It’s never easy to enter a new market or produce a
new product for a market when you don’t have a good
sense for the buying power.
Very few of us have the time or resources to flounder
around in a market or between unsuccessful products
until we find a winner – we need that first product
to be a winner.
When I created my first product to sell online, I was
still working 60-hour weeks and learned what sleep
deprivation was really like with a new born baby in
the house.
I remember the self-doubt that crept in many times
during those weeks as to whether I could even complete
my first product let alone whether it would sell.
It would have been difficult to have gone through all of
that and to have sold NOTHING – yet it happens over and
over again when it really doesn’t have to.
Now I can’t guarantee every product you develop will
turn into $30,000 in sales in your first year – but it
is certainly possible and is nearly impossible to not
make significant sales IF you become good at discovering
the buying power of your market BEFORE you spend time
developing products.
It’s NOT enough to know that you have a market and that
they have money — at least not for me…
I want to see evidence that they are spending money –
and lots of it.
So – I head over to my trusty Keyword Power Generator –
Wordtracker(I couldn’t live without it…) and do an hour or so of
keyword research.
First, you want to find severall hundred to several
thousand searches for related keywords – evidence that
people are searching for products like yours.
Second, you want to see a broad range of keywords that
people are searching for – all related, but not just a
high count on 1 but tens – even hundreds.
Third, you want to pop over to Overture’s View Bids
Tool: http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/and enter your terms to discover what advertisers are
paying for top placement in the Pay-Per-Click search
engines.
What you want to see is a high (higher than .50 is OK,
higher than $1 is quite good) on each of the top 3-5
listings, not just on the first listing.
What does this tell you?
Typically if advertising revenues are high, it means
customers are buying – otherwise advertising revenues
decline.
Even better, you have the links to click on that allow you
to find out excatly what types of products are selling.
For example – let’s take the keyword “resume writing”
We find TONS of demand – hundreds of thousands of searches
each month.
Next – we find pretty good advertising revenue, in the
$1.00-$2.00 per click for the top 5 listings.
Now, let’s see what is selling. Without an exception, what
people are paying for is a resume writing service.
So – if you thought of writing a book or creating a course,
there is NO evidence that there is a willing, paying market
to learn.
In fact, let’s do something interesting – let’s enter
“how to write a resume” as your keyword. A logical
search for someone looking for ebooks or other information
on the topic.
The results are brutal – less than .20 for the highest
priced bid on Overture.
Do you think out of the millions of PPC advertisers, that
such a low bid would occur if there were lots of HOT customers
for resume writing information?
Absolutely NOT!
In fact, I’ve known ebook writers who have been burned by
this very market – with this 15-minutes of research, they
could have saved thousands and months of work.
Don’t make the same mistake.
Jeff
