Here’s the “Quick Start Guide” that we’re including with our new product. It will give you a great overview of the awesome system that will let you put surveys to work making money for your business, with a minimal investment of time and money.  To get the system, go here.

We’ve been getting LOTS of great questions about how to use surveys to make money in this recession (and if you haven’t posted yours yet go here to post yours; you’ll get 20 free videos on using surveys in your business, plus a tour of our new product!)

Here’s one of the questions you asked:

What’s the most cost effective source of survey respondents if you don’t already have a list? What factors do you need to consider before doing a survey so that you know it’s going to be a worthwhile thing for you do do?

And here’s our answer:

Hi David,

Great question!

As for the Return on Investment (ROI) on surveys, as long as you do surveys well, it’s huge. To be honest, I’ve had people pay me $10,000 to conduct a survey and they were THRILLED with the results. Think about it:

• What’s it worth to create a product?
• To get 100 testimonials to put on your website?
• To produce statistical proof—hard data—that your products and services work?
• To generate referrals or produce original research you can use in press releases or to create buzz in social media? So is it worth it?
• I’d say I’ve never seen a case when it wasn’t.

But here’s the thing: You can do surveys REALLY inexpensively.

• We’re about to put out a product that will let you design a complete survey system for your business, create your customer profile surveys, with templates and step-by-step videos to do everything you need, for LESS than $600. That’s about what 2 hours of my time would cost for consulting!

For the second part of your question:

How to you get respondents if you don’t have a list?

Let’s make the question a little broader . . . How do you get information you can use to make money, if you don’t have a list?

The first step is to figure out exactly what you’re trying to do.

Do you have a clear picture of your target market? That’s always the first step, whether you’re doing a survey or not. If you don’t have that clarified, then your first step is to describe that market very clearly.

• Who are they?
• What are their characteristics—are they male or female?
• How old are they? What do they do for a living?
• How much money do they make?

Once you know who your target market is, then the next step is to look for some information that’s already out there—that’s free data.

• There are enormous sources of data out there, from the census bureau to the Pew Trust to data archives. One of the things we’re doing in MySurveyExpert is showing people where to find these sorts of data and how to use them.

• We’re also going to be collecting data IN the MySurveyExpert community, building aggregate data that online marketers in our community can use. That will be another source of what we call secondary data, or data someone else collected (which means you didn’t have to do the work and spend the $$ yourself). And these will be the first aggregate data of this sort collected inside the online marketing space.

If you want to collect data yourself and you don’t have a list, sources like these can help a lot. But you shouldn’t stop there. Look around in your niche—could you form a partnership with another marketer and collect data from his or her list?

If you’re putting together a product that isn’t a direct competitor of theirs and you can share the data, they might be willing. If you think this way, you can probably come up with lots of ways to get information.

Another way to start to get information is to do just what we did, put up a Traffic Geyser lead page (you can get an account here).

• You can use video and other forms of social media to drive traffic to that lead page; the answers to the questions will start to give you information about what your market wants to know.
• From that, you can build a list AND create your first product!

Hope this helps! Check out the rest of the blog for more info.

So you’ve gone and done it–you sent out a market research questionnaire, a customer satisfaction questionnaire, or some other sort of survey.  Now you have these Survey Monkey data staring at you and you have NO earthly idea what to do with them.

Don’t despair, there IS a way to make sense of all this.

And if you do your job well, the results will be amazing.  One of my clients said recently that interpreting survey data on her customers was like focusing a camera lens, so that she now had a crystal-clear image.

How do YOU get that crystal-clear image?

The simple fact is that the better job you did of WRITING the survey and planning the analysis, the easier the job of INTERPRETING the survey data will be. More about that later.

But for the moment, let’s assume you wrote a stellar survey and let’s think about how best to make the most of the results.

Let’s break it down into five simple steps:

First, look at the overall data and response. Here are some of the questions you should ask in this step:

• How many people completed the survey?
• How does that compare to the target group–the number of people on your e-mail list, for example?
• What was the response rate?  (To figure this out, just take the number of people who completed the survey and divide that by the number who opened the survey invitation).
• What was the average amount of time that people spent taking the survey (in other words, did people take it seriously or did they seem to fly through the questions)?
• Who responded–what does the breakdown look like, in terms of age, gender, type of business, etc?  How well does it represent your target group (for example, your customer base or e-mail list)?

Second, look at the answers to your key questions or “outcomes” in the survey. If this is a product creation survey, for example, what % of the respondents said they’re very interested or somewhat interested in the product–and what % said they’re not interested AT ALL?  Of those who are interested in the product, what kinds of things do they want to see in the product?  How would they like the product delivered?  What are they willing to pay for it?

Third, see how those things “break” by demographic characteristics. Are men more interested in the product than women?  Are “newbies” more or less interested than people who’ve been in business longer?  This starts to give you a good sense of who’s most likely to buy the product and at whom you need to target it.

Fourth, what do the open-ended questions tell you? Ideally, your survey should rely mostly on closed-ended questions, because these are the easiest for your customers to answer and also the easiest to analyze.  But it’s good to include a few open-ended questions–to pick up on the nuances and meaning that closed-ended questions miss, to get the “language” your customers are using, and to pick up some things you might not have captured with your closed-ended categories.  Read through those comments, first looking for themes in the comments, then looking for how widespread those themes are, and finally summarizing what you’ve learned from these questions.

Fifth, draw up your “action items.” Based on the results, compile your “to do” list.

• If it seems clear that there’s strong interest in the product you’re creating, that’s great.  Draw together everything you can to draw your “road map” for creating the product–and then follow that map.
• Chances are you also learned some things about your customers you didn’t know.  Make a list of those things and particularly note things you want to explore further in future surveys.
• Note the things that don’t seem to make sense, any things in the results that have you “scratching your head.”  These are things you might want to explore on your blog or even in conversations with some of the survey respondents (you can also select respondents with the “interesting” or “unexpected” answers and offer them a free report or a discount coupon in exchange for talking with you).

After you’ve gone through these steps, you should have good information that you can put to work in your business.  You’ll be amazed at the wealth of data that even a short survey can provide and the many ways in which you can use them.

In addition to interpreting the survey data, you should also note things you learned from doing the survey:  things you learned about writing the survey, lessons from the process of administering it, things you’d do differently next time.

And don’t forget to look carefully at your customers’ comments and feedback about the survey.  It’s always a good idea to include an open-ended question, at the end, that lets customers tell you what they liked and what they didn’t.

You can expect that a few customers will always say that the survey is too long or they disliked something about it.  But if you find large numbers of people saying those things, or complaining about a particular question, you should certainly consider that when you design your NEXT survey.

Follow these steps to interpreting survey data and you’ll begin to get inside your customers’ heads in a way you never imagined possible.  And once you do that, your profits will explode.