I found particularly useful a list of 10 conversations for companies to monitor and I’ve added some of my own thoughts.

It’s very easy with current technology to set up automatic alerts to track mentions of your company’s brand name, website and key personnel (we’ll show you tomorrow how to set up a Google Alert) – but the paper suggests this is not enough, you need to be looking for particular conversations and you should be treating different types of conversations differently. Some of these conversations may never even mention your brand (at least at first).

1. The Point of Need: If you can meet people at their point of need, you are not interrupting or pitching, you are helping and responding to an expressed need

This is often why Google Adwords is so successful with certain search keywords. People are looking to solve a problem at that particular point in time so they are far more receptive to advertisements that fit exactly with their need.

2. The Influencer: Listen to the industry influencers and strong online voices 

It’s important in any market to know who are the main influencers – getting an endorsement can mean instant sales success for your product or service. If you want to influence yourself, look to see what they are doing (and also what they are not doing for better or for worse). Model and differentiate.

But it goes further than just how you can influence. Keeping tabs on the main influencers is a simple way of keeping up to date with the key information and trends in your industry. Just remember to allow yourself to think for yourself and express your own individuality.

3. The Crowd: Monitor and participate in the broader industry conversation to identify which related topics garner the most attention and engagement

Don’t just look to the influencers and don’t underestimate the influence of a crowd. Quite often you’ll find that crowds behave differently to influencers – they have different experiences, comfort zones and sometimes, different problems. Influencers are usually early adopters who pick up trends that crowds may never accept and can tire of them long before they even become popular. Remember who your target market is and listen to them, try to understand them.

4. The Competitors: Listen to conversations about your competitors brand, including all conversation types

You’ll compete better if you understand your competition. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How does this create threats and opportunities for your company/product/service? You can also look to see if you can insert your product/service as an alternative.

5. The Crisis: Catch issues before they go viral or mainstream, when possible

“Forewarned is forearmed” as the saying goes. Don’t think you can just ignore issues and they’ll go away. The internet has ruined many a brand when problems go viral. Take control of the issue while you can. 

6. The Campaign Effect: Measure the conversation effect caused by your social media (or other) campaign

Look for ways of measuring conversations – count the number of blog posts but also look at it qualitatively – is what you’ve seeded being picked up in a meaningful way. Look at how different campaigns get picked up – what works? What barely gets a murmur?

7. The Inquiry/Question: Answering questions online is an opportunity to gain valuable insight and also promote your strengths, product benefits, customer service, personality, etc. (and you are not pitching, you are answering a question)

Provide a face in the community. Not only does it get people at their point of need (see #1) but web services like Yahoo Answers get significant amounts of traffic and often rate on the front page of Google for searches for solutions to particular problems. By answering one person’s question, you can efficiently answer for many more readers searching for that answer.

8. The Customer Problem: Listen for known or potential customer issues so you can respond prior to “the complaint”

It may not be that someone is directly complaining about your product, but they may raise an issue or just be talking about your type of product/service in general. Catch it before it escalates. Also see it as valuable feedback and act on it.

9. The Compliment: Say thank you and show genuine appreciation of compliments; these online references and testimonials can prove valuable

By saying thanks, you give the person complimenting even more reason to go out and recommend your product/service again. Remember to collect them (asking permission of course) – social proof (that is proof that people’s peers like and use something) is one of the big factors in persuading potential buyers.

10. The Complaint: Listen for posts complaining about your company, product, service or staff and then respond quickly and transparently

There are few products/services in this world that are perfect. Don’t take a complaint (however badly it’s worded) personally. Don’t attempt to blame the complainer. Get a response up there quickly and be honest. If they are being truely unreasonable then don’t stoop to their level and be similarly rude – if you keep your calm and attempt to genuinely help, onlookers will see who the troublemaker is. On no account ever, ever, ever enter into a flame war, you’ll alienate readers and it’s too easy for such a conversation to be picked up by a blog and then spread as news.

I recommend the Thirty Day Challenge to anyone who has a business online (or is considering taking their business online) as well as anyone else who is interested to learn more about internet marketing, with some provisos.

Don’t get caught up in the hype

There’s a lot of hype around the Thirty Day Challenge and I believe a lot of misconceptions. It is pitched by its creators as a free course that teaches you how to make your first dollar (or ten) online but a lot of people hear that as a course that shows you how to make your first million online. It doesn’t, there’s usually a lot more that goes into making a million dollars but the skills you learn as part of the Challenge will help you along the way.

