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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