Market research and making money.

Humor me! You'll probably be bored by all of this, BUT, I've got to do it. See, I've

1. Got to get into the habit of writing something regularly, and

2. Got to trace the evolution of developing a niche website.

So, I've got to record the steps, not in great detail, but just enough to follow my progress.

The beauty of working in the Internet age is that the information we need is readily available.  There was a time when the research would have to be done by hand.  Now, using the Internet we're not only going to identify markets, we are able to test these markets to see if they are worth spending our time.

Think about this:  long before we worry about product creation we can eliminate the effort in developing that product until we know there is a need for the product or service.

The next item on our list is known as traffic. it is crucial, because we may have the best product in the world, the best service in the world, the best thing ever since sliced bread, but who will know unless they get to see it?

That is why we focus on determining if there is enough traffic to sustain our business in the Internet marketplace.  Remember this, without traffic, no one will purchase anything.  And we need to make sure there is enough of it too.  Because there is nothing more disheartening than doing a lot of work and have nothing to show for it.  Whether it is a retail store, a coffee shop, or an Internet marketplace, without traffic all of our efforts are wasted.

There was a time in the early days of the Internet that if you came up with an idea, and it was really working well, you could be copied very easily and other people could grab your traffic.  Now, building traffic takes time and effort, and the people who want to rip us off are basically lazy.  As a result they are not going to spend the time and effort and energy getting traffic to their websites.  So the difficulty of getting traffic acts as a way of protecting our business and makes our future websites all the more valuable.

The third thing we're going to talk about is known as conversion.  It is a fancy way of asking the question, how many people are taking action when they to come to our Internet  website?

Typically of course, we look at this as, “how many people who come to our page will buy our stuff”?  That is the ultimate conversion, but when you think about it there are many other things they could be doing; you could be getting them to sign up on a mailing list; they can be clicking on an ad; they could be filling in a survey. We have to measure our effectiveness at converting people from passive readers of whatever information we are providing to actively doing the thing we want them to.  And that is how conversion is measured.

Okay, my friends. Next time we'll look at how the 'right words' can get people to your website.