4 effective methods to do Market Research and expose a Profitable Niche for Free

by admin on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 | No Comments

Ambitious entrepreneurs and small business owners are often misguided or misled upon the topic by how to in good order conduct market research that reveals a profitable niche.

The route most unsuspecting entrepreneurs take is by ending up at keyword tool or database to begin their search.

The principal keyword databases that are currently available to the general public simply give search figures a limited amount of data that accounts for 1% – 2% of the real searches people do around the entire worldwide. They can only predict (emphasis added) the actual majority of searches that are being done on the big five search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com which hold 97%-98% of the keyword data.

Most significantly, keyword research only displays what keyword phrases people are using in the search engines to look for answers, not what people in reality buy on the internet. Only because a group of people search for precise terms or brand names does not mean that’s what they buy. That is a key distinction many entrepreneurs and business owners incline to gloss over.

When looking for a fruitful niche marketplace, your principal focus should be searching proof of a group of hungry and rabid buyers that want to exchange their money for a service or product (information, physical or digital). Without this essential qualifier, you may have the greatest product in the world, but you may be missing a market to sell it to.

This article will present a number of important sources to look at which will give you a running start to expose a fruitful marketplace exists before you go for the gold and put all your resources into a website, product creation or expenditures toward some sort of online property.

When you establish that you have located a market that carries signs of adequate commerce moving through it, you then have a worthy reason to look further into a keyword research service to find out what keyword phrases people use to find the market you have selected.

Let’s begin looking at how to identify a profitable market.

MAGAZINES

One of the best methods to find signs of a truly profitable marketplace is searching a magazine in that industry. If a publisher has enough money to print and diffuse a full color magazine, there are most likely advertisers that endorse the funding of the magazine’s ability to circulate all the copies which most likely means there are sales being made by those advertisers.

Instantly, this may bring you to question whether there is too much competition in a marketplace with so many advertisers selling in a magazine.

In fact, it’s a neat sign to have competition which means there is an sufficient amount of customers to sell to and a percentage of a sizable pie to be had in that marketplace. If there is very little competition, you may (1) not have adequate product being sold in that space; or (2) not have a marketplace to begin with. The larger the competition is, the larger the piece of revenues you will be able to catch.

Without being forced to leave your seat, you can hop on over to Magazines.com and looking through the number of different categories to find a profitable topic or industry in which to start an online business.

One of the things you’ll want to focus in on is the number of subscribers each magazine has and how long the magazine has been in print for stability purposes.

Make a list of magazines you want to look into and then go hunting for them at one of those large dedicated newsstands that covers just about every magazine on every topic.

To get a better look at what people are buying in the World Wide Web, you will need to finally decide whether you wish to represent physical or digital products.

PHYSICAL PRODUCTS

There are two incredibly large marketplaces that are massively trafficked, move a lot of product and are great places to find what people are really buying.

Let’s start with the first large marketplace…

eBay

At eBay, you can look through a list of the most popular products people are buying through and through auctions or from eBay stores that vendors have setup. To see a visual path on how to locate the most popular products, please use the reference below to view the extended version of this article.

Amazon.com

Another really large marketplace is Amazon and it’s not only for books. You can find just about any product and name brand that is a mover and shaker. Again, look at the most popular products in those categories that capture your attention.

DIGITAL PRODUCTS

If you wish to sell products of the digital nature which does not require inventory and which generally carries high profit margins for affiliates, you’ll want to check out the Clickbank digital marketplace that rates product sales from highest to lowest sellers in each category.

Simply browse through categories at Clickbank.com and you’ll at once find the top sellers of digital info products, software and subscription services which are placed right at the top listings.

Once you gather the adequate market research, you can do one of the following:

• Create an online store that ships out physical products and merchandise (requires inventory)
• Sell merchandise through eBay auctions or their online stores (requires inventory)
• Create a site that represents vendors as an affiliate (requires no inventory)
• Create your own product, service or software for a digital product (requires no inventory)

Making used at least two of the four places above, you can be guaranteed that you have conducted proper market research to reveal “proof positive” what people are buying and, thus, a profitable niche market.

You can then quickly build out a non-complex site with a simple product offering, find some low cost keywords to use in a Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click campaign with a minimal spend of $50 to test the market and see if you have a winner.

If the first test results pan out, meaning that you pulled a profit from your test, you can invest more energies, conduct more extensive keyword research and expend more advertising dollars. If the test results do not pan out, find another market until something sticks.

I believe this should fortify you with enough information to get you moving toward finding a market with limitless revenues.