If you want to know why some people have consistent success with their online business ideas, while other seemingly good ideas fail miserably, the answer is research.
When you thoroughly research any online business ideas, before doing anything else, you increase the likelihood of their success by magnitudes. You absolutely must know that there is a demand for your product in order to ensure success at the outset and avoid putting money into an internet marketing venture which really has little or no chance of being successful.
If you were wanting to open a physical retail business, I'm sure that you would research the local area, find out what other businesses and competition there was, likely customer footfall etc and create a workable business plan, before investing in premises and stock and other set up costs. And, although the initial asset costs aren't as great. the same research is required for setting up a new online marketing business.
The reason for stressing this seemingly obvious fact, is that it's all too easy to get very enthusiastic about a new internet marketing business idea and then become somewhat blinkered as to it's true potential. This enthusiasm, or passion, is an essential part of creating a successful product, but it needs to be balanced with the two other keys to success, potential and profit.
If the results show that there is no significant potential market, then you can be sure that there is no significant profit, which means that, at best, you will be running your online business as a hobby and possibly an expensive hobby at that.
And this is where you have to be prepared to be totally objective when reviewing the results of your research. No matter how much you're impressed with your initial idea, or how much you think it should be successful, if the research suggests that it's unlikely to succeed, you need to avoid being so personally involved that you press on regardless. This always leads to wasting time, effort and money.
However, if you undertake the research and view the results completely objectively, you'll be taking the first step to joining the growing band of successful internet marketing entrepreneurs.
So, if you've got an online business idea that appeals to you and you want to find out if it has potential and is likely to make a profit, where do you start. Well, when you know what your market wants to buy, then you can sell them what they want. Most of all, people want something to fill a need and a good place to find out what they need is from forums and other social networking sites where people are asking questions and looking for answers.
If you find lots of questions that would be addressed by your intended product, then you're off to a good start. At the same time, do your own online search for similar products by typing a suitable product description into Google, and looking for a similar product appearing in the paid ads in the right hand side bar. If you find some there, and at least two is good, then you'll know that this is a market where people are already buying. A word of caution here, if you don't find any similar products, don't take this as a sign of an untapped market. It probably means that it's been tried and wasn't worth the effort.
The next place to start looking for confirmation of your product's saleability is a general keyword search. Imagine what your prospective customer will be looking for and what he or she will type into their search engine box. Make a note of half a dozen variations and use the various keyword tool sites available online to find out if people are searching for these terms. Two of the most useful free keyword tools are Freekeywords.Wordtracker.com and the keywords tool at Google AdWords.
Google have the lion's share of the search market and Wordtracker have a significant chunk of that remaining, so, based on the keywords and phrases that you come up with, using these two keyword tools together, will give you a good idea of the potential of any online business ideas. Just note that the Google results are searches per month and Wordtracker's are searches per day.
Another good place to check out the size of the general market for your product is YouTube. Around half of search engine results are now video based and YouTube is the foremost video service. So if you search in YouTube with keyword topics relevant to your product, you should return some useful results. The most significant thing will be the total number of views. Allowing for the time that the video has been posted, this figure will confirm whether the your online business ideas are generally popular and, also whether you should include your own video as part of your marketing campaign.
These online investigations will give you the best indication of the market and potential of your product idea. Additionally, if your product is in eBook format, you can get still more validation from sites like Clickbank.com, which publish ebooks for affiliates to sell. Just look for a similar product and check out the its sales statistics to confirm that it's popular.
And, it's easy to check out all the magazines and periodicals in the newsagents when you're buying your paper. Finding a magazine or a headline article relevant to your product is another good indicator of it's potential. Magazines only deal in articles that are popular, that's what sells the magazine and their advertising. And, given the right internet marketing techniques, which we'll look at in another article, that popularity will sell your product too.
Original Article: http://EzineArticles.com/5683466
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