What it will teach you is some really great foundational skills that you can use for any business and any market (if you are flexible and use your imagination).

The importance of market research (and keywords)

The most important thing to realise (and it is something the creators repeat over and over) is that the main purpose of the Thirty Day Challenge is to show you how to research a market. They do also teach you internet marketing skills (it’s a great first step to understanding the power of social network marketing and it’s brilliant for understanding keywords) but the focus is always on testing your market – does it exist? is there sufficient traffic? can you get that traffic? is your market willing to spend?

How many times have you seen a store in real life that is selling something that nobody wants to buy or is in a really bad location that hardly anyone knows they are they? I see it all the time and I feel so sad because I know that business owner will lose hundreds of thousands when he/she is forced to foreclose. All of which would have been easily preventable if they had first just done their market research and been honest with the results.

The same things are important on the internet, but fortunately it is much easier and cheaper to do that all important market research. One of the most important concepts in online business and a fundamental part of online market research is the importance of keywords and this is covered extensively in Thirty Day Challenge. For that reason alone, I would recommend going through the Challenge.

But there’s more to online business than longtail keywords

The focus is on finding “longtail” keywords – keywords with regular traffic but because they are more on the edges of a bigger market (think of an animal, the animal is the main market, it’s tail is the smaller niche you’re looking for). The aim is to find niches that have little competition (but enough paying customers).  The Thirty Day Challenge teaches useful criteria on how to measure and choose these markets based on ease of profitability.

It’s very good advice but it’s not for everyone and it’s not for every business. Some people already have businesses in very competitive areas, others may find that their one true passion lies in an area where there are millions of web pages. There’s also a lot more to markets than just keywords, especially longtail ones and all because they are important doesn’t make them the be all and end all. People have succeeded in some of the most competitive fields through talent, offering some different, passion, determination and implementation savvy strategies. Needless to say, it can be harder, take longer and be riskier than targeting low competition niches.

Still, if you plan to tackle a competitive market, it’s best to know your competition – understand how strong they are and how they got there. Keyword research will tell you a lot of this.

It can also tell you which part of the market to attack first – the tail is going to be much easier than the head. Looking for longtail keywords, even if you don’t plan to stick with just the longtail, will show you where the competition is weakest and can even give you clues as to what is missing in the market. Research can show you the entry points, how to differentiate yourself from the competition. Once you’ve mastered the longtail, you can move up closer to the rest of the body of your market.

Just remember that there’s a lot more to knowing your market than keyword research. Keyword research will tell you a lot – it will tell you what people are looking for using search engines, this is very important – but it won’t tell you everything. You still need to get involved. The Thirty Day Challenge recommends subscribing to newsletters in the area, trying out free products, reading as much as you can, but sometimes this advice gets ignored. If you commit to creating a business in a market, don’t forget to get to know it by immersing yourself in it.

The Challenge demonstrates testing and marketing – it doesn’t cover product creation

This is the biggest mistake I’ve seen most people make – they think that what you learn in the Thirty Day Challenge is how to create an internet business, product and all.

In the Thirty Day Challenge, an affiliate product is used to test if a market will spend or not. This can even be an Amazon book. While they do show you how you can use what you’ve built to make some pocket money, the real aim is to test whether it is worth developing a product for the market you’re testing. This is based on finding out whether there are enough regular customers willing to buy.

The Thirty Day Challenge only shows you how to test a market, it does not show you how to develop a product. Finding an affiliate product is not developing a product and the creators don’t say it is. 

Even if you aren’t creating your own direct product to sell – say, you have a blog that hopes to earn income by reviewing affiliate products – you are still creating a product in the form of your blog that people will choose to consume or not depending on the value you create for them.

The problem is that many people do the Thirty Day Challenge thinking they are being taught how to create the product and the result is a lot of poor blogs trying to sell poor affiliate products. That’s not the purpose of the Challenge.

If you try out the Thirty Day Challenge, remember that there’s still a lot more work (and learning) to getting up an internet business. The beauty of the Challenge is that you’ve done the research and so you know whether it’s worth investing your time and money into developing a product.

Don’t create splogs

A “splog” is a spammy blog. A splog is a blog that is clearly set up to make money and doesn’t attempt to give any value back. Often it will just steal or crudely re-purpose other people’s work with no meaningful comments or analysis. 

This really follows on from the last point, when you have tested and you have found a good niche, make sure you respect your market and create something of value for them. Don’t just serve them rehashed content and “buy here” links.

