A recent post on the Nichebot Keyword Research blog makes the assumption that too many people rely strictly on keyword research to begin figuring out what niche they would like to develop to make money online.

We agree with the overall presentation that one should not use keywords as the starting point to building an online business. Instead, your keyword research is conducted to further enhance search-ability for that particular segment or niche after you’ve determined your market. While keyword research is a mainstay for developing tags, metas, titles, and content on your website, as stated, it is a tool used to uncover what people are searching for.

On the other hand, to reveal what people are buying online, you need to use “market research” tools. The article goes on to give you some solid starting points which include:

To Uncover Hot Selling Products

Head to eBay and click on their BUY tab. You’ll know in a flash what people are purchasing. The “Popular Products” is another link resource to ferret out even more information.

Amazon is, of course, another place to go to see who’s buying what. The idea, keep in mind, is you are trying to figure out what niche you could likely corner based on what people are physically buying.

Where to Find Popular Digital Products

A good solid source for information about popular digital products is Clickbank’s Marketplace. You’ll be able to set specific criteria and pull up what’s popular based on criteria you set.

In fact, Clickbank suggests the following:

“How do I identify the most successful products to promote?”

“Some affiliates prefer to promote very popular products that attract lots of affiliates (high affiliate gravity), while others prefer to promote products with less advertising exposure (lower affiliate gravity). The Marketplace can be sorted, within each category and sub-category, by item gravity. Either way, your best bet is to promote products that are well presented and likely to appeal to the people who visit your website, or view your advertisements.”

Competition

The final section of their post discusses the dreaded word “competition!” Many people fear competition and so never make a choice of what to plunge into online. If you read the article, you will discover that:

“There is NO reason to feel that way. In fact, you should get excited when there is a lot of competition. Here’s why…

“If there is no competition whatsoever in a marketplace, there may be no marketplace (or people to market to) at all. You should actually be worried if you don’t find any competitors for a market you wish to enter.

“The more competition there is in a marketplace, the more commerce is being moved. The more commerce that is being moved, you’ll have a chance at grabbing a bigger piece of the pie.”

We give this informational article a thumbs up for clarifying a business builder’s first steps, and again we have only presented an outline of the full post.

You can read it for yourself here:

“Market Research (or finding a profitable niche market) has Nothing to do with Keyword Research”

Enjoy!

This software is going to be incredibly easy to review since we’ve been using it off and on for the past month or more. When we first saw this software product, what caught our eye were the graphics representing the product on their sales page, as well as the stats for the transformer video pages example they use – very impressive since getting traffic can be a tricky thing for most of us.

In fact, it’s a great thing the graphics are visually appealing since, frankly, the grammar on the sales pages leaves a lot to be desired. Not so much English as a second language, but more like English is that writer’s third language, and he (or she) failed the first two miserably LOL!

Sorry, but it’s true.

So that said, we picked up the Master Resell Rights and away we went. You’ll see many examples when you check out the product (YouTube Video Website Generator if you’re in a hurry).

Here’s another sample site we put together this morning (just for this review):
Social Media YouTube Video webpages.

There’s only one frustrating part to this simple 5 step process that all takes place on your desktop before the system itself uploads it to your domain. While the process is super easy you do need to remember or have on hand two pieces of information (if you’re interested in monetizing the webpages) which are:

1. Your Google Adsense pub id #
2. Your Amazon affiliate id (end with a dash and number)

Oh, right, the frustrating part is really simple, too. Just remember when you make the folder (which you do before uploading the webpages) on your domain, that you CHMOD the folder to 755. You’ll drive yourself a bit crazy if you forget to do this step.

On the plus side, as you make the pages, you can (at the same time it is uploading) save a backup copy to a folder on your own computer. Very nice.

Another point to consider is that you will need to read through – and edit – the original sales letter if you intend to offer this product on your own domain. It’s nasty LOL and really needs your personalized touch. That’s fine, too. The original talks all about the reason why the creator made YouTube Video Generator in the first place, and his story would not make sense if you try to present it as your own (unless you have a son interested in Transformers!).

We give this software an A+ in terms of ease of use (again you have to have ftp access to a domain to even use it). An A for the videos it pulls together for you (you pick up to 8 keywords of your own for YouTube to search and display). We give only an A not because the generator is poor but because not all the videos going up on YouTube are worth displaying in the first place

We also give it thumbs up for its ability to be tailored. You can edit the templates yourself and make it feel more a part of your own site. We’re lazy though and just leave them “as is.” They are good-looking right “out of the box.”

To see more information about this software, YouTube Video Website Generator click here.

Ebay has announced that they are cutting their fees by 50% which will start as of Feb 20th. They also have cut out the picture fee as this should be included on ecommerce sites. Where they are picking it up is on the sale end as a commission. If the product sells for under $25.00 it will be 8.75% but will be less on higher priced products.

They will also use customer ratings of the process to determine the rank in the searches so someone who has many dissatisfied customers will be lower in the searches. This has come about as the market on ebay is flattening due to all the cost and sellers are pulling out. They only had a small 4% increase of the last year and are now needing to compete with companies such as Amazon who charges $0.00 to list a product and you pay the commissions when something is sold.Not sure how long ebay will be able to hold on with the shift in the seller market, but they are looking to make a complete platform change in hopes of not going under. This all came to a head last year when Chief Executive Meg Whitman announced she would retire at the end of March. That is when Donahoe, president of eBay Marketplaces decided he needed to aggressively change eBay’s product, customer approach and business model.