Once you actually get serious about Internet commerce, you'll soon realize that while all of it is indeed about sales in one form or another, the Royal Road to success isn't about short term profits (aka the "fast buck") at all. Rather, it's about effective data mining, because that's where the real money is. If in doubt, take a closer look at Google - they're doing it to the tune of umpteen billion dollars a year. Hard to argue with that.
You see, it's about your customers, readers, visitors: if you can get them to tell you what they want, what their pain is, what they're running away from and what their main interests and yearnings are.
At the end of the day, most if not all successful marketing will focus on relief or, at the very least, on the promise of such: How can this product/service help me get along better in life? What kind of burden can it take off my shoulders - as an entrepreneur, as a marketer, as an SEO, as a golfer, as a mother, as a lover, whatever? (In the copy writers universe it was the inimitable "shitweasel" Gary Halbert†, I believe, who coined the phrase "starving crowds" and taught us all how to push this concept to the limits and make them all happy, bless him.)
There's a lot of mystique surrounding data mining these days, but when all is said and done it's simply about getting to know your customers, prospects, leads, subscribers, visitors. The more you know about them, both individually and as a collective, the easier it will be to laser target your promotion, zeroing in on what your markets actually want, rather than chasing some fond delusions based on your own gut feelings or "intuition". (To be sure, intuition has its place in life, but data mining is certainly not one of them!) No point in trying to hawk the proverbial refrigerators to Eskimos (oops, sorry: Inuit, to keep this 100% pc...) or attempting to sell lipstick to your average construction bear.
While all of this is fairly obvious and based on simple common sense, pinpointing the tools to actually help you learn as much about your clientele as you reasonably can, is quite another matter. Not only that there's so many of them around - as a savvy marketer you'll probably be loath to fall victim to one of your peers' hard sell tactics. (Hey, it happens all the time, and yours truly is certainly no exception - but that's no reason to actually like what's going on, either...)
One major way of soliciting visitor or client feedback is, of course, running surveys on your site. While their answers may not always be entirely truthful (especially when you ask them about your products' pricing, heh), if you do it right it can be pure gold. And save you tons of advertising failures in one stride as well.
However, most survey software and services really suck: They're a pain to set up, an even greater hassle to maintain, and if you're using third party stuff be prepared to pay through your nose for it. That's probably the #1 reason why most web sites will only run surveys as a one-off operation, if at all.
By contrast, here's a tool that will help you no end in cutting down the entire process to its essentials. It lets you focus on your survey goals, structure, set of questions etc. rather than encumbering you with tons of setup and tech issues.
It will be launched tomorrow at 12 Eastern and only the first 500 buyers are in for a special price. So check out the 5 min demo pre-launch video here: Instant Form Pro
And while we're at it, this is another tool that can help you blow up your signup rates by 25% or more, endorsed by the likes of Michel Fortin and many of the other big boys of copy writing and Internet marketing. Don't miss out on it - for (currently) $27 it's a positive steal: Action PopUp
Combine the two any which way, and what you'll get is a positive killer setup to drive your data mining efforts through the roof!
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