How to find out products and services with the help of discussion forums?

So our first step is just to do some simple searches with Google and see if there are any existing online communities in our market, so we can find out where some of our target customers are just hanging out or spending a lot of their time, as well as talking about things that are related to our market, products and services, new problems, new wants and desires, so on and so forth. In fact, discussion forums and communities where your target customers hang out online and talk about issues related to your market could be some of the best research data that you’ll find on the entire internet, it is extremely valuable.

It can help you tweak your marketing so you can do a better job at selling to those people, it can help you come up with product ideas to fulfill or solve a certain problem that they have that maybe no one else is currently solving in the market, or you can also find out about certain products and services that your market is raving about, that they’re fans of, you know, certain companies and certain things that those companies do that these people are really, really pleased with, and then they can give you great ideas to improve or tweak your own marketing or the way that you handle customer support or anything else. So there’s a gold mine of data to be found in discussion forums and by looking at just the conversations that your market is having with other people that are interested in the same types of things related to your market.

So we are here at Google and we’re just going to do some simple searches. So the first thing we just kind of want to look for is to see if there is any discussion forums related to our market. So using “web hosting” example, I will just do a simple search for – and by the way, I could do a search for web hosting forums. In fact, let me do that search first to show you something. So I will type “Web hosting Forum,” you could also type “web hosting Discussion Forum,” or “web hosting Message Board,” those are some just variations of what they call online forums, but I am going to type in “web hosting forum” and I am going to do a Google search. Let is see, up comes “hosting Web – The Internet’s Hosting Community, that is probably a really good site for us to go and find some of our target customers and to see what they are talking about and just to kind of get the pulse of the market.”Helpful Web Hosting Forum,” “Domain Forums,” “windows server,” as you can see, there are just tons of them, and this is just on the first page. So imagine if we click to the second page of results, there are just more forums and more forums. Now, most markets are like this. Most markets where it’s any kind of subject matter that people are passionate about or really interested in or just involved with, they are finding places on line to talk to others that are also interested in the same topic or have the same type of problems, so on and so forth. So forums are usually all over the internet for most markets.

Depending on your niche, you may find a market where there are no discussion forums, where it is something that people are not really talking about, and that is okay. It does not mean that your marketing is going to fail, it does not mean that you can not be successful with this course, it just means that you will  be missing that little piece. But for most markets, you are going to find these communities and these discussion forms where your market is hanging out.

In the case that you can not find discussion forums or you can not find kind of, you know, many answers to some of these questions that you are going to be doing with some of these exercises that I am giving you, these action steps, oftentimes it is necessary to broaden your market. You know, with hosting, I kind of briefly talked about before, that hosting is actually a subset of a larger market, which would be kind of Web Designing or things related to people that own internet presence because typically hosting. So if I could not find any hosting forums then my next searches would be kind of the next step up the ladder, I will search for kind of Web Space forums and I will probably find that somewhere within that community there’s a subset talking about hosting.

So that is it. Those are some quick tricks so you can find discussion forums in your market, and you could just replace those searches with, in this example, “Hosting Message Boards,” “Hosting Discussions,” and some other words related to forums. But you will  also want to do “List of Market Forums.” You can also do “List of Message Boards” and then the topic, so on and so forth, but do that and you should find a bunch of forums in your market. If you don’t, remember, go up a level for whatever market your little market is a subset of and work yourself up the chain until you find out where some communities are where people are at least talking somewhat about your market.