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A common mistake I see a lot of newcomers make is to think up of a great product idea, putting the time and effort required to create the product (taking sometimes months of grueling relentless hard work), falling completely in love with their idea and THEN trying to find people that are willing to buy it from them.

Find a hungry, starving crowd that have problems and are ALREADY spending money for these solutions, then and ONLY then, go out and produce a “solution in a box” and give it to them.

You could be doing a gazillion things wrong but if you picked the right market and offer them the RIGHT product you’re gold.

Dan Kennedy talks a lot about message to market match and this is essentially what this means. Find a market (which I’ll show you in this guide) then find/create a product that matches their need and help them do what they ALREADY want to do with a well crafted message.

Imagine this. Even if you weren’t too good of a salesman and tried to sell water to a thirsty crowd, even if you’re the most uncharismatic person on earth, smelled like raw fish and had some missing teeth… all of that wouldn’t matter so much because you’re bringing to them what they ALREADY desperately wanted in the first place.

Your presentation (salesmanship skills) does becomes an issue when there’s 10 other water merchants hanging in your block trying to do the very same thing. But you’re STILL MILES ahead and better off in this situation than if you were trying to sell to… let’s say: 1 million people who all have 200 kegs of purified water stocked in their garages.

Now. I realize this is a lot easier said than done, but the Internet is a vast and extremely powerful tool where you can conduct market research for free (If you only know how).

There is no other place right now where you can do this. If you had an offline business and wanted to do market research offline, do you think you could do market research for free and as quickly as you can on the internet?

It would not trust me. In fact it would probably be much harder and more painful.

But here’s the good news. You’re on the internet. And a lot of the work has already been done for you. You just need to know where to go, in order to tap that goldmine and how to connect the dots, and how to interpret this information to your advantage.

Let me show you the process I go through when I'm trying to brainstorm for winning ideas.

For starters, I'm always aware of trends and current events in the real world. I read several newspapers each day, many magazines, both general and niche-specific, I watch the news, I listen to the radio. Occasionally something that I hear or read will stick with me. I may record my thoughts on my portable voice recorder; jot down some notes, whatever happens to be convenient for me. Sometimes I'll call my office voice mail and leave myself a message.

But at some point I'll have several broad ideas to research. But first I want to look deeper because I want to make sure there is a good market for them before I even think about spending enormous amounts of time, capital and resources in creating and marketing a product.

To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist. If I am targeting the US market, I’ll click on “U.S. Zeitgeist,” otherwise I’ll look at “Zeitgeist Around the World.”

As a general rule I am always going to look at what’s currently popular in the U.S. as the vast majority of online customers are from the U.S. but otherwise know that you can always check what’s popular and trendy elsewhere.

It’s important to note that at this point I am just looking for broad ideas and themes to get my juices pumping.

If I see that a particular hot topic catches my attention, I’ll make sure to write it down on a piece of paper and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites (which I’ll show you shortly).

The Lycos Top 50 is similar to Google Zeitgeist, where I will review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further. And finally I will also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well (see below).

By combing these 3 websites thoroughly you should have jotted down on paper a few topics that have caught your eye. Now, it’s time to drill down deeper and get more specific to discover a sub-niche for your main topic.

One of the reasons we are going to become more specific in our niche selection is that the tighter our focus topic and the better our chances are of actually succeeding at discovering a winning niche that is not already flooded with big sharks that will eat you alive.

For example no one will argue that the online auction business is an extremely lucrative industry, in fact billions of dollars I believe are being spent every year in this industry.

But does that mean you should start up an online auction site and compete against eBay?

There is a reason why even the smartest marketers who have millions of dollars in the bank choose to not go head-to-head against industry giants like eBay, Amazon or Google.

My point is that there are easier fishes to fry, and there are PLENTY of other UNEXPLOITED markets and that’s why you should always look to focus your niche as tightly as you can to uncover these markets where you can actually carve yourself a place in the market space.

The eBay Pulse web site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches. What I will do is select the category first (using the topics I’ve gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.

What’s important to note about eBay is that they spend a HUGE amount of money to professional market research teams in order to uncover the best categories for their eBay sellers to sell items in.

Each category wasn’t just randomly chosen by a clerk they hired. Each has been specifically chosen for a very particular reason and is based on solid searching data: they’re popular! So use their categories to look for ideas.

Remember the best chance for success is if I am as specific as possible with my niche selection. Let’s say for example that through my initial research I had chosen to pursue the topic of ‘Crafts’. But that’s too broad. I don’t want to sell to the “crafts” niche, that’s WAY too general and more difficult to crack. I need to get more specific.

It’s simple really. If I had a choice between selling in the topic of Crafts and selling to grandmothers who enjoy giving their latch rug hooking gifts to their families and friends. I’d choose the latter any day. That’s a ridiculous example but you get the idea. The more focused the better.

