B - Market Research
Editor's Note: With any business, making money takes knowledge and perseverance. If you are committed to start an online business the very first step is identifying what you are going to sell.
Market research is the cornerstone of nearly every online niche store. Finding the hottest items to sell in your online store can be overwhelming.
Google Trends: A free Google service that provides charts that show how often words, phrases and topics have been searched for over time. Using Google Trends you can compare up to five topics at one time and also see how often those topics have been mentioned in news stories and find out in which geographic regions the topics have been searched for the most.
Google Insights for Search is a service by Google similar to Google Trends, providing insights into the search terms people have been entering into the Google search engine. Unlike Google Trends, Google Insights for Search provides a visual representation of regional interest on a country's map. It displays top searches and rising searches that may help with keyword research.
Google AdWords is Google's main advertising product and main source of revenue. Google's total advertising revenues were USD $28 billion in 2010. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads.
Magazines.com founded in 1999, is the oldest, the largest and the most dependable magazine subscription service on the Internet.
eBay Pulse is a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay, listing popular searches, largest stores and most watched items. Alhtough eBay Pulse page shows an overview of the entire eBay marketplace, you can use the drop-down menu to refine and filter the lists to show content for specific categories on eBay.
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Amazon.com is one of the best sites for doing market research. Search any of their departments, i.e. books or baby or and you’ll see either a link for Bestsellers or Top Sellers, etc.
Yahoo Buzz Log is focuses on the entertainment industry, providing their most popular searches on a daily basis for actors, movies, music, sports, TV and video games.