Deciding What To Sell Online (Podcast)
The Story: One of the first steps in creating online businesses is deciding what to sell.
How do you do that?
The Point: There is a “magic trick” that will allow you to always know what to sell from your website.
The Resource: AskDatabase
3 Ways To Decide What To Sell Online
1. Ask your customers what they want to buy.
2. Look for things you’re passionate about and springboard from there.
3. What are you good at — what’s easy for you but difficult for others?
Click for the Podcast Audio:
IMHO it is also very important to do at least a cursory objective reality check of the market demand.
Keywords - What keywords best describe your proposed product. Make a short list of terms related to the product.
Trends - Check what kind of search trends there are for your keywords at
http://www.google.com/trends .
If they flat line at zero, they are dead.
Competition - Do a Google search for each keyword. If you Google a multi word phrase use quotation marks to eliminate unrelated results. How many sponsored ads there?
Competition is GOOD.
Competition indicates money is there to be had.
You don’t have to do a full blown search engine optimization keyword evaluation. Just do a few of the main keywords to evaluate if that niche is worth spending marketing efforts on.
Just because you build something
doesn’t mean they’ll come.
Ray,
Excellent advice, as always. Seemingly obvious but few people bother to ask their customers or potential customers what they want. Every time I’ve conducted a survey for either myself or clients it’s always been well worthwhile.
Kevin Francis
Hey Ray,
I think it’s important to add that whatever your “niche” or industry is, you also need to stay on top of current trends, changes in your market and the latest news that could affect your clients or customers as well.
For example, how many business owners were affected by the last postal rate increase? For many of my clients, it’s changed the way they’re sending direct mail. I spent some time looking for some alternative suggestions for my clients - ways they could still reach their target markets while saving money - or increasing their ROI.
So my suggestion for our readers is: Think about what issues, news or changes in the market is affecting or going to affect your clients? What kind of ripple effect will that have? And how can your product or service help them to overcome these obstacles and achieve their goals?
I like the idea of making the list of things that I am good at and things that I am passionate about. In addition submitting the questions to friends and compiling responses from both surveys.
The above tips can help me in my own online business. Thanks, Ray!