Also, I’ll always check the largest stores as well to see what they’re selling. There is a reason why they are the largest stores. They are doing something right so make sure you study what they’re doing carefully.

TIP: eBay also puts out a PDF report of their hottest categories each month, available at

Amazon is another great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche.

Uh oh. There are WAY too many books returned. This niche is not targeted enough. It is too general.

Now, Amazon is also a great resource to determine if people are actually spending money in a niche which is ultimately what we want to know.

Now that I have some potential sub-niches to work with, I want to see how much of a market there really is.

If you type into the Amazon search engine any topic, notice how many reviews there are in the books results. The more the better obviously. It’s an indicator if people are spending money in that sub-niche.

We want to be as certain as we possibly can that our niche is focused enough but yet big enough, and that the people in that niche spend money.

Then I type in a keyword to see how many times that keyword and all related keywords were searched in the previous month.

I like to see at least 10,000 searches for all keywords combined, but not more than, say, 50,000 or so (although I do have profitable niches that have only a few thousand searches at Overture, but they are the exception rather than the rule).

Remember that Overture searches are for Yahoo and their partner sites, so to measure the number of searches on Google, I usually estimate between 5 and 10 times this number to come up with Google’s searches.

The reason I’m ‘guessing’ is because Google unlike Yahoo(Overture) do not disclose to ANYONE of their exact search counts for searched keywords on their search engines and hence no one can know for sure what this number is (unless you work at Google).

But most experts will agree that it is a multiple of 5 to 10 times the # of searches on Yahoo so use that as a general rule of thumb.

Also, depending on the market, I've sometimes found Overture’s figures are somewhat inflated, so bear in mind that the number of actual searches might be lower. But nonetheless it will still give you a good idea of a market demand and this is what we’re trying to do at this point.

Now let’s say I found a sub-niche topic that I’m happy with. I next want to see how much pay per clicks (PPC) are going to cost me on Google Adwords because this is how I can generate traffic on demand quickly and easily to start testing if this market is actually spending money.

I’m pretty sure anyone who’s reading this is somewhat familiar with the concept of testing.

Testing is more often than not the answer to most of your marketing questions. Let the market tell you what you want to find out!

Want to know which headline is best? Then put up two versions of your website and send traffic equally to both websites and track which one brought you the most sales.

Similarly, if you want to know if a market is willing to spend money than figure out a way to get the right type of people in front of the right offer and see if they will buy.

See, the only real way is to have your market vote with their wallets. You can do that with Adwords, because it is the fastest and quickest way to bring in unlimited amounts of the RIGHT type of traffic for you to test.

I’m not against any other traffic generation method in fact USE them if you can generate traffic through SEO, blogging or whatever. Just MAKE sure you’re getting targeted traffic.

I obviously cannot do justice in covering Adwords properly in a niche research book but if haven’t already I highly recommend you check out Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide On Adwords. I’ve studied this guide back to cover more than once.

To determine ad costs there’s no better tool than Google’s own Proprietary Keyword tool.

So first you’ll type in the keyword and click on get more keywords as shown here:

Then you’ll want to input a dollar amount that you’re willing to spend. In this example I’m putting 1.00$ to see how much I’ll have to pay to get the top 3 positions on Google Adwords. Then click on recalculate as shown below.

Now, I want to make sure I won’t have to pay more than a dollar or two per click on average, but of course what you can profitably pay for PPC will depend on your product’s selling price and how many you can sell.

Again, at this point I’m just trying to get a snapshot or pulse of this market.

And since we probably don’t even have a product yet I’ll show you a way you can easily test a market with no product at all.

To check on the companies that are bidding on my keywords in Google Adwords, I use http://www.spyfu.com.

As you can see on the top, you’ll find the top 5 advertisers that are currently bidding on your keyword and if you want to see all of them you can click on more to the right.

Ok, the next thing I'll do is check how many magazines there are on the subject of my chosen niche.

For example, golf has a lot of magazines, but it's not a good niche by itself. It needs to be more targeted. But in that case I can always get more targeted sub-niche ideas within that topic by looking at the types of magazines for that topic.

Now, as good as these sites are for finding magazines, I'm still going to need to go to a bookstore that carries lots of magazines and browse through the ones in my niche.

I need to know who else is selling what, and it will also tell me whether the people in this niche are willing to spend money. And the ads will not only tell me that, but they will also tell me what the people in this niche spend their money ON. And if I want to know which ads keep appearing (because then I'll know they are making money), I would want to pick up several issues in a row of the same magazine, if possible. Remember advertisers don’t keep paying for ads if they aren’t bringing in a healthy profit.

Ok. By now I should have a pretty good niche market to test. And by knowing what kinds of informational products are ALREADY selling, I can start to put together in my mind an idea of the type of product that this market could potentially respond very well to. This will give me a template of ideas when I’m going to try to start looking for affiliate programs to promote or start developing my own product.

