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A few weeks ago I was watching my 7 year old Grandson Joel as hewas drawing a picture of a strawberry patch.

As he drew, it began to look more and more like a Christmas wreaththan a strawberry patch. I told him that it looked pretty good,but suggested to him that "maybe you could put a few strawberrieshere, and here and here" as I pointed to the big white area in themiddle of his drawing.

He looked at me in all seriousness and said...

"Grandpa, it doesn't matter what YOU think, it's what the artistthinks!"

It was funny at the time, but I have been thinking about this quite a bit.

You know what? He is right!

There is a great lesson to be learned here. The lesson appliesvery well to Internet marketing. Actually it applies well to ANYkind of marketing, it doesn't necessarily have to be on theinternet.

We have a tendancy to come up with an idea that we think is thegreatest thing since sliced bread. We're absolutely convinced thateverybody will beat a path to our door to buy our product. Wespend lots of money to develop a sales campaign, build a website,buy advertising and so on, and spend a lot of time and effort todraw people to our website, get good search engine positioning, andthen more often than not we're disappointed because very few peoplebuy our products.

Could it be that the marketplace doesn't care about our opinion? Does that hurt your ego? It shouldn't. It should open your eyes to this very simple, but wildly profound truth.

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU THINK, IT'S WHAT THE MARKETPLACE THINKS THAT IS IMPORTANT!

Big companies spend millions of dollars on market research, testingand surveys before they ever spend any money in developing aproduct or marketing a product. Doesn't it make sense that beforewe ever spend a dime on any kind of product development, websitedevelopment or whatever that we should spend some time first tofind out what people are buying, when do they buy, and how do theybuy?

By doing proper research in advance, you'll save yourself a lot ofwasted time and effort, and you'll be rewarded many times over bysuccessful, money making websites. Finding profitable "niches" isnot a difficult process, but it can make all the difference in theworld as to whether or not your website will be a huge success or adismal failure.

As you consider what kind of websites you'll be building, keep inmind the lesson learned from a 7 year old.