3 Key Steps in Finding a Profitable Market

How to target a market

If you are thinking of setting up an online business, one of the first things you need to think about is finding a profitable market in which to develop your business. You need to find your target market.


Profitability

How do you go about doing this? Look for a market with high profitability. You want to find a product or service for which there is high demand. High demand means good chances of high profitability. You also want to see high competitive activity or supply. Why? Because that means people are making money. It means there is a good chance you can position yourself to make a good profit if you plan your marketing wisely.

Categories and Keywords

Some typical areas of high demand and strong supply are categories such as internet marketing, stock, currency and index trading, health programs, weight loss and even gasoline efficiency for your daily commute. You can determine how these areas are doing by going on Google to find the dominant keywords for a particular product or service. Google Adwords is a great tool to use for this purpose. For example, look up affiliate marketing or currency trading and see the results you get. With the keywords from your research, you can then do a Google search to see what businesses pop up.

Check out the top sites both in the organic return down the middle of the page and on the top and right column where the paid sponsorships display the level of interest for paid leads. A presence of paid sponsors indicates that people are paying for ads and making money for the product or service you are researching. It also shows you what the competition is doing and what you need to incorporate in your own planning to get good results.

Marketplace Sites

Another option in evaluating the profitability of a product/service is to join Clickbank, Paydotcom, cj.com or any number of resell sites for product and services. With Clickbank, for example, pick a market category that fits your prospective product /service. There you will see the leaders in the category. You will also see the level of affiliate sales activity, the commission amounts being paid, information about the product and the contact information of the owner or originator of that product or service. This information will tell you, who is making money and what the business sector profitability is. With this information you can decide to rep a product or service or find something similar to resell or develop yourself.

Affiliate System

Once you have made your choice of a profitable market area, you want to find a specific product, preferably a digital product, that you can “front end” to get started. In this model you want to own resell rights and make your offering of affiliate resale rights at a very low cost, somewhere between $10 and $20. You offer your affiliates a commission of 75-100% for the delivery of leads to your web site.

This affiliate system will help you develop your customer base to which you can cross sell and up sell all sorts of related products/services and that is where you will make your income. These back end products can be cd’s, DVD’s and all sorts of software needed to carry an online business.

Part of the process of setting up your online business means you will need to register a domain name and sign up with a web hosting service. Your Web site will be the place for your presell, sales and order pages. You will also want to sign up with an autoresponder service to organize your email responses to your affiliates and customers.

Conclusion

When this early research and set up process is done, you will have a chosen a profitable market sector and you will have selected a list of products that you can front end and back end to grow your business. You will be ready to move to the next stage of your business development; working out a marketing plan to capture and grow your customer base and preparing the final stage of launching the actual business.

With careful research and preparation on the front end you will increase your chances of success when you are ready to make your move.

May your travels be prosperous.


Over the past 20 years Claude Pelanne has worked in a series of startup ventures including some of the first commercial webcasts. He is an internet marketer and serial entrepreneur. Get information on internet marketing at cpelanne or claudepelanne

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