Avoid the “get rich quick” mentality and stay ethical. Even affiliate blogs involve work (imagine blogging every day for six months). The most popular ones also provide interesting (and regular) content for their readers – they save their readers time by genuinely looking for the best deals and the best products and they put their readers’ interests first – not how much they might make.

It really comes down to trying to doing best by your potential customers (or in the case of blogs, readers).

Don’t socially bookmark all your own stuff

As part of the testing, the Thirty Day Challenge teaches marketing and how to create backlinks (what helps you get to the top of Google). 

You should only socially bookmark stuff that you think is worth sharing. Think whether you’d pass it on to a friend and whether they’d appreciate it. Of course aim to have as much high quality material as possible but even then some stuff will be better than others – try to pick what is your best work and focus your marketing efforts on them. Let other people bookmark the rest of your stuff.

Don’t socially bookmark poor value material – that’s spam!

If you must, don’t do it under your name or else these actions will bite you back in the future! 

But you really don’t have to, even if you’re just testing with a temporary blog. Just take a little longer to write something that actually has some value to it so that you can, in good conscience, link to it.

Picture yourself on delicious or digg looking through the recently linked items, do you want to be going through spammy no value information or do you want to be looking through great stuff? If you put up poor value material, you’re wasting people’s time and devaluing those social bookmarking services.

Don’t stop there

There’s great stuff in the Thirty Day Challenge and it can be used in any type of business or market, even businesses that are already established – you just need to be creative. You’ll get a great understanding for some core concepts and there’s even a very good introduction to how to use Google Adwords. 

But it really is just the beginning for creating and running an online business. Don’t stop learning and developing here.

If you find a good niche, consider creating a product for it. Learn more about blogging and WordPress blogs (not just the Wordpress Direct tool that’s taught in the Thirty Day Challenge). To help you do this, we will be publishing a step by step introduction to how to blog over all the weekdays in October – it’s our Month of How to Blog! Learn more about social network marketing and copywriting.

Learn more about what you need to learn. 

Think for yourself

This is important. The Thirty Day Challenge doesn’t claim to be the only way of doing market testing. There are other ways out there, be open to them. You may need to modify things to suit your business/market. You may see a better way of doing something – if so, test it (safely). And because, the technique is tailored for testing, when you have committed to building up a niche, you will need to apply techniques more appropriate for that stage.

And as always, remember to have fun!

PS If you haven’t already subscribed to the blog or our Newsletter, I recommend you do because in the next week or so, we’ll be putting together a special Thirty Day Challenge goodie that our subscribers will get long before we make it public.

It really depends on who your target market is. Realise that there are still significant parts of demographics who don’t spend any or hardly any time on the internet at all. Kids and Generation Y may be on all the trendiest social networking apps, but they may not be your market and may not want or afford your product/service.

Print in particular can have a lot of value. People can tear out a coupon or an ad with an address on it. It’s a physical item that is likely to cross their paths again – it can serve as a constant reminder. Whereas even bookmarked pages on the internet are easily lost amongst the hundreds of other bookmarks that an average person can quickly accumulate. Paper can be stuck on a refrigerator, links cannot (at least not yet – the internet enabled fridge is a number of years off becoming a common household appliance).

There’s something too about the tactibility of paper that can lead to greater engagement and attention. Think about hard copy magazines and trade journals and think about e-zines and e-newsletters: do you treat them differently? Would your target market?

It may be as marketers focus their attention online, there will be less competition for attention in the offline space. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve noticed less unsolicited mail coming in my real life mailbox – but way more spam (fortunately my Gmail spam filter is very good so I hardly if ever see any of it). And when I do get something in my mailbox, it’s a bit of a novelty so I’ll open it.

There’s a term in direct marketing called “lumpy mail” – it’s the strategy of putting something in the envelope other than a letter, something that creates a lump. That lump in turn turns the unsolicited piece of mail into a mystery and opening rates soar as most people can’t resist the temptation to find out what that lump is. If the lump is something of value or use the person, then you also tap into the psychological phenomenon of reciprocity – people tend to want to reciprocate when others do nice things for them (and often they’ll reciprocate above the value of the original benefit – one theory is to cancel out the uncomfortableness of being in “debt” to someone else). I think it requires more skills to create an equivalent online (Video and audio, I think are the online equivalents of lumpy mail – they are something different, they use different senses and provoke interaction on multiple levels.)

The online world will only get more and more important but don’t forget the offline world. You may find some offline campaigns more effective. Just remember to know your target market!