For today’s “Burning Question” Susan asks:

“How can I find out what my list wants to buy? They may be interested in what I am talking about, but how do I make the leap to offering a purchase?” 

This is a great question. When I started out in my online business, I stumbled upon the perfect answer to this question, and that is, you want to listen to what your tribe is asking you for. In my Law of Attraction / Self-Empowerment tribe, they actually began to ask me for products and coaching. And, I told them “I don’t have anything to offer!” The fact is, I hadn’t intended on that becoming a business. I was just passionate about it.

When I finally listened to them, I created audios, videos, ebooks and other products. I also began coaching them.

If you’re not sure what your tribe or community wants or needs from you, ask them.

Susan, since you talk about “my list” it sounds like you already have a list. Great job for building it! And, for realizing that as the leader of your tribe – it’s also your job to offer them solutions to their problems through your products and services.

Send out a survey your list community and ask them what they want from you. There’s a few different ways of doing this.

Simple Email Survey – You can send out an email broadcast with the simple question: What is your biggest question about Your Subject? So for example, if you were in the weight loss industry, you would ask:

“What is your biggest frustration about losing weight and getting in shape in the next 90 days?”

In this option, subscribers can simply email back their answers.

Multiple Question Survey – You can also do a longer type survey. I recommend that when you do surveys, you do from one to seven questions. But don’t go over seven questions. People are busy, people are overwhelmed. You don’t want to ask a 15 question survey. So I usually think three to five questions are perfect. Some of the questions can be true, false, multiple choice type questions, but you always want to have what I call an open ended question as one of the questions in your survey.

So if you only ask one question, make sure that it’s an open ended question. This means that your prospect, the person taking the survey, is able to write in their own answers in their own words.

This is important for many different reasons. If you have multiple choice, that’s still your words and what you think they might need. As experts, we sometimes try to offer what we think people need versus what they really want. And you really want to focus in your offers on what they really want.

Make sure that you always do an open ended question, that’s where the real gold is. When you do, you’ll be surprised to discover what your list community really wants and needs from you. This has been huge in my business, and I hope it’s huge in yours.