I was watching a bit of TV last night and there were a couple of Irish entrepreneurs selling genuine Irish dirt, bits of earth, in a nice bag to the American market. They were selling tons of the stuff. Can you imagine going to the bank with that business plan? The manager would have to change his pants.

But however bizarre it sounds these guys are making it work. I’ve no clue what research they did, if any, they just had an idea and it turned out to be a pretty good one. So is your idea a good one?

The good news is that in today’s world of blogs, twitter, facebook and bebo you can certainly get an idea of whether there’s a market for your business idea. As I’ve mentioned before research is everything and nowadays it’s very easy and cheap to do.

No.1 thing to do, start a blog. Make it look nice with some frilly bits and start to talk about stuff relevant to your market. Use various methods to spread that message around the web and see what happens. That’s what we did at hmp. We wanted to know if there was a large enough market out there for us to create a specialised job board for people looking for flexibility. Turns out there are 1000′s of you, so we did it.

Since then we’ve continued to post on the blog because as well as market research it’s also a great customer service tool. There’s no better way to get input and direction than from a direct connection with your readers and service users. We’ve got a whole raft of free online courses in the pipeline – why? Because our members asked for them.

Most of our members are 30+ ladies and gents with drive, imagination and one or two business ideas they want to try out. The problem is that everyone keeps telling them to build a website, set up a facebook page, run a twitter campaign, submit articles, write a viral ebook, look at PPC, distribute their RSS and create a buzz – but no-one has told them how. We listened, via the blog and social media, and now we’re reacting to our markets needs.

In todays connected world you can increase the odds of business success by talking to your market and then build on any success by using the same tools to find out what that market needs and respond to that input. And best of all – it’s free (or nearly). You no longer have to invest in a long term lease to test the water of potential markets, just send a tweet.

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