It's 1996, do you know where your clients are? - includes related articles on Web marketing, using CD-ROMs and reader service card management - Technology Information - Cover Story

Home Office Computing, March, 1996 by Sarah Stambler, Abby McLean

Researching Your Market

THE OLD WAY: Go to the library. Work your way through unwieldy reference tomes containing information that's even older than that bottle of salad dressing in the back of your refrigerator. Spend lots of time and money photocopying page after page of demographic data. File the pages in a drawer. Forget where you filed them. Go to the library again.

THE NEW WAY: Hop on the Internet and find the information you need, when you need it, right at your desk. This rich marketing research resource is largely free (except for online access). In addition, you can copy and paste the information you retrieve directly into your documents. What's more, online reference materials are updated far more frequently than their print siblings.

To start, use such basic tools as Yahoo! or Webcrawler's keyword search engine to locate sites and articles that are relevant to your research. A treasure trove of facts and figures is available free from national and state government sources as well as universities. You can jump to government sites, such as the U.S. Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/), directly from Yahoo! or your Internet provider's Web menu. Many federal government sites are overloaded during peak hours, so plan your research trips accordingly.

Sources like American Demographics magazine (http://www. marketingtools.com/) and Hoover's Online (http://www. hoovers.com/) would like to sell you their value-added services, but both sites also offer many valuable resources free of charge. American Demographics covers consumer trends and renders statistics as useful information. This site provides conferences, links to marketing magazines, and a catalog of data sources and books. Hoover's database of 9,300 companies is the backbone for links to news, corporate information, and related articles all over the Net. And don't miss SOHO Central, the Home Office Association of America's home page (http://www.hoaa.com/index.html). There you'll find selections such as full-text articles for 50 great SOHO start-up ideas and an incredible list of hotlinks to the best SOHO resources on the Net. Note that these are just starting points--you'll find innumerable sources of information for your particular business when you start pointing and clicking on the Net yourself

Gaining Exposure

THE OLD WAY: Pound the pavement in your neighborhood to try to drum up interest in your business.

THE NEW WAY: Set up a site on the World Wide Web and give prospects and clients--far-flung and local--a way to come to you. Though nobody knows for sure how many people are on the Internet (current estimates range from four to 30 million), the population is clearly on the upswing. But before you jump on the bandwagon, a goo way to determine if you can benefit from to use the Internet to find "birds of a feather." Search for newsgroups, mailing lists, and special interest groups related to your product or market. Subscribe to a few and follow the threads to keep up with subscribers' Internet experiences as well as current events and market trends. Once you've found enough like-minded souls, set up a home page and invite them over.