My favorite way to build a list is to set create a 5-day or 7-day e-mail mini-course on my niche topic then load these messages in my auto-responder so they are sent automatically to my subscribers in a sequential, timely manner.

If you have the resources you can outsource the creation of an e-course for about $200 - $500. But if you don’t then you’ll have to get your sleeves up and do some research and come up with an informative e-course that solves your market’s needs.

You also have the option of offering a free report as an incentive for them to opt-in on your e-mail list.

The reason I like mini-courses better than just a free report to get them to opt in is because the free report is a one shot deal whereas the mini-course gives you an excuse to e-mail them more frequently (they gave you permission).

I also want to “train” them to be on the lookout for my emails, to anticipate good valuable content and most importantly open and read them.

That way whenever I DO promote a particular offer they will be a lot more responsive and eager to listen to my recommendations because trust has been established before hand through me giving them good content. When you give a free report you run the danger of not establishing that trust early on enough for them to start accepting you as someone they can start to trust, and if you don’t mail them for a long time you’ll simply lose them. (In that case they’ll likely forget they signed up for your list and promptly delete your offer, unsubscribe, or report it as spam).

If I have a free report I want to use, I’ll simply break it up for my mini-course.

You can easily obtain PLR rights to a lot of different reports on a whole slew of topics online or in the Warriors Forum so this shouldn’t be too difficult. And here’s a good one that’s going to save you HEAPS amounts of time & money with all the PLR & Source Code Items Available…

If you have some intimate knowledge within the market than all the power to you! This will give you a definite edge and you can promote a newsletter that you write but if not stick with the free report or mini-course… it will do fine.

Next you’ll need a Squeeze Page. A simple page that is basically a short sales letter that sells the benefits of joining your mailing list.

Just having a simple join my 101 tips to gardening type of incentive usually is NOT going to make the cut anymore.

Obviously this depends on your market and some markets are easier to sell to than others and so you might be able to get by with a less than optimal website.

But if you’re going to have some long-term life in this business I suggest you pick up a book or two on this subject.

Just putting up a little box that says Join Now for my Golf Tips or whatever and saying that they can get stuff they can get anywhere else for free anyway is more often than not highly ineffective.

More and more now, visitors need to be convinced that it’s in their best interest to sign-up. And this BEGINS with the RIGHT type of offer to the right type of market.

Now I don’t care if you’re the best salesman in the world, you’re not going to make a living anytime soon trying to sell ice to Eskimos.

And similarly you’re SELLING these people on the idea of joining your list. Nowadays, with the proliferation of squeeze pages and everyone asking for e-mail …people don’t just give out their e-mail address for no reason anymore.

Here’s a basic layout of what a good sales copy on a squeeze page should contain – you can use this as a template. Keep in mind that as simple as this may appear it’s a proven model that has worked for hundreds of people.

In fact some of you may recognize this template as it’s the squeeze page that a marketer uses to run his 25 million dollar a year company.

Also, I believe it’s one of the most studied and ripped off model so USE IT because it still works!

(As a side note, that should tell you something about the power of learning to write effective sales copy)

Example: Who Else Wants To Make 1,000$ Residual Income On Auto-Pilot With A Proven Step-By-Step Blueprint?

Example: How To Seduce Anyone With Words (And Get Them To Listen To You Attentively)

Give Me (Insert # Here) Days (or Minutes) And I’ll (Fill in the blank with a bold promise that you can deliver)

Add Testimonials In Boxes. (Get real testimonials)

Simply enter your first name and primary e-mail address below to get started immediately:

Insert Your Opt-In Box Here and call to action button here.

(Mention that you won’t spam them and that their privacy is safe with you)

Add anything that you think will increase conversion rates, such as an e-cover. E-covers are great because they make the product more real, more tangible and since we all think in pictures… if you have a nice looking e-cover you will almost always increase your opt-in rates.

But at it’s core, to summarize what constitutes a good squeeze page, it will have a compelling headline, grappling emotionally charged bullets (benefit points) and a call to action.

I cannot get into too much detail on copywriting here as I want to stick to the topic of market research but I do recommend that you pursue your education in this very critical area of marketing as this is a very important skill in marketing that I simply cannot stress enough.

Even if you have no intention of becoming a copywriter superstar you need to at least get this area brought to some level of competency so that EVEN if you never write a single word of copy and outsource this out to a copywriter you can RECOGNIZE what’s good copy and what’s bad copy.

With that being said Yanik’s Instant Sales Letter is the easiest course on writing good copy I’ve seen anywhere for the beginner. Yanik not only teaches you the deep psychology of copywriting in plain English but he literally spoon-feeds you with all the best openings, bullets, copy-connectors, selling words, guarantees, closes and P.S.’es that you can just rip off, copy and paste …everything you’ll ever need to create killer sales letters.

