Researching Your Target Market

You have probably heard that you need to research your target market before you embark on your business.  But how do you do research?  To do market research, I would recommend a couple of things.  First, go to www.wordtracker.com   You can sign up for a free trial.  You can also pay for a weekly or monthly subscription to get more detailed results. To start, you would type into the search box the "keywords" you want to research.  Let's say you want to sell gift baskets.

• You type in "gift baskets" in the search box.  When the results come up, click on "gift baskets."  It then shows you how many people actually searched for this term.

• You can select the phrase by clicking on it, then go on to step 3.  Step 3 will show you all the phrases you selected (you can choose as many as you want from the list provided in step 2).

• Then go on to step 4, where it shows how many searches there have been in the last 24 hours for each phrase you selected, and how many other sites there are that are competing (using the same keywords).
  
  With the free trial, it is important to understand that you are only given MSN's results.  With the paid version, you can find out the results for Google, Yahoo, and any of the other search engines.  If you are using the free trial, know that the search results may be much higher in Google and Yahoo than in MSN.

At this point, the number of searches is what you should be concerned with.  As you start building your website and using keywords, you will want to look at the number of competitive sites, but for now, you need to determine the amount of interest in your general market.