The news was big enough to make NYT and WSJ alert status:  After much sturm, drang, and hoopla, Microsoft and Yahoo finally struck a deal to challenge Google on search.

Will they successfully challenge Google?  Is the Microsoft/Yahoo deal game-changing?

I suggest that, if you’re an online marketer, you shouldn’t be wasting time worrying about those questions.  The most important question you should have been asking yourself when you heard the news was, “how can I use this new development effectively in my business?”

Lots of marketers understood that and quickly put up blog posts to start a conversation with their customers about the news.

And you can bet your bottom dollar they did more than that:  They got busy figuring out how to profit from this news.

Whether they’re figuring how to make more money from their PPC campaigns or how they might roll out products that teach others to do so, smart marketers weren’t reacting, they were taking action.

Because that’s what smart marketers do:  That’s how they make money.

And you know what?  The smart marketers weren’t sitting there wondering whether this news was relevant for their customers or what  to buy, they knew.

Because smart marketers have that information in their hands, constantly.  They’re getting an oingoing stream of information about who their customers are, what those customers are buying, and how they like.

So when big news breaks, they don’t have to waste time–and competitive advantage–trying to figure those things out.  They’re armed and ready with the information they need to take action and make money, right away.

Bottom line, that’s why you need a survey system in your business:  So when news breaks, you know exactly how to take action to profit from it.

Many of you have asked us,

“how many people do you need for an accurate survey?”

The answer isn’t simple, but I can boil it down for you, with some basic principles that should meet the needs of most businesses.

First, what do you want to do with the data? What questions do you need to answer and how complex do you need to get?

• For certain kinds of data analysis—for example, if you want to do complex analysis and “cut” the data lots of different ways–you need at least several hundred respondents.

• If you just want to look at frequencies, though–in other words, if you just want to know how many people are interested in a particular product or service–100 or so might be enough.

Regardless of how many responses you get, the CRITICAL issue is representativeness.

• That means that you hope the characteristics of the people who respond, as a group, “look” as much as possible like the people in your customer base, as a whole.

• So you hope, for example, that you get roughly the same % of men or women that you have in the customer base, the same age distribution, and so on.

• One of the things we’re going to do in our new membership site is show you how to get this.

Sometimes, though, you don’t want to know about EVERYONE. Instead, you really want to know about a particular group, or segment of our customer base.

• Maybe you want to know if the frequent buyers are interested in a membership site.

• In that case, if you’ve already segmented your list (using surveys and data from your shopping cart) to segment your list properly, you can go in and select that group, then send the survey invitation JUST to that group.

• That’s just one of many reasons that segmentation is so powerful.

The bottom line? Anytime we do surveys, we want to get as high a percentage of customers as possible to respond.

And it comes back to the mantra we give you over and over: The best way to get good information from your customers is to show them “what’s in it for them.”

• You do that by giving them an incentive to take the survey (a free report and a chance to win something cool, such as an iPod, for example) and by
• showing them clearly, in the survey and the invitation, that we’ll use the information they give us to give them more value.

To get a quick, easy SYSTEM for doing surveys this way, go here.

We’ve had LOTS of people ask us,

How do I get people to respond to my survey?

They’re asking that question with good reason, because this is one of  THE MOST IMPORTANT issues:  Simply put, if you don’t get good response to your surveys, you can’t use them to make more money.

So how do you get the responses you need?

Here are some tips:

1.  First and foremost, you get response by showing your customers “what’s in it for them” in taking your survey.  It needs to be ALL about them, so that they see why they should spend time and effort to give you information.

2.  You do that in many ways, but 2 of the key ways are to (a) offer incentives for taking the survey (such as, everyone who takes it gets a free report AND a chance to win something cool, like an iPod) and (b) designing the survey so that it reads as if it’s about THEM, not about YOU and how YOU can make more money.  If you do that, you WILL make more money, because you’ll get the information you need.

3.  Write a good survey!  If you learn how to write clear, effective questions, to make your survey a conversation, and to report results to your customers and show them how you’re using the data, they’ll learn over time that your surveys are worthwhile. That takes some skill, but you’ll be surprised how fast you can learn to do good surveys, particularly with the simple recipe we’ve put together.

4.  Send multiple invitations to do the survey.

5.  Show your customers how you put the information they give to work to give THEM more value.

There are other techniques that we’re teaching, but this should give you some information you can use to get responses to surveys.  To get our other techniques AND our complete system for using surveys to ramp up profits, go here.

Try these tips to increase response to your survey.  And let us know how you’re doing!