If you happen to know a good resource that you’ve personally had good results from let me know and I’ll include it here as well for the benefit of other readers.

Now, assuming you now have a squeeze page with somewhat decent sales copy, you have a 5-day mini-course and you’ve signed up with an Auto-responder the only thing left to do is to send people to the page.

I strongly suggest you do not try Google Adwords if you’re completely new to internet marketing. There is a learning curve, and you should get the necessary education under your belt before you attempt anything in this arena.

A lot of people have lost their shirts trying to make Google Adwords work just by reading a couple of articles or forum posts. It astounds me to see this happen over and over again.

That’s not the way it works. You have to put in the time, energy and effort into learning the game right.

Ok. Now turn the Google Adwords machine on and you’ll start receiving a lot of traffic and build your list.

Well, at this point, I don’t know for certain how much traffic I’ll get or whether they’ll opt in or not, never mind whether they will purchase my product. But I have stacked all odds of success in my favor at this point, due to my extensive market research.

But now we want hard numbers to back it all up before I invest any more of my time and money. Hence, you must test the market itself.

1) My click-through rates from PPC. I am aiming to get click-through rates of at least 5% and more as a general rule for my PPC campaigns (That is for every 100 visitors that sees my Google ad, 5 click on it).

2) My opt-in rate (%). I’m aiming to get at least a 20% opt-in rate. So for every 100 visitors, 20 are subscribing to my offer and giving me their e-mail address. If it’s too low, either my squeeze page copy needs to be tweaked, or, if I’ve done my homework with my copy, perhaps this market is not made up of enough buyers. But most likely it is my copy or my offer that needs to be tweaked. (This is why having some copywriting skills is super important)

This is the single most important metric you will track. You must determine your break-even point. Discover what is the maximum amount of money you can spend before breaking even.

For example if you’re promoting an affiliate product that pays you 75% commission on a $50 product, that’s $37.50 for you every time you make a sale. If you’re paying 0.35 cents a click it would take ($37.50 / 0.35 = 107 clicks).

That means that you can afford to pay 107 clicks to make a sale for you to break even.

So as long as you make a sale every 107 clicks you’re breaking even, which means you’re building a list for free! Which is a good thing because you can then sell them more things in the back-end.

So keep a tab on how much you’re paying and keep a tab on your commissions so far.

Now if my traffic and opt ins are both good, now is the time to start thinking about a product, which ideally should be along the same lines as the content they signed up for in the first place.

Sometimes I will even email my list at this point and simply ask them what they want, or try to determine their wants and needs from carefully constructed survey questions. Just remember that people often say one thing and do another. It’s only 100% accurate when they vote with their wallets.

But nonetheless this is a technique that’s been highly popularized by famous Internet Marketer Marlon Sanders. He has been doing this since the 1990’s and with great success.

And he has a affordable solution software that’s literally Push-Button and will help you create surveys on the fly.

A good way to test if a market will spend money in a market is to prepare a free teleseminar for them, then see how many show up. If a large percentage of your list calls in, it’s a good bet they’re interested in your call topic.

HINT: Teleseminars also make GREAT products or bonuses themselves if you record them and sell them after the fact. In fact, sometimes I’ll announce a paid teleseminar rather than a free one.

Because then I know people will pay money for that information, an even better test indicator. They are voting with their wallets. Plus I can always sell the call recording after the fact as well.

But if you’re feeling lazy, the best way to test whether this niche is built up of buyers or tire-kickers and freebie seekers is to promote an affiliate product within that niche.

If the product content is similar in nature to what you want to create as your product, it’s a good indication that you have the potential to get a similar percentage to buy yours.

The beautiful thing is, once I confirm a niche will be profitable, with this approach I already have a pre-built list that keeps getting bigger and by the time I launch my own product I’ll already have a proven list of buyers to market my product and keep 100% of the profits.

There are plenty of sites I use for research in addition to the ones above, but they are usually niche specific and I didn’t want to confuse anyone in the process.

There are several other sites I use as well to get niche ideas, and especially to narrow the niche and discover potential information the market wants:

Also, I'll do several targeted searches in both Google and Yahoo (for example, on the subject of "hobbies").

Finally, I’ll see what existing digital products are being sold in my target niche at the Clickbank Marketplace

HINT: If you want to see how your competitor’s sale pages has evolved over time, the Wayback Machine is a great place to do so (http://www.archive.org).

And of course I will always Google my keywords and check out the competition in the Adwords ads. In this case I pay special attention to the ads that sell information products (or services like mine if I’m selling a service).

A Step-By-Step No-Fail Resource Guide To Uncover Highly Profitable Niches That (Almost) Guarantees Your Success!

You May Not Redistribute This Report It Is For Your Personal Use Only.