We all know that we SHOULD survey our current or potential customers – after all it’s a goldmine of information that we can use to shape our products and services. I recently surveyed the members of Creating Fame Classroom and was actually quite surprised by the parts of the program that they valued the most (which we now know to put more focus on). The bottom line is that surveying is a valuable tool but one that can be completely overwhelming – which is why this week I’m asking you to tackle it head on!

First write out a simple, 5-10 question survey that doesn’t take much time to answer. The survey should contain no more than 3 questions that require paragraph answers.

There are two free tools that I love for conducting surveys – SurveyMonkey and Google Docs . Google Docs is more flexible as it doesn’t have a limit on the number or type of questions, but it doesn’t have the fancy reporting abilities that Survey Monkey has. Google Docs will just store all of your data in a spreadsheet, then its up to you to analyze and display the data. (For example, if you want to see your results in a pie chart you’ll need to know how to create it yourself just like you would in excel.)

SurveyMonkey is pretty self-explanatory. Just sign up for an account and they’ll walk you through the process of creating your survey. The end result is a link that you can email out to your customers. Google Docs can be a little trickier, and you have the option of either linking to your survey or embedding it right on your own site. This great video from Erica.biz explains all the ins and outs of setting up a google doc survey.

So the basic structure is: write out your survey, put it into a survey tool, then send out the final survey link using email and/or social media. Even if you only get a few responses, you’ll uncover some juicy information about your audience!