SolveYourProblem
Article Series:
Niche Marketing Opportunities
How
To Research Your Niche Product Idea
by Jeff Cohen
The fundamental mistake made by many niche
marketers is they create products based on what they think
people want to buy. The correct way of deciding what niche
product to create, is to find out what people are actually
buying at the moment.
Here are five
ways of discovering ideas for niche products which you can sell to make money:
1.
Use Forums
With the rapid expansion of the internet, forums (or discussion
groups or bulletin boards as they are also called) have proliferated.
There are forums hosted all over the internet based on practically
every theme imaginable.
Forums are websites where like minded people gather to discuss
all sorts of issues pertaining to the theme of the forum. Some
of the well moderated forums are extremely active and a good
place to conduct research.
When it comes to finding ideas for niche products, you need
to use the search engines to locate a number of forums on the
theme you are interested in. For example, if you're interested
in needlepoint, you could enter needlepoint+bulletin board
into the search engine.
Visit each forum and find out what questions people are asking.
In addition, find out how many times similar questions are
asked. The more frequently a question is asked across a number
of forums, the more likely you have found a topic for your
next niche product or website.
2.
Visit Your Local Book Store
If you are completely stumped for ideas, a visit to your local
book or magazine store is in order. People who are keen on
a hobby almost always subscribe to related magazines, and if
they buy magazines there's a good chance they will buy niche
products.
Your task is to discover what magazines are being sold and
how quickly they move. It is best to visit a number of stores
and compare the common magazines sold in all of them. Try to
find out from the sales assistants how many copies they sell
of the popular magazines you have identified.
A magazine sold in great number by each store, month after
month, is a sure sign of a profitable niche.
3.
Investigate eBay
eBay is one of the biggest, if not the biggest single market
place on the planet. Millions of people buy a gigantic range
of products month after month.
Go to eBay.com and scroll down the left hand
menu, click on "All
Categories" and scroll down to the bottom of the page
that opens in your browser until you get to the section titled "Other
Ways to Browse". Included in that section are four sub-sections,
each being ways to conduct your research:
i) eBay Keywords (popular terms being searched for)
ii) Common Searches
iii) eBay Pulse (a daily snapshot of current trends)
iv) Popular Products
From these four you will be able to spot a multitude of popular
ideas for your next niche product.
4.
Survey Your Website Visitors
If you have an existing website which receives a fair bit
of traffic, you can survey that traffic using a popup. In order
to entice people into taking the survey you will have to offer
some kind of reward. You could even offer extra rewards for
people who refer others to your survey.
Normally any web survey you conduct would have to be of a
similar theme to your website, but it is possible to conduct
a survey to find out your visitor's interests and whether they
would be prepared to spend any money on their interest.
They key is to ask simple questions in a manner
that won't lead your respondents to any particular answer.
When designing
your survey, keep in mind you will have to analyze the data
and draw conclusions from it. This means keeping your questions "on
topic".
The simplest surveys to analyze are those constructed
with multiple choice questions. The disadvantage of this
is you
don't know for sure that the answers are absolute or close
(i.e. "second best").
5.
Survey Your eMail List
If you have your own email list, you could survey them to
find out what problems they are currently facing, or what interests
they have. People on your email list will tend to answer more
truthfully because there is a degree of trust between you and
them.
This degree of trust not withstanding, you will still have
to offer an incentive for your subscribers to take the survey.
Design your survey the same as you would for a popup on your
website. # # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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