By Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD

Today, we’re starting a new series on the blog to answer some of your most common questions about surveys–everything from “Why surveys?” to “how many responses do I need?” to “how can I use surveys to build my list?

We’re going to begin with the most basic question we get: “Why surveys?”

Well, the answer is straightforward: Surveys make money, pure and simple.

Top marketers, Fortune 500 companies, bestselling authors–they’ve all been doing surveys for decades to convert prospects, create products to order, and much more.

Here are 10 ways you can follow their example and make money with surveys:

1) Create products to order:  My partner, Mike Koenigs, calls product creation surveys the “million dollar strategy,” a sure-fire way to create products your customers will beg to buy. After all, if you ask your customers and prospects what they want, create it for them, then tell them you’ve done that, don’t you think they’ll be invested in your product or service and BUY it?

2) Convert prospects with quizzes: Probably the second biggest problem our customers tell us about is that their prospects don’t convert. One awesome way to increase those conversions is to use quizzes. These work like gangbusters because they’re interactive, engaging, and FUN for the customer. Plus, we’re teaching our customers how to give a customized recommendation for their products and services in the quiz, which will really help ramp up your conversions.

3) Develop a membership site: We’ve designed a template for gauging interest in a membership site, finding out what content your customers would like in it, and what they’re willing to pay. It’s the same logic as creating products to order and it works great. We used this for one of our customers and she had an absolute formula for creating her membership site!

4) Segment your list: Surveys can give you the information you need to segment your list, so you can tailor messages, offers, and products to particular customers. That means you can send different messages to men and to women, to frequent buyers as opposed to those who don’t buy as often, to people in areas that have been hard hit by the economy. This one technique can increase your click throughs and conversions by as much as 45%!

5) Get testimonials: Surveys can get you awesome testimonials quickly, easily, and inexpensively. We have an awesome technique, a testimonial generator we used to get as many as 190 responses for one of our clients!

6) Prove it: Testimonials are just one form of proof. You should be getting 2 more: case studies and the gold standard, statistical data that PROVE your products work, your services change lives. Surveys can give you all 3 forms of proof and the UNIQUE advantage of surveys is that it can get you those statistical data.  And those statistical data will give you the information you need to comply with the FTC guidelines on testimonials.

7) Keep them happy: To keep your business growing and thriving, you’ve got to know when your customers are satisfied. Customer satisfaction surveys do that job for you, giving you an ongoing stream of information about your key products and services. What’s more, they’ll tell you when your customers AREN’T satisfied, so you find the ticking time bombs in your business BEFORE they explode.

8)  Build Your List: Surveys can let you build your list, in a number of ways. If you partner with someone else who has a list, you can collaborate on a survey and build your list. If you put a quiz out and use video and social media to drive traffic it, that’s another way surveys can generate leads and build your list. We’ll have more for you, so stay tuned.

9) Create an autoresponder series: When you do product creation surveys, or if you just do simple one-question surveys to find out your customers’ biggest problems or pain, you can take that and create an autoresponder series that addresses their questions and shows them how your products and services will let them take the next step to solving their problem or easing their pain.

10) Get an instant product:  That’s right, we’re even using survey technology to create instant products you can have up and running on your site, generating money on autopilot, in as little as 2 weeks! Stay tuned to find out how.

These are just some of the ways surveys can make money for you. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to go into all these topics and more, in great detail. This is awesome content that isn’t being put out anywhere else in the Internet marketing space, so stay tuned!

One mistake I see MANY marketers–even TOP “gurus”–making is that they rely almost exclusively on open-ended questions in their surveys.

I’m going to show you why this is a mistake and how to avoid it.

In business surveys, I recommend that about 85-90% of your questions be closed-ended (meaning you write choices to give the respondent), rather than open-ended.

Why?

Two reasons:

1. From your point of view, open-ended questions just give you too much information.  Imagine getting thousands of responses with long, open-ended answers.  Wading through it all and trying to come up with a real analysis of what’s there requires not just a lot of time but also a lot of skill.
2. In most cases, your customers HATE open-ended questions.  They take far more time and thought to answer than closed-ended questions do.  That means you’re less likely to hear from a broad base of your customers AND you’re more likely to irritate them–something you NEVER want to do with a survey.

But open-ended questions DO have their place.

You can include them in a survey after open-ended questions, to ask things such as “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about ______?

• That way, you can pick up information and ideas you might not have thought to ask.
• You’ll also start to pick up some of the language of your customers, language you can use in your marketing.

Open-ended questions are also really useful to get information you feed INTO closed-ended questions in surveys.

• So, if you ask questions such as, “What’s your most important question about _____?” or “What problem or issue about ______ keeps you awake at night?” can give you impressions that you can then test, in a survey, with closed-endd questions.

