An overlooked item that can cripple your business before it even starts!

Many new business owners underestimate the importance of being able to easily reach their target market. If you can’t easily reach your target market, then it’s not a market you should go after.

In the first business I started, my first product was a product geared towards helping law students succeed in law school. In many ways, law students are a very good target market: many of them have student loan money and their parents’ money at their disposal and will go to almost any lengths to get ahead. The problem with this market, however, is that they are very difficult to reach.

Good mailing lists from them are hard to come by just like magazines and newspapers and other media. The best way to reach them is to physically go to law schools. And as you probably know, manual labor marketing is generally a very low leverage activity that should be avoided.

This turned out to be a profitable business for me, but it never got close to the six figure level. I am sure that if I had put more time and energy into this market, I could have turned it into a six figure business per year. But this effort was difficult to justify when he knew that there were many other markets that were just as good and much easier to reach.

Accessibility is an overlooked reason why many business owners are so successful. For example, there is a long list of very successful business owners who have built very successful businesses by providing marketing and business growth materials to various types of small business owners, including chiropractors, attorneys, restaurant owners, dentists, etc. These and other types of small business owners are very easy to contact through readily available mailing lists, email lists, and business magazines.

Finding out if you can reach your target market is relatively easy. You can do this by going to your local library and looking in the Standard Date and Rate Services (SRDS) directory, which lists all commercially available mailing lists. You can also check http://www.magazines.com to find out if there are specific magazines dedicated to your target market.

In conclusion, if you are starting a new business, one of the first steps you need to do is to make sure that your target audience can be reached. After doing that, it’s just a matter of getting the right offer if they’re in front of them and the money will start rolling in!