How to Conduct Instant Online Consumer Market Research the Right Way and Find the Best Selling Stuff in Any Market in Real-Time

by Jim Morris

It’s been about a couple of years since I wrote a pretty thorough article on the 5 free powerful ways to conduct successful online consumer market research and finding a product that’s in a niche market to represent.

That article made some serious waves and rounds on the internet and was reprinted thousands of times on exactly how to conduct online consumer market research the right way.

So in the spirit of keeping things fresh, we’re going to do a quick refresher on how to do this the right way.

The type of market research mentioned in the article above can be done for products you wish to represent as an affiliate (someone who works on commission) or whether you are looking to do direct sales from your own ecommerce site or digital publishing site.

But it still amazes the desperation of some SEO folks go through to attract attention to themselves by releasing a free or paid niche finder tool which (in a nutshell) claims that you start with a keyword database search to find a niche market.  (I’ll keep names to myself!) 

Someone please help by find the buzzer ———->  BUZZ!

This is ALL wrong and bass ackwards!

The process is so simple, let’s not confuse it:

1.   Find the hot selling products in your niche market by looking to online authorities that allow you to sort by “Best Selling”

Stop!

Let’s think about this for a moment (the vastness of this).

Companies like Best Buy, eBay, Amazon.com, Dell, Office Depot, Buy.com, Sears, Hewlett Packard, CDW, Sony — the largest retailers (online and offline) have done the research for us.

As you can clearly see that from clicking on the Amazon screenshot example above. the best thing is that some of these companies like Sears and Amazon.com allow their users to sort by “Best Selling” because, after all, they want to appeal to the folks who have to keep up with the latest.

The seriously cool thing is, we as marketers, entrepreneurs and business people have the chance to harness the vast power of tapping these giants’ databases instantly — and without them even charging us. 

Now, all you have to do is pull up one of the larger retailers (or digital publishers like Clickbank) that allow you to sort by “Best Selling,” pick a Department or Category, and refine your search until a Best Selling feature has shown up.  (I have verified the Best Selling feature on Buy.com, Sears.com, BestBuy.com and the ability to see the best selling products on eBay.com).

Hey, listen, if you currently have a site that is on literature and hot selling books, then you’ll want to check Amazon’s best selling for the hottest novels, etc.

If you are much more savvy and want to dig into offline databases to understand what kind of mailing lists there are in your niche or industry, then you can freely search SRDS (Standard Rate and Data Service) or use NextMark Mailing List Finder to search through over 55,000 mailing lists and locate related industry information.

(For instance, if your website sells binoculars, by searching NextMark’s Mailing List Finder, which is like a lite paid version of SRDS, you would immediately understand that both bird watchers are searching for binoculars as well as hunters.  You can also gain a good understanding of how solid, stable and well grounded your industry truly is.  You don’t want to get into an industry that constantly changes like a fad or could be here and gone tomorrow, wasting your precious promotional time.  Make sense?)

The primal concept to finding a good market is one that will serve you year round and not just on a seasonal basis.

2.  Go to a keyword tool and then expand that keyword list once you’ve found the market and the product to represent.

In fact, if you click on the image above, you’ll see that 85% of your keyword research is done for you since the “buying keyword” is the keyword you’ll be aiming to get ranked for (in fact, Tiffany Dow is teaching right now how to build a focused Squidoo lens around these tightly formed buyer keywords).

Look, I’m not even going to ask you to use our keyword suite of tools because you can dig into any keyword database you like.  Just make sure you aren’t limiting yourself to just one database and getting as much coverage NicheBOT has.

If you don’t do as prescribed above and in the article mentioned above, you end up at these keyword tools with a blank stare on your face NOT knowing what to type into the blank field for a keyword search.  Let’s face it, us humans are not as creative as would like ourselves to be.

This is why it is so much easier when you start inside an existing store like Amazon that has just about every product in any niche you can think of.

However, it may be advisable to use a specialist store to search when you may be looking at remote control cars as such (I would isolate my search to a site like hobbyshack.com).

Doing what is so logical above is so easy.  In fact, you’ll be instantly clear on the essence of your keyword research that follows.

When you start the other way around, you have to first go out and confirm that there are even products or services to offer a niche market (making it double the work for you).

There is no doubt that it helps to be inside a lively ecommerce place like Amazon.com to see what’s selling and hot now in a marketplace that interests me.

Fact is, Amazon has just about every single item on the planet.  So…

Now all you need to do is find your passion or at least something that slightly interests you, and it’s off to the races (to build a site or third party hub site).

THE MIS-INFORMATION ABOUT MARKET RESEARCH MUST STOP

It really urks me when I continue to see people serving up misleading information in a desperate attempt to get attention to their keyword tools.   (Aren’t there any better promotional tactics?!)

Back in 2001 – 2004, I remember what it was like to be lost in this sea of endless information, not knowing who to believe or what to believe, until I unraveled it all (after years of discovery).

That lost feeling is one of the big reasons that drove me to become obsessed with keywords and keyword research (and perhaps you should get obsessed too).

I’ve said this for over 3 years now and I’ll continue saying it today — “keyword research does not equate to market research” — and vice versa.

Let’s think about it for a moment.

When a large corporation goes on to conduct some market research for a product they may wish to develop, they go to sales statistics that are basically taken from a particular sector or industry.

The basis of measurement should be true for any entrepreneur, small business or otherwise.

You should be looking to actual online authorities for the particular products you wish to sell.

Here are a few scenarios for you as I’m looking at this huge list of the top 500 retailers:

1.   If  I want to sell consumer electronics (maybe even computers), I’m probably going to head over to Best Buy so I can sort stuff by Best Selling.

Speaking consumer electronics, check out this neat gadget caught over at CES 2010 which @chrispirillo’s team covered:

2.  If you are looking to sell more household items, power tools, etc., then you’ll want to go check out Sears.com and sort by their best selling.

3.  As I stated above, if I want to get into the R/C car/helicopter industry, then I’ll probably want to head over to a specific online retailer like HobbyShack.com that does the most sales in my country (and hopefully they’ll have a way to sort by “best selling”).

4.  If you can’t find specific stores or items in large online retailers, then you may just have to pick up the phone to speak to some personal shops in your city, country and local area that sell the kind of goods you wish to sell.  I’m certain you can find a person or two at a number of sites to offer helpful information about the current trends and tell you what’s selling now.   Without raising any red flags, you may want to avoid talking to managers and rather speak with sales clerks or salespeople.

See, I’m able to pinpoint exactly what I should be focused on selling NOW rather than pulling these ideas out of my head from some random keyword tool just because some a keyword phrase got a LOT of searches.  (Gimme  a break!)

No keyword tool on earth can tell you exactly what people are buying unless you go to some concern that is doing a lot of sales for a specific group of products.

It’s almost not even fair when you conduct market research this way before entering a marketplace.

You will certainly be 10 times more prepared than 99% of the marketplace that is simply hoping to sell some of whatever they have to offer. 

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