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!

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.