Market Research – Know where you are going before you start!

Many of us have entertained the thought of starting an online business at some point during our lives. But only a surprisingly small portion actually does put effort into creating a viable online business. Most of us simply get stuck on the question of how to find something that can be sold online and where to find it.
The truth of the matter is much like starting a regular business most good ideas stem from a passion or a skill we may have. Attempting to market a product that we don”t have knowledge about or isn”t something we are willing to invest a lot of time in is almost destined to fail. Even an online business is still a business and as a result requires a lot of hours especially in the start-up phase. Spending hours and hours on a project that you don”t particularly enjoy will often cause a significant amount of frustration.
For those of you still searching the Internet for a good niche market to start an online business in it is time to sit down for a good old brainstorming session. Take a good look at your life, your hobbies and even the resume you used to get your last job. By thoroughly analyzing your life it is possible to come up with a whole listing of potential marketing areas that can range from, arts and crafts, to dog training and fitness.
Even the most uncreative amongst us can muster a short list of interests, and using this list, we can start researching the market. After all we want to know whether we can make money from of our hobbies and skills.
In order to do this we can use any number of online research tools to determine how big the market is we”re working in, how many potential customers are out there and who the competition is.
If your market research shows disappointing results in any of these fields then you should seriously consider a different project. Even when it comes to something relatively simple as marketing affiliate programs, not knowing what the competition can do and how many customers you can expect will most likely lead to an (un-)healthy loss of money.
WordTracker and overture”s search term suggestion tool can give a clear insight in what people are looking for in the world”s most popular online search engines today. Entering a specific word, known as a keyword, into WordTracker will generate a list of how often people have looked for this particular keyword. This allows you to quickly see if people are interested in what you might have to offer and also allows you to find other keywords in your area of interest.
Once you have found a few keywords that are high in demand try searching for them and see how many results are listed. Obviously the fewer results that are listed the less competition you will have on your market which is definitely a big plus when starting an online business.
Finally it is important to look into where your market segment is heading. If you”re interested in selling CD’s then maybe the fact should be considered that CD’s are slowly but surely being replaced by DVD’s and this will most likely affect your online business considerably in the future.
Making sure that there is sufficient demand will help alleviate potential income problems (along with frustration!) and is well worth the few hours’ worth of researching the future of your potential market segment.