Marketing begins with research. Every person or company out there that has achieved success in web marketing has done some amount of market research long before the first sale was ever made.

Your market is not a set of cold numbers that you can dispassionately experiment with. It’s a group of people sharing common interests, opinions, and buying preferences. Depending on the size of your company, you can either do research on your own or hire an army of market research firms to find out what your market really wants. Only when you have a firm and highly specific idea of what your market is looking for, should you go into the next step of product development.

No research, no marketing

This is actually where many of us get it wrong. We spend a great deal of time and money to develop a product, write a book, or launch a site – only to find out that no one, save your mom and girlfriend, wants to use that widget, or read your book, or visit your site. Not to belabor the point, but market research should come before anything else.

If you’re thinking of starting your internet business, but have no clear idea about what to sell at the moment, don’t worry, we’ll soon find a profitable niche for you. Again, a niche is a group of people sharing common interests, opinions, buying preferences, age, or problem – whatever it is that sets this group of persons APART from the general population. The narrower and more defined these interests are, the better for you.

Focus on your passions

Some people suggest that you focus your efforts on things that you’re interested in and passionate about. What is it that you really enjoy doing? Fishing? Golf? Photography?

The reasoning behind this is that, unless you have the means and systems in place to outsource everything, it would take a great deal of your time and energy to accomplish the tasks ahead. And, the surest way to maintain your enthusiasm for the project, is to focus on things or activities that you love doing, in the first place.

The truth is, you’ll have a better than fighting chance to succeed  in ANY market for as long as you’re willing to do your homework and find out, from the very start, what it is that your market really wants.

So, where do you find your market? Here are a few places you’d really want to look into:

Magazine subscriptions

Why magazine subscriptions? The magazine publishing industry is a hotly contested and highly-competitive environment. Only the toughest survive here. These magazines have perfected the art of defining their market and by considering the top 100 most subscribed-to magazines in your niche market selection, you’re basically leveraging – to your advantage – the market research they’ve already conducted.

Browse through the top 100 best selling magazines in Amazon. See which one stands out or is related closely to your areas of interest. You can also visit other sites like Magazine.com and repeat the brainstorming process until you’ve come up with a list of possible niches you might want to explore further.

How-To Sites

More and more people are flocking to online how-to sites like eHow.com and Dummies.com to find how-to or do-it-yourself (DIY) information. If you’re an expert at something, or if you’re planning to sell ebooks online, these are the places you should go to. People here are basically telling you what kind of information they want and are willing to pay for. Again, our goal is to find topics or niches that have the highest demands, so it’s best to search for the most popular articles and most “… for Dummies” books in these sites.

Shopping sites

These are places where people go to with their credit cards on hand, ready to make online purchases. It’s an essential stop in your market research – the results you’ll get from looking at eBay Pulse or Shopping.com’s Consumer Demand Index are highly product-specific and accurate. These sites actually record transactions as they occur online and rate products  accordingly. This is where the market tells you, “Hey, this is what we want to spend our money on.” As a soon-to-be internet mogul, you should listen.

Trends sites

If you’ll take a look at Google Trends, you’ll see that the trending topics or searches are being updated constantly. This is mostly news-driven and rates the most popular search terms people are currently using worldwide on Google. Yahoo Buzz and Lycos Top 50 are similar search engine-based services giving you an idea what the current hot items or topics are. Since you can actually obtain the trend statistics on any given search topic or keyword going back several months or years, you can see which ones are popular throughout the year and which ones are seasonal – providing you with an idea on when to conduct specific marketing campaigns for best results.

Now that you’ve finished visiting these sites and compiling your list of possible niches to market to, you’re ready for the next step in market research. This time we’re going to drill down to specifics and validate the items in your list to see if they’re worth pursuing. We will be covering that (keywords research) in our next post on marketing.

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