Asking Your Customers to Be Your Focus Group

There's a particular article directory where I've posted some articles I've written in the past few years. Writing articles and posting them to such directories is an excellent and easy way to market your business and your booklets, especially when you can excerpt your own booklet into an article ("13 Ways to... -- straight out of your own booklet).

Now there are probably thousands of these article directories online these days. However one, in particular, is distinguishing themselves from among the rest. That directory is www.EzineArticles.com owned by Christopher Knight. They distinguish themselves in quite a number of ways, as far as the services they provide.

Yesterday they did it again. They distinguished themselves one more time. They scheduled a Town Hall meeting on the telephone as a conference call. I have no clue how many of their article authors they invited to attend the event. All I know is that I was one of them. They scheduled it for two hours, and even though I was interested in attending, I didn't think two hours giving them input on their business would be the best use of my time. How wrong I was.

As it turned out, I stayed to the very last moment, every split second of the two hours. Yes, I had a couple of suggestions to offer, but that was not the brilliance in all of this, at least not for me. What I quickly realized was how much there was to learn through the prepared questions asked by the owners of www.EzineArticles.com and the other people on the call. I'm guessing there may have been a couple dozen of us.

There were hugely valuable features on the website I had never noticed or known about. There were ways to use articles that I had never considered. There were people on the call outside my regular circle of colleagues, as well as some names I recognized. And the people at www.EzineArticles.com did valuable market research in ways that couldn't otherwise accomplished, for much less than other methods would have cost in time or money.

The entire experience inspired me on various levels. It reminded me to utilize tools that are right under my nose, to go about it in ways that work, and to remember there is always learning that's available in every experience in life. This was so much easier to gather information from constituents than by sending out an email survey, and it allowed for on-the-spot clarification of all the people involved.

I am going to schedule one of these open town hall meetings on the phone in a couple of weeks and see what ideas and information turns up. There's no doubt in my mind that it can be nothing but good coming from it. What about you for your own business?

And by the way, post some of your own articles at www.EzineArticles.com as soon as you can. Costs nothing and they get results. The stats for my website traffic always show visitors to my site coming from www.EzineArticles.com

Until next time,
Paulette
http://www.tipsbooklets.com