Researching Your Market

Although right now you are probably just thinking of writing an info-product to sell on TradeMe, it is a good idea to find out how much competition you have online, so you can take this into account before you start to create your product. While TradeMe is brilliant right now because there are only a handful of people selling their own information (mostly in the diet and make money niche), you do eventually want to move your product to a world wide market.

This is where the real money is to be made, so you want to evaluate it first.

When you move your product to selling online, you will assess your worldwide competition by going to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ – typing in your keyword to seeing how many results show up – and more importantly at this point, how many people are searching for your topic.

You want just enough people to have a market, but not so many people that the market is absolutely saturated. The ultimate find is one that has a high number of searches, but quite low competition of around 20,000 – 30,000 searches per month.

Any more than that and you may want to drill down a bit in your niche to find something closer to that range. You do this by clicking on the link provided in Wordtracker. So if you did a search for ‘diet,’ Wordtracker will return this:

3959 top 10 diets
3493 atkins diet
3114 south beach diet
2250 diets
1707 diet pills
1500 diet
… and so on
620 mediterranean diet

So instead of ‘diet’ you may want to target ‘Mediterranean diet.’ When you click on Mediterranean diet, this is what’s returned:

620 mediterranean diet
114 mediterranean diet menu
56 mediterranean diet recipes
51 modified mediterranean diet
31 recipes for mediterranean diet
29 copy of mediterranean diet

This means that there are 620 people per day searching the term ‘Mediterranean diet.’ Once you have established this, you then need to find out how much competition you have out there.

You do want to make sure that there’s a little competition, because no competition may mean that it’s not profitable at all. When you come across a niche that has no competition, this can mean one of two things:

1). Ooh, ooh! Massive untapped market!
2). Or more likely – it’s been tried and has been proven unsuccessful.

To find out, go to www.Google.com and type your niche’s main keyword into the search field. We’ll use the phrase ‘Mediterranean diet’ for this example. When the results come back, take a look on the right hand side where the sponsored results show up called Google AdWords. You want to make sure that there are at least some people selling information products on your topic.

The reason we use the sponsored results is because if people are paying money to advertise a product, they’re likely making money selling it. Those ads that you see at the top of Google AdWords are paying top dollar to have them there, anywhere from $1 per click to $15, depending on the niche.

You then want to know how many websites there were out there that contain this search phrase, this would be your competition. So you would do the following:

Type your niche into Google in quotes: “Mediterranean diet”

Google came back with:

Results 1 – 10 of about 1,640,000 for “Mediterranean diet.”

This is a lot of websites for a new person to compete against when creating a website to promote the Mediterranean Diet. If you were thinking of taking your info-product online after you have learnt all you need to know about sales through TradeMe, it would be difficult for a beginner to compete with seriously knowledgeable internet marketers in this niche.

It is likely you would clean up on TradeMe with virtually no competition, but in the big bad internet world, this key phrase would be swallowed up. Most desperate topics will be around 90,000 – 120,000 web pages, this is around about where you want to be to start with for a beginner.

I don’t want to put you off anything at all though, because with good copy and a bit of work, you can get up the search engines for what is called ‘long tail’ key phrases. These are the search phrases containing 5-6 words rather than 1-2. The search phrase ‘head lice’ returns around 1.6 million web pages as well, but with a well written sales page (that you will soon get into) you can do well through long tail phrases. It will take more work to get to the top of Google with your key phrase, but it is not impossible. I am now on page 2 of http://www.Google.com.au for the key phrase ‘head lice’ and number one on http://www.Google.co.nz.

I do suggest you take the worldwide market into account first. You don’t always want to be selling on just TradeMe, especially if one of your goals is travel.