Whatever type of business you’re in, it’s really helpful to get “inside the mind of your audience” to understand what they’re thinking about.
How do you that?
One of the easy ways I’ve found, reading forum posts, because people reveal in “there own words” what’s on their mind.
To discover the most popular forums in any niche, I use a free resource called Board Tracker. It’s like Google, for discovering forums.
If you’re serious about research, I know you’ll find this useful.
Board Tracker can be used in a number of ways…
- As a search engine in the ‘traditional’ sense. All the information in there database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows use to return even more relevant results without the ‘spam’.
- You can pre-define search terms and preferences and Board Tracker will let you know in a number of ways (email, Jabber, Site) as soon as a thread matching your search term is posted on any of the thousands of forums they track.
- Board Tracker can be used by unregistered surfers and by registered free & premium accounts for more useful features.
- Corporate users can arm their sales and marketing staff with Board Tracker accounts to give them essential business intelligence.
They are constantly adding new boards and forums and expanding their database.
Until next time,
PS. Try them out, and let me know what you think in the comments below.