Follow these suggestions and you’ll see your response rates–and your profits–grow.

To learn a quick, easy, foolproof system for writing closed-ended questions, check out our survey system.

One question we hear often from the MySurveyExpert community is,

Are multiple choice surveys misleading?

Here’s the bottom line:  They are, if you don’t know what you’re doing and you write them incorrectly.

And “loading” questions or writing “leading” questions can actually cost you money.

Why?  Because the simple fact is is that you need to know what people think; leading questions don’t tell you that.

And here’s the thing:  The more accurately you find that out what your customers think, the more money you’re going to make.

So knowing exactly

• what people want,
• what they’ll pay,
• when they’re satisfied (and when they’re not)

can double, triple, or even quadruple your profits.

That’s why you’ve GOT to write good questions.  Leading questions are bad and costly.

But here’s the problem:  it’s not always obvious when a question is “leading”  or “loaded.”  Sometimes, they’re really tough to spot, particularly when you’re writing questions about your own products and services.

Here are some tips to avoid that leading questions, tips that will help you write GOOD survey questions that make you money:

1. Use neutral language.  Avoid any terms (either positive OR negative), anything that might get an emotional response.
2. Balance your response options.  If you’re asking people whether they agree or disagree with a statement, make it “Agree strongly, Agree, Disagree, Disagree Strongly,” not “Agree strongly, Agree, Disagree.”  You want both “sides” to have the same number of responses.
3. Review, review, review.  Go through the survey yourself, several times, to look for “loaded” or “leading” questions.  Then put the survey away for a couple of days, then come back and look at it again.  Then, ask a couple of other folks to look it over for you and get their input.
4. Once you’ve reviewed it, pretest it.  Get a small “subsample” of your customers (20 or so is usually enough), have them take the survey, then give them a few questions that ask THEM whether they thought anything was leading, whether they saw any problems with the survey, and so forth.

Follow these guidelines and you’ll be finding out what kinds of products your customers want, when they’re satisfied and when they’re not, and much, much more.

And your bottom line will skyrocket.

To get a foolproof system for doing all this and more, get Turn Surveys Into Cash.

Think surveys can’t help you make big money as an affiliate?  Think again!  Putting a customer questionnaire in place and segmenting your list effectively can turn your affiliate marketing into a whole new–and much more profitable–game.

To make it clear how this works, let’s use an example.  Let’s suppose you’re an affiliate for an online marketer who is about to launch a coaching program and who has some cool, free blog software he’s giving away, prior to the launch.

You want to promote the software, and the program, so you might do something like this:

• You send a message out to your list, saying that you know some of them already have blogs. But for the customers who don’t, they should really get this cool, free software to get a blog going.
• You’ll follow that up later with a message telling them about the coaching program and urging the newer marketers to join.

Pretty standard affiliate marketing model, right?  You blast the message out to your list and hope the people for whom it’s relevant will read it and respond.

But let’s suppose you  had “insider information” that let you ramp your marketing up dramatically.

Let’s suppose you could look inside a magic box and know exactly who on your list didn’t have a blog yet, who really WANTED to put a blog in place.  This “inside information” let you distinguish the newer marketers from the “old hands.”

Well, if THAT were the case, your strategy for promoting the product could be very different–and far more effective.  That strategy would look something like this:

• You send a special message out to the newer folks on your list, the ones who don’t have a blog yet.
• You tell them that you know they’re just getting started and they don’t have a blog up yet and you know how tough that is–you’ve been there, yourself.
• You tell them that you really want to help them out, even though putting up blogs isn’t the focus of YOUR business, so you’re going to hook them up with a guy who has some great, free blog software.
• You tell them about the software and encourage them to take advantage of it.
• Then, a few days later, you follow that up with a message telling them about the coaching program, that will help them get their new blogs going and get their businesses up and running.

Now, can you imagine how much more effective this second strategy would be?

• You’re talking DIRECTLY to the folks who NEED the product you’re promoting, rather than sending a “generic” message to your list.

• You’re telling that you know their problem, understand their pain–because you do.  You took the time and trouble to find out who they are and what they need.

How can you do this?  How do you get a “magic box” with all this insider information?

It’s not magic at all.

• All you have to do is survey your list, to find out who they are, what they want, what they need.
• You use that information to segment your list.
• Top marketers do this all them time–that’s WHY they’re top marketers.  One top “guru” segments his list 36 different ways!
• Follow their lead, do what they do, and research shows that your conversion rates can go up by as much as 45%.

So get our questionnaire templates, which will let you get the information YOU need to segment your list, quickly and easily.

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.