Market Research Determines Your Product Development 2

Sell Products or Markets?

Do you have an easily targeted niche? If not you are making a mistake. The most important thing to do when marketing online is to know who your prospects are and not to misjudge where they exists. Many people start with a hot product to sell first and not with the marketplace. This is not “always” a mistake and finding hot products on Click Bank and the like can be easier to target than reinventing the wheel.

The problem most people have with this is: To really know your prospective buyers of this hot product you need to locate them and learn how to target and approach them appropriately. You see just because the top affiliate marketer selling the number one e-book from Click Bank is selling 100 copies a day doesn’t mean you will. That marketer has either been able to study his prospective niche and find out how to approach them or he has found a stream of pay per click keywords that are converting for that particular product. In either case he has found a way to profit with that e-book from specific segments of markets.

They either know something you don’t or they spent money to find out who would buy the book. All this talk abounding about how easy it is to make money with pay per click advertising is really misleading. Before you make money with pay per click you need to have a fool proof system for designing campaigns and selecting markets. That is what this lesson is all about and in it we are going to examine several methods for selecting a marketplace and products to sell to that niche. These methods are very good tried and tested compasses.

We call them compasses because they will point you in a pretty precise direction to profits in a market, but make no mistake there are really not tons of easy targets out there. Uncovering a profit will almost always take some trial and error.

The biggest mistake people make is finding the product first and then marketing it. This is the biggest mistake marketers make today rather than selecting a marketplace first and feeding it what it wants they always become captivated by the idea of oh if I sold this or that I would make a fortune. Well that is not how it works and if you approach marketing that way you will probably lose a lot of money and time. Do not misunderstand what this means…..if you have a passion for something that is where your research should begin…to see if there is a profitable niche there.

There are two basic models in niche marketing: Audience Based versus Product Based. One model takes the audience into consideration first, while the other takes the product into consideration first. The truth is both of these models can yield success, but an audience based model has a much higher chance of succeeding and will always allow you to know your niche better.

Why is this so? Because people don’t go online just to buy things, but are usually looking for information and solutions. The audience based model always considers what the prospective traffic from a marketplace segment wants and doesn’t just sell the hottest selling product without taking the market’s temperature.

The product based model relies on the idea that if you want to get into profit quickly you should sell what people are already buying. There’s plenty of data out there about what sells online such as going to Click Bank and finding out what the hottest items are selling in a niche or looking at the top sellers on eBay. Your job is to identify the gaps in the market, and build your niche around them. It is hard to identify these gaps if you are basing your business model around one product only.

niches within markets are everywhere but, the product based model spins off existing markets and trends. The problem is it is not really based on finding the prospects and offering them what they want. The audience based model takes subject matter, special interests and information into account first.

You begin by identifying a broad industry like health or car racing then drill down into sub themes like varicose veins or Nascar. Then you dig further into the sub themes and you let the product come to you. Yes this sounds weird but the niche will reveal what products it wants to you. You just need to start off with no preconceived ideas about what to sell. You won’t have a specific product in mind and only an audience you want to target.

You will see when you do your marketing research your target audience will reveal what they want and this information will allow you to create your product. The best thing about the audience based model is that you can create whole new markets out of thin air.

Market Research Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

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