Finding a Need, It All Begins Here

Much has been said about Internet Marketing. One uncommonly mentioned step in this process is finding a need. It’s actually probably the most important step in Internet Marketing–or any other marketing, for that matter.

If you aren’t finding a need, you’re really not going to get very far in a product launch. This has to be done before product development, before marketing, before anything. You have to be able to supply what people need. If you don’t, you’re just wasting time and resources.

Think of it this way. Let’s say that it’s around December 10. You know that people are shopping for Christmas presents at this time. You decide to launch a Christmas based product, or made a special Christmas sale. You realize that there are people on the Net with a need and money to spend. You provide the needed item, and make money. That’s the essence of how to go about finding a need.

It’s all about target traffic. As I just said, you have people browsing the Net that are “just browsing,” and then you have people that are actually shopping. Obviously, you want the ones who are spending money. Finding a need is the first part of targeting your traffic. Obviously, you don’t care about the guy sitting at his kitchen table drinking his coffee, just browsing for the sake of it.

Of course, the process of finding a need is a bit more complicated than just knowing that Christmas is coming up, so you should develop a Christmas line. It takes a bit of market analysis. Let’s say that you have this brilliant idea for a launch. Let’s say that it’s a line of instruction manuals on how to do underwater basket weaving.

The first thing you do in finding a need is condense this whole idea into as few words as possible. Now you can take this to Wordtracker or another keyword tool. Plug your words into the keyword search tool and let’s see what happens. Wordtracker will kick out every (more or less) current permutation of your keyword and how often it got hit.

Based on this analysis, can you say that by doing this search that you’re finding a need? If you’re not, perhaps there’s some variation on your keywords that will actually hit higher than your original version. It can be quite a boring process, but sticking through with it will pay off in the end.

For instance, let’s say with this example that you plugged in “underwater basket weaving Alaska.” Let’s say that in this example, you see that there’s actually more interest in underwater basket weaving in Outer Mongolia than in Alaska. I know, you had your heart set on Alaskan techniques of underwater basketweaving, but there was more demand for Outer Mongolian methods. Finding a need doesn’t always mean that you get your way.

Now that you’re done finding a need, you can begin making your instruction manuals for underwater basket weaving in Outer Mongolia. You can then move on to pricing and marketing and everything else. But this is where it starts.