One of the most important skills that any serious internet marketer must master is market research techniques.
Amateur marketers create or promote products that they think would sell well, without having any actual concrete proof that it should be profitable. It doesn't matter if you think it will sell, it is what the market thinks of a particular product or a service that is important.
With the internet available these days, we have numerous options to use market research techniques to discover what are the hottest trends and in demand products.
The idea is to find markets that have a large demand, but a limited supply that you can exploit (in an ethical way of course).
Here are five highly useful market research techniques to find hot niches, including some direct links:
1. Trends & Market Analysis Tools
Just like investors read graphs and charts to work out when to buy and sell certain stocks, internet marketers can also use this type of information to see what people are currently interested in.
The obvious example is search engine data, which measures how many people are searching each day for certain keyword phrases.
Here are some links to do research on trends and market analysis:
2. Answers, “How To” and Self Help
Answer sites are extremely underrated for market research, with a lot of people believing that they are not worth the effort.
This is far from the case, as you can easily search for the most popular types of questions on these sites, and then create products based around them. And by participating on the sites by answering some of the questions, you can often recommend solutions which include your own products or affiliate links.
The people asking the questions will be extremely grateful for answers and solutions to their problems.
And of top of that you are also able to put a signature link on some of the answer sites with a back link to your website.
You can check out the Answer & "How To" sites below:
3. “Idea Generators”
Just as the name suggests these are the places that you would visit primarily to get some fresh ideas on what might be a viable and untapped market.
These sort of sites are not the usual places that people look to do market research, but they are well worth investigating.
Alexa Top 500 Movers and Shakers
4. Directories
Directories can be used to discover and explore certain categories/niches/industries and are a quick and easy way to check on what the competition is up to.
Only bother with high quality directories that are edited by humans such as the following:
5. Web 2.0 Sites
Web 2.0 sites allow users to publish content onto their sites with easy to use website builders and widgets.
Some of these sites allow you to look up categories and see which pages are currently the most popular for each section.
This is a great way to see what is popular right now.
The best two sites that I know about for this are the following:
Now it is time for the keyword research
Once you used these market research techniques thoroughly and jotted down some good ideas, it is time to actually see the real numbers by doing some thorough keyword research.
You will find that by doing a combination of market research and keyword research, you will be able to pick out the niches that are worth spending your time on.
If you can learn how to master both market research techniques and keyword research techniques, you will save yourself a lot of time, money and energy chasing niches that were never going to be profitable.
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