Enrolling in class
Yesterday I asked whether you are being an intentional student or a passive consumer of information. I outlined my strategy for getting an education without the tuition.  The strategy is to pick an author whom you respect and trust and then treat their archives like a textbook. Starting at the beginning and working to the most current entries while taking notes along the way.

Strategy 1 focused on the teacher; strategy 2 focuses on those who are being taught.

Strategy 2 – Study in the lab

Read much about product creation and you’ll eventually encounter this strategy:

Listen to your customers/readers and they will tell you what they want you to make.

It’s easy to see the wisdom of this. Your “right people” (as Abby Kerr would call them), will tell you what their pain points are. If you offer a product that addresses that, you stand the chance of having a very profitable business.

That’s all fine and dandy when you are one of the big players and you have tons of “right people” telling you what they want. But what do you do when you DON’T have all those people? What are you supposed to build? How are you supposed to even have a clue what your market wants if you don’t have a group that you can engage with?

You go where they are and you listen.

Remember the people from yesterday? You know, the ones who’s archives you treated like a text book. There are others who read their site too. (If not, move to the next author on your list.) These leaders have followers, and usually a large number of them. Every post seems to elicit tens if not hundreds of comments.

All of those comments amount to one thing for you: market research!

The “How to” part
Just as you treated the archives like a text book, you’re now going to treat the comments like a lab. If you don’t have a large audience of your own to study (or even if you DO), you can learn a lot from the comment sections of other blogs. All of those people are dying to be heard by that A-List blogger who’s site you are on. They are screaming out their questions and suggesting products to them. That’s how that A-Lister comes up with what they’re selling in the first place.

No one is stopping you from learning from someone else’s readers.

Here’s what I recommend:

1. Go to their website – I prefer to do this part on the actual website and not in an RSS reader like yesterday’s strategy because it allows you to easily see any threading that may take place in the comments
2. Start with their most current post – This is contrary to yesterday when we studied the author’s knowledge. Now we know the author but want to see what their current market is requesting.
3. Read from first comment to most recent – I do this to see the progression of the conversation that takes place in the comments
4. Write down what people are REALLY saying – You will notice a lot of comments that basically say “Nice post” albeit with much more words. Ignore those. Here is what you are looking for:
   1. What questions do you see being asked repeatedly? These indicate reoccurring pain points
   2. What types of things does the author have to clarify in the comments that the post did not do well? These indicate important points that people wanted to know more about
   3. What areas of frustration do the comments highlight? These indicate unsolved problems waiting for solutions
   4. What problems are people admitting they have? More unsolved problems waiting for solutions
   5. What solutions are people offering that they have personally found? This indicates a problem that they had at one point
   6. Who are people that reoccur in the comments with good questions? I’ll address this below in the Extra Credit section
5. Identify trends in the responses – What questions keep reoccurring? What problems do people continually admit to having? Note those things and write them down.
6. Identify the root of the trends – Analyze the trends and determine what the root problems are. Write them down.
7. Repeat steps 3 – 6 with the next most current post – Keep doing this until you feel you have identified the major trends in what people are saying
8. Develop this strategy as a habit – Using this strategy on every post you encounter is a good thing to do. It helps you to have a broad view in to what people’s problems are.

Once you have identified the root problem, you have options:

• Ignore it – Seriously? Why bother with any of this if you’re going to do that?
• Offer a solution in the comments – This is a great way to make yourself a valuable member of that community and stand a chance to get noticed by the blog author. This might be a good strategy for smaller problems to mid-sized problems or larger problems you don’t want to address long term.
• Post an answer to the problem on your own site - Make sure you are clear about identifying the problem you discovered and then very practically outlining the solution. I’d recommend this strategy for mid-sized to larger problems.
• Create a service or product to address the problem – This is the goal, right? I mean we’re here to do business. I’d recommend this strategy for large problems or groups of related problems.

If you can provide solutions to people’s problems, you have a business. If you don’t have people to identify their problems, you can borrow someone else’s.

Extra Credit
Once you start doing this on multiple sites within a given market, you will likely notice the same people (Item 6 under Step 4 from above) at each location . If you can, follow the links to those people’s websites. See if you can determine more information on the problem they mentioned on the original website. If that person has a Twitter account (you do, yes?), follow them. They will likely provide you with additional market research and insight into their problem through their conversations and updates on Twitter.

This is extra credit because it is a much slower process. The results can be awesome though as you really get to know the person and can develop a connection long before you develop the solution to their problem.

Final thoughts
This is a much more involved task that yesterday’s reading of the archives. Instead of studying the site’s lessons, you are interpreting the site’s feedback. While very powerful, it is much more mentally intensive than yesterday’s lesson.

Tell me in the comments what your thoughts are on this. Is this something you already do? If not, will you be trying it out soon?

(Note: Here is the link to the first post in this series: Click here.)