[This is the seventh in a series of posts about entrepreneurship as a way to protect your income in a bad economy.]
When you’re selling for someone else, you have to sell whatever product or service your company provides. But when you’re working for yourself, you can sell whatever you want. The best things to sell are the ones your market wants to buy.
You have two ways to know what your market wants to buy:
- You can research what they’re already buying.
- You can ask them what they need and want.
You can see what people are already buying by viewing the sales of different kinds of items on Amazon.com, eBay, Clickbank and other sites.
Amazon.com Tells You What Topics People Find Interesting
Amazon.com tells you the rank of an item within its product category. For example, the book Every Landlord’s Tax Deduction Guide ranks 3,697 in the book category at the time of this writing. (When you go to the Amazon page for a book title, look under the section heading Product Details along the left-hand side of the page.)
Amazon doesn’t tell you how many units this title sells. But it shows you that the topic is a lot more interesting to its book buyers public than The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, which won a Pulitzer prize. It which ranks 9,092 in sales.
Amazon.com also provides a list of its 100 hottest book titles.
eBay Puts Your Finger on the Pulse of the Market for All Kinds of Products
On eBay you can go to a section called eBay Pulse, which tells you the big current sales trends. It also tells you which items are being most widely watched. Across all categories, for example, Wii and Wii-related products rank number one. For the category “computers and networking,” laptops rank number one.
eBay also lists more than 700 “Neighborhoods,” or gathering places for people with similar interests. Coffee lovers form a neighborhood with about 12,000 members. Dog lovers (with about 10,000 neighbors) far outrank cat lovers (with about 5,400).
You can also determine relative levels of interest and enthusiasm by visiting eBay Groups, Discussion Boards and Chat Rooms.
You should be careful how you interpret these relative rankings. Even so, they’re pretty good indicators of broad levels of interest.
Whether or not you ever want to sell on eBay, it’s a tremendous resource for researching what people are buying
Clickbank Shows Which Digital Products are Hot
Clickbank is a clearinghouse site for people who either publish or want to sell digital products such as eBooks, software, games, digital audio, digital video, etc. If you go to site and click on the tab Promote Products, you can search Clickbank’s product offerings by category.
For example, if you search the category “Health and Fitness,” you’ll see more than 800 products on topics ranging from arthritis to weight loss. The products appear in declining order of popularity.
Each listing tells you how much the product sells for and how much the publisher will pay you for selling it.
Survey Your Market
The next general way to learn what your market wants and needs is to ask it directly. You can do this by setting up a survey page on the Web and then drive traffic toward it through articles, blog posts, pay-per-click advertising and a variety of other methods. When visitors arrive on the page, you offer them a desirable reward for taking a few moments to fill out a survey.
The survey asks one to seven questions about what they were looking for when they searched on a key word or phrase that brought them to the site.
You can run surveys and compile their results by using any of several survey-management software products that are easily available at low cost.
While there’s more to it than we’ve covered here, this is the high-level overview of the approach.
The next step is to find sources for the products or services that meet the needs and wants your market has identified.
More on that in the next post.
Stay fresh.
– Scott Silverback