Livingston Surveys Complete!

I recently purchased a DVD seminar series for the Livingston survey method called “How to Double Your Business”. If you’re not familiar with Dr. Glenn Livingston, click here to read more about his methodology.

Since I am already involved in the Incorporation/LLC market I decided to apply the lessons there first.My objective was to gather at least 300 surveys in the Incorporation/LLC/DBA market, and at least 35 for each of the channels that I wanted to move into.

Most of the data being collected was open-ended questions asking the survey taker to tell me about their most important problems. For taking a survey, I returned the favor by giving away a compilation of data that already existed for free on the Internet. (To be fair, they would have had to search long and hard to get all that data, and I provided it in one spot, so it was valuable.)

After more than a month, and a sizable $$ outlay, the surveys have been completed. Below is a screenshot of the number of surveys I completed for each channel.

As you can see, the LLC market is by far the biggest. At least, that’s the one that I was most successful driving traffic to with my Adwords campaigns.

This was not a cheap endeavor! The clicks in this market are expensive and only a small percentage of the people I paid for actually took a survey. But, the data collected was very valuable and confirmed that I am in a potentially lucrative market.

New business owners face an uphill battle of legality and complex rules. These people have all kinds of questions about their business entities. And, they are willing to form a personal relationship with me (even though we’ve never met and they’ve never heard of me). 23% of the survey takers gave me a their phone number (even though it was not required).

Now the real work begins! I’m moving on to the coding phase of the Livingston survey method. This step will require me to break down the answers of every survey received into “codes” that will tell me many things about my potential customers.

When done properly, the resulting data will tell me everything I need to know to make money in this market. It will tell me:

• What kind of products they’re desperate to buy, and at what price point.


• Exactly what the strongest selling points are that I could make (in order of highest priority to lowest).


• Which sub-groups and segments are most responsive.


• What types of terms they are likely to search on to find the data they’re looking for.


• Which markets are related (and which are not).


• Market demographics for laser-targeted offline advertising.

So, off to the Excel mines! Time to get my hands dirty and figure these folks out.

More updates coming soon.

Travis

ps. In addition to coding the survey data, I must also at this point begin my phone interview process. All of the data above will provide the “hard facts” I need about my market, but only by talking to the actual people and hearing the words they use and the emotion behind their problems can I understand the “softer side” of their needs.