Day 8.1: Knowing Your Market

First the good news: the brilliant plan I've been working on is just about ready to go, and for sure I'll tell you guys in the next post or two how you can actually make serious money on the internet. Again, it's not "easy money," and if you go for it you can expect to be pretty busy, at least for a while until things pick up. But it is simple--foolproof, even, if I can just get the last few kinks ironed out (and there aren't many).

And now onto my topic for this post: knowing your market. One thing that pretty much any book on writing tells you is to know the readers, to have the audience in mind as you write. What age group is the story for? What do they care about, and what draws them in? It's good advice in the writing world and at least as good in the business world.

Yesterday, as I was researching ways to put my plan into action, I came across a very interesting e-book, The Fastest Way to Build A Large MLM Downline by Tracy Biller
. It wasn't on exactly what I was looking for, but it was related to MLM (multi-level-marketing) and sales. What it said was that personal referrals are nothing. I know from experience that you can talk until you're blue to friends and family, and even if they do sign up for something there's no way they'll be active. They just want you to shut up. It's a waste of their time--and it's a waste of yours. Another tip that the book said was not to waste your time recruiting rookies. That was new to me. What's wrong with recruiting rookies? I consider myself a rookie. Why shouldn't a wise marketer recruit me?

The truth is that if you don't know what you're getting into, and you don't walk into something with a plan in mind, blindly expecting money to flow into your bank account, you're going to fail. You're going to fail big. And when most people set out to make money online, they immediately see that it isn't as glamorous as all the ads paint it to be, and they give up. That's the problem with rookies.

So now you have a problem. If you try to market your service to friends and family, they'll do the minimum just to get you to shut up. If you market the same service to the general public, they might sign up, but they'll soon get discouraged and give up before their presence makes any difference. So what can you do? You need to be able to find a target audience. Look through forums and chat-rooms to find people who are seriously looking for a solution and willing to work it out. Look for people who want your business as badly as you want theirs. Those are the people who will make a difference. Those are the people you want on your side. Know your market. You want veterans, not rookies!

For more detailed information, here's the link to the e-book that told me all this: http://www.documentspratiques.com/downloads/FastMLM.pdf. It's a pretty short read, and I think definitely worth the read, whatever your online business is.

Please check back later to hear about my brilliant idea: a shockingly simple way to make actual money online. And right now I'm ironing it out to make sure it's also as easy as possible without any guesswork or frustration involved.

In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter for the latest updates and tips on how to work and save online. You can also join me on Clixsense, Protypers (code 611M) and Swagbucks for easy ways to earn pennies! And for your information, I've already earned over a dollar on Protypers for only a couple days' work, and they pay you after you reach three dollars. Not bad for an online gig!