Finding A Hungry Market

I was listening to a copy writing talk earlier this morning (recorded) by Andrew Cavanagh and it was just a basic introductory talk part of a larger series on how to develop good copy writing skills.  The basic point of the talk was that you have to find a hungry market and then tailor your copy to that market.  If you have a hungry market, you will be able to sell them anything.  So try to find the market first, and then work creating or locating a product for that market.  Tips on finding a hungry market are going to various forums and seeing what people need, even asking them if a particular item could solve their needs.  Also books are a good indicator of a hungry market – go and check what books are available on a subject and then go and read the blurbs from the books to get a good idea of answers to your research.  This is a good research tip as well.  Rather than just going on Google for your research you can check out existing books and their blurb chapters or pages or even the table of contents. 

Anyway, here is a summary of the best ways to find a hungry market – ones that i especially like are bolded:

1.  Use the phone book to contact businesses.

2.  Find niche keywords and check the page ranks of the resulting pages on Google.  Lower page ranked pages can mean that you will have an easier time getting free traffic.  This is another step to niche research that I didn’t think of before.  Yeah you are getting results, but what kind of results are you getting?  If you can get a page with a higher page rank then you can be sure to rank higher than these results on google (right?). 

3.  Search for the top ranking sites on google and check if they are capturing email addresses.  If they are, then you can market to their list and share the profits –> also known as Joint Ventures.  You can also pay for a solo – email.  An email that goes to their whole list.

4.  Check paypal stores.

5.  Discussion forums / google groups / yahoo groups

6.  Go to amazon and check books within your target market and see why the popular books so popular. 

7.  “Flycatcher technique” – from Google PPC take users to a page where you tell them you are putting finishing touches on a book and want to make sure all questions are answered.  If they send you their questions, whatever they are, you will send them a free copy of the book when you are done.  Build a list this way as well.