simple and completely free.

Overture advertises to a network of other search engines for about a small fee per click. Advertisers pay this small fee to get visitors. The tool above counts how many searches were made for a particular term. For example, marketing research had about 7682 searches during the month we tested it. product research only had about 1095 searches in the same month. The term that we decided to use throughout this article is market research. We have the best chances of getting the most traffic.

In the same manner, you should research your own products using the overture search suggestion tool above. It will help you decide what topics and items should be on your website.

Here is a list of words we have researched for our own site:

• graphic design
• web site
• promotions
• marketing
• printing
• advertising

Using the research from the words above, and from other words, we built this site. Without doing this marketing research, we could of been wasting our time!

Compile a List of Popular, Targeted Key Words

The list of key words are important because it makes no sense to invest hours of work on an article that isn't popular. In case you do not know yet, articles are what will get you the top rankings in search engines. The more free, useful content you have for your visitors, the better you'll do in search engines.

You should also try to get phrases instead of single words. While marketing may be very popular, it is not focused enough. Instead Internet Marketing would be better because it defines a more precise niche.

Choosing Domain Names

Now that you have researched the exact words that are popular ( try to get at least 50 ), you can choose a domain name.

The domain name should be easy to remember, spelled normally, contain a hot key word, and be as short as possible.

Do not make the mistake of getting a cute spelling on a name because the real spelling of that name is unavailable. If you are branding, then it is okay to make up a word, but that is a different form of advertising, with a different budget that most people can afford ( sony, viao, ebay, compaq, dell, etc ).

You can purchase a domain name from Network Solutions they sell them for $35 a year and have a great management service that lets you control whatever settings you need to. They also have excellent customer support.

Who Are Your Competitors?

If you do a search for your product in Google you will find many sites. These are your competitors! Now, where do they advertise? Google has a special feature that will tell you. In the google search bar, type link:www.yourcompetitor.com to see who is linking to them.

If you want to see every page that has your competitor information on it you can type something like this: "yourcompetitor.+com" and it will show all pages that make any reference at all to your competitor.

Once you get a list of every place they have their name, you can contact those companies and get your information on the page too!

Anyone Talking About Your Company?

Newsgroups allow people to talk about stuff. Sometimes they ask questions about products and you may know the answer. A good marketing technique is to be helpful, answer questions and post a link back to your site. You can also see what people are talking about by entering your company website or name as a search. Use this free tool from Google: http://groups.Google.com. You'll really be suprised at how people talk about you!