I agree with Ken about doing surveys of your customers. I haven't tried SurveyGizmo, but used SurveyMonkey and it worked great for me. The point of my survey was to find out how I could improve my newsletter.

I also agree--somewhat--with John. Focus groups are, in my opinion, pretty useless. I haven't done one for my own Internet Business, but I've done them at work. As John points out, you can't trust the results of "What do you think about...?" type questions.

And with surveys, even anonymous ones, people often answer in the way they think they SHOULD answer. So with a question like, "Do you recycle used motor oil?" they'll answer YES because they feel it's the right thing to do... even if they do NOT do it.

So you have to be careful about the questions you ask. And you need to start designing your questions with the end result in mind. Ask yourself, "What will I do with the results of this question?"

Where I work, for instance, an employee survey that asks "What kind of articles would you like to see in the employee newsletter?" seems reasonable at first. But when you think about the answers you're likely to get--Movie reviews, recipes, comics, classified ads, etc.--and you know those will NOT be included in the newsletter no matter how many employees want them, then asking that particular question is pointless.

So it takes a bit of thought to do an effective survey, but I feel the results are worth it. When I did a survey of my website newsletter subscribers, I got some very interesting and surprising results. This helped me to improve the newsletter, make more money, and also gave me ideas for future products. And it was all free.