how to start a business without money online (Chapter-7)

 Chapter 7 – Finding Your Ideal Customer

Your ideal customer is the one who is willing to pay for the solution to their particular problem. This means that you can find your perfect customer by going where they go and offering helpful advice and solutions to their problems. There are several ways that you can provide solutions for your customers like creating free content that will encourage them to view you as an expert. When they view you as an expert, they will be more likely to pay for your paid content. The one thing that you don’t want to do is to treat the free content that you provide dismissively.

You should look at the free content that you provide potential customers like the free samples at Costco. One taste will hopefully convince people to buy the entire package. The whole package might transform their initial purchase into a long relationship between a new, now loyal customer who becomes a repeat buyer of your products. And if they can’t continue to buy the same product, they might be more willing to try your other products as they become available.

When you always provide your customers with what they need and knowing them well, makes you seem as though you can anticipate their needs. This creates the kind of ideal customer who will continue to buy from you month after month and year after year. The more loyal, repeat customers that you gain, the more recurring income you will receive. You can start to build your email marketing list so you can begin to test the viability of your niche, by offering a free newsletter, download, or both. This will allow you to market products and services of interest on a regular basis. When you can gain your customers’ trust based on your expertise, many of them will buy what you recommend. These are the kinds of customers that you need to find or create with high-quality interactions.

Researching and Surveying Your Target Market

Once you’ve decided on a profitable niche, it’s time to focus on pinpointing precisely what is the target audience’s pain points. You need to determine their most urgent and critical problems related to your niche. When you can identify the issues your ideal customers are experiencing, you can provide them with the best solution and increase your niche’s profitability.

To identify a need in any niche, you need to start looking at the problems that you face in your own life. Take some time to consider what you would improve in your life or what could take away one of your own life’s challenges. An excellent place to look for these answers is on niche forums or favorite blogs. Yahoo Answers (https://answers.yahoo.com) is an excellent resource for determining what solutions people are searching for regarding their problems. Quora (https://www.quora.com) also works similarly.

You can use the search terms, “help with,” “cure for,” “advice on,” followed by your specific keyword to obtain a list of questions people are asking. The solution to your target audience’s problems will be where you can see the most profits, whether you offer a physical product, a service, a digital product, or information. You can also use Google Correlate (https://google.com/trends/correlate) to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide, or it can be a question that you enter. You can then view the results on the site or download them into a .CSV file so you can analyze it further. 

Utilize Online Surveys

You can use online resources like Survey Monkey (https://surveymonkey.com), SurveyGizmo (https://surveygizmo.com), and Google Ads to send online surveys to question your target audience to find out exactly what they want. The stronger the demand and desire for your product or services, the more likely your target audience will be to participate in the survey. You can use incentives like discounts, free downloadable products, or online services the users expected to find when they clicked on your advertisement to get more people to complete your surveys. 

You want to aim for receiving 1,000 responses or more to your online survey, to obtain a good cross-section of your market. With this cross�section, you will be able to calculate if enough people are participating in the survey to suggest an affordable response rate. From the information that you gather from the online survey you should be able to provide your potential customers with: 

• Precisely what they are looking for; • Exactly the way they want it;

• And at a price, they are prepared to buy it for.

The answers you receive from the survey will also provide you with the language that you need to use when you write your sales copy.

When you send out your survey’s you want to be sure to not only ask about the problems they are experiencing and how difficult it is to find the solutions to those problems, but you also want to try and obtain demographic information as well, like age, job, education level, etc. You can even ask them how much they’d pay for a solution and how they would like it delivered. 

There is a qualitative difference between market intelligence, like that, gathered from a survey, and keyword intelligence. Market intelligence can be more valuable because it allows you to obtain accurate and confident information to make decisions regarding marketing and strategic decisions.

The time you spend researching your niche and the ideal customer will be time well spent because you will gather enough ideas on products to create, provided that you have found a niche that is willing to pay for solutions to their problems.