Sales Safari

First, find your audience watering holes—the places where your audience hang out online.

Forums
Comments on blogs
Q&A websites
Reviews

Things we’re looking for:

Keywords and themes: We’re looking for shared vocabulary and jargon. “We need to understand them, and the way to do that is to understand how they speak.” Try to identify the keywords used over and over. They’ll rank higher for SEO.
Expression of preferences and emotion: Look for differences in what people want so you can decide how you want to segment the market in a natural way.
Pain: You’re looking for pain you can address as well as insight into the things your potential customers worry about.
Questions: What are the common questions people ask?
Influencers: Who’s who in the market?

Try to consolidate and re-express your customer’s issues into key takeaways. Once you’ve done that, you can take the pains your customers have experiences and see what solutions you can create to address them. Take the pain and reverse it, and then ask how your customers can get there.

The pain of “I don’t know” is really easy to solve with educational tools. This could be an ebook or a paid mailing list.