Search Marketing Courses

Have you ever wondered why people buy a particular product or service? Understanding the basic motivations which drive your customers to buy a product or service is crucial to creating the types of products or services that they want to buy. In other words - if you don’t get your customers you also won’t get their money (to put it bluntly).

A few days ago we listen to Tim Knox advice us on the importance of selling what your customers want or need. We now turn again to Tim as he offers us suggestions on how to determine what it is that they want or need:

Tim Knox On The Real Reasons People Buy (02:47)

I think the key word that can summarize this process is “psychology”. You need to get into the mind-set of your customer-base. What is it that they really want? Are they stressed out by all the work that they have to do? Do they find that they have no time? Are they under financial stress? By pinpointing their real problems you can then come up with products and services that really meet their wants or needs.

An excellent example of this is a book called The 4-hour Work Week. I heard an interview with the author of this book in which he explained that most people don’t understand why they want to be rich. It’s not the money that people are after, but rather the life-style. As such, he says, people should think about how much money they need to live the type of life they want and then organize their life in such a way as to achieve that goal.

Now, I’m not here to evaluate this book or it’s message (I myself have not read the book). What I do want to note, though, is how clever this book is. The author understands something about why people want money. This has allowed him to write an extremely popular book (the 53rd bestselling book at Amazon.com as of the writing of this post). So it is (I imagine) with many products or services. Understand the fundamental desire and motivations of your customers and you can create products and services that they will love to buy.

Let’s face it - marketing doesn’t mean squat if you don’t have anything to market. If your product doesn’t satisfy a want or a need of your (potential) customers, then it doesn’t matter how many people visit your site - you simply will not make money!.

Tim Knox makes this very point in this short, 5 minute video:

Tim Know on Market Research & Validation (04:46)

My favorite line of this video is the one about fishing - if you want to fish in a pond, you better know what those fish want to eat. The same goes for marketing a product - if you want to make money online then you must market products that relate to peoples wants and needs.

On the other hand, my least favorite line of the video was his comment that market research is simple. I don’t like calling anything relating to business (or anything else that requires time, energy and skill) simple. It may not be as hard as other elements of creating a successful business, but like anything else it needs to be done properly. And that, by definition, means that it is not simple.

With that said, I think the suggestions he made on how to perform market research are solid ideas - although they need to be delved into and explained in more details (something I hope to do in future posts).

Also, I’d like to differentiate between finding a profitable market and finding a profitable product within that market. A profitable market means that people spend money on various different products within that market. For instance, the pet market (to use his example). People spend a lot of money on their pets - they buy houses, food, toys, clothes, books, etc. for and about their pets. This means that there is money within the market.

But that does not necessarily mean that you can make money in that market. You still need to offer a product or service which satisfies the needs and desires of that market. If you are unable to come up with such a product or service then it does not matter how much money there is in that market, for you will not see any of it.

What’s more, coming up with such a product or service can often times be extremely difficult - and may require more sophisticated research than he hinted to in his video. It usually requires in-depth understanding of the needs of the people within that market - something which you won’t get just by perusing the magazine stand (but that’s another topic for another day).

P.S. I imagine that Tim would agree with the points I made above. I think his advice is right on. I just think it’s important to have the proper mental attitude before starting a new venture - and understanding that creating a product or service is neither easy or simple is part of that attitude.

What do you get when you combine a social butterfly with a bookworm?

Del.ico.us.

Okay, I won’t quit my day job - but seriously folks, social bookmarking in general and delicious in particular is something that you want to know about.

Why?

Let’s let Lee LeFever of Common Craft answer that question:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

And while we are at it, we should also let Garrett from Tech-Bite get his two cents worth in:

Tech-bite’s Intro to Del.icio.us

Note: When I signed up for Delicious I was asked if I wanted to install the Delicious Firefox Extension, which does not include the sidebar or toolbar mentioned in Garrett’s video. I later on installed the Delicious Bookmarks Firefox Add-on which does include the forementioned sidebar and toolbar. In other words, don’t worry if your default settings of del.icio.us don’t look like they do in the Tech-bite video.

Okay, now that you’ve got the basics down, let’s start to look at some of the more powerful networking features of Del.icio.us. We’ll let Liz B. Davis guide us on this tour with two very nice videos on how to best use Del.icio.us.

Her first video is also of the intro to Del.icio.us variety, but at the end she shows us how to use del.icio.us to discover what other people find valuable on the web. This is one of the powerful social elements of tools like Del.icio.us which enable us to learn from other peoples research. Let’s see how it works:

Getting Started with Delicious

Liz’s next video takes things a step further by showing us how we can build up our own social network of Delicious friends. This, in my mind, is a video that everyone should watch as it can be an extremely powerful marketing and search feature if used properly:

Networking with Delicious

By now you should have a good idea of what Delicious is and how to use it. But Delicious is not the only game in town - there are literally hundreds of Social Bookmarking sites that have popped up over the last few years - each with their own unique way of doing things. Hopefully we’ll be able to cover some of those other sites in future video tutorials.

Until then, why not get started and take a bite out of Del.icio.us?