Step 1: Market and Product Research

Before you start to invest lots of time and money into your online or offline businesses, you need to do the proper market research. Fortunately with the Internet, doing market research for an Internet business is so much easier than doing it for an offline, traditional business.

With the internet, you can find out exactly what people are searching for online, how frequently are the searches, where are they searching etc. All these will indicate whether your targeted market is in demand. Having identified your target market, you need to check your corresponding competition too. If competition is very keen, you may want to reconsider your targeted market.

There are many ways to find out what people are searching for online to help you determine the real market demand for your business. For example, you can go to this web site http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com and type a keyword for your own products and services to see if they are being searched for by potential buyers. If you do not have an existing product or service of your own to market and sell to someone, you can also use this method to try to identify new markets and find out what is in demand too.

Another way that you can do your market research is to use free software such as Good Keywords for doing your keywords research for your market. Go to http://www.goodkeywords.com and download a free copy of the software for your own research. If you need help, please refer to the documentation for Good Keywords.

For me personally though, I like and prefer to use this commercial keyword research tool because this software offers me so much more functionalities than Good Keywords such as spying on my own online competitors. I recommend that you check out Keyword Elite too! It is easy to use and there are videos trainings to help you learn how to do keyword research!

After identifying your hungry market, you will need to find a product or service that can help to fulfill the needs and wants of your targeted market. You can go to web sites like http://www.clickbank.com , http://www.cj.com , http://www.shareasale.com etc (or any other web sites that offer their own affiliate programs) to find a product or service to help your targeted market solve their problems or fulfill their needs. When you have found a good product or solution for your targeted market that provides an affiliate program for you to profit from, just sign up as an affiliate and be ready to promote and market your new business. Signing up as an affiliate is free for most affiliate programs and a good affiliate program will usually provide you with all the resources and tools such as graphics, banners, and viral ebooks etc to help you to market their products better.

Before you commit on promoting any affiliate products, check that the owner or vendor of the products are reputable or credible by doing your due research on them on the Internet. This is to ensure that they will pay you your commissions for affiliate sales whenever you make any sales for them, since you are putting in your efforts to help to market their products.

Along the process of recommending your selected product or service to your prospects, you get paid by the vendor whenever your prospects buy the product based on your recommendation.

Researching your market is an extremely important step if you want to succeed in your Internet business. Do not skip this step. You do not want to spend so much time and money on promoting something now and realise that there is no market demand at all for whatever you are promoting later! Doing your market and product research may take a little more time sometimes and you will be very tempted to skip it. Please do not!

So, how do I start to market to my targeted prospects? I will show you how to do so in the next few steps!

Go to Step 2>>