InternetBusinessManual.com - Step 2: How To Figure Out What's Hot To Sell & What's Not

The hardest fact most newbies have to digest is that paying for the highest spot in online ads, sending emails to thousands of individuals in your niche field, does not guarantee you will get any orders. Many newcomers falsely believe that most web businesses receive multiple orders a day. Often, however, the average website owner is lucky to receive 1 order a day, or even 1 per week, or even 1 per month.

The only information you should consider to determine what kind of sales potential any product has on the Internet is THE ACTUAL NUMBER OF PEOPLE SEARCHING FOR THE PRODUCT ON THE WEB.

Most buyers find web merchants on searches conducted with keywords. Keywords are the focused terms or words, people type into a search engine to find the item or subject they are seeking.

So to determine the marketability of a product, you need to research the number of searches for the keywords relevant to the product you want to sell. What you may think is an important keyword may not actually be. The only way to tell is to look at the current search term figures in the popular search engines.

The major search engines have search term tools to show you the number of times people searched for keywords, if at all, in the product line you would like to sell. Those numbers will tell you how many sales you can realistically expect to make, taking into account that you need x number of visitors to your site to make x number of sales, which is called the conversion ratio.

At you can expect, not every visitor to your site will be a buyer; in fact, most visitors to your ecommerce site will not buy. The ratio of visitors converting to sales in an Internet business is extremely less than most people realize, even less than mail order conversion ratios.

A mail order house can often expect each time they send out a brochure or catalog to their own loyal customers, 4 to 5% of the total customers they mailed to, to place an order. The figures are even less for an online website.

You can expect a conversion rate of .5% to even less than .1% of your total number of visitors to place orders, providing these visitors are targeted to your products. That is why you only want to build your Internet business around products that have sufficient keyword popularity, which have the potential to convert from the number of visitors into healthy sales figures.

Nothing else matters . Not even the fact that there may be a large number of other websites selling the same thing too, not even big fancy websites.

A lot of this has to do with how cheap it can be to run a business on the web. Anyone and their brother are up there, just trying to sell, at all cost. Even loss!

There are a lot of people out there with some bad ideas at what makes good business web wise. They just jump in feet first and hope they land in a pot of gold. Most of the time it’s a bunch of muck that sucks up their time and money before they sink, blub, blub, blub...

And when one disappears, there is always a new, green-behind-the-ears individual ready to take their place. So, the number of websites selling the same thing is no indication at how good a product does on the Internet.

For instance, there are a lot of web sites selling similar or identical pepper spray products in Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture.com). You would think by the number of them there are tons of consumers clamoring to buy mace pepper spray online.

But, an inquiry into the number of times people in the month of June, 2005 searched for the keywords where these web sites appeared, revealed another sobering picture:

mace pepper spray 3124
self defense weapon 2252

And these figures were for all the partner search engines of Yahoo! Search Marketing, like MSN, Altavista and Yahoo.com itself.

Based on these figures alone, since there is a lot of competition, starting a security business selling pepper sprays would not be a wise move if you wanted to make a lot of money.

However, if you have an original item for this niche market, perhaps a downloadable electronic book (eBook) such as an invented title, “How to Choose the Right Kind of Pepper Spray You Can Bet Your Life On”, you could make money, if you follow the traffic building advice in Step 13 after you make sure your eBook is filled with valuable information.

So, remember, there’s just one way, and one way alone to figure out what is a hot product to sell on your website and what isn’t, and that is to check to see how many searches occur for a product or service. And, if the numbers are lousy, drop that as something to sell and find the item that really draws people.

How then can you find out what those numbers are? Real simple.

Use one of the search popularity tools on the Internet.

These tools tell you the number of searches done on a term in an entire month on the search engine that owns the tool. One of them is at the 7Search.com engine and this is the link to it:

http://www.7Search.com/scripts/advertiser/sample_get.asp

Take into account that the search numbers you get when you visit this tool, only pertain to the people searching on that engine (www.7Search.com), and NOT on the whole web.

For instance this is the results on a search at 7Search.com on the term car accessories.

In 7Search.com there were 34,724 monthly searches for car accessories

Those figures are only for people searching on 7Search.com for car accessories.

The same search on the Keyword Selector Tool at Overture’s search engine, returned these numbers: 296,188 monthly searches for car accessories when you take into account the number of visitors needed to convert into a sale.

So in the corner of the Overture universe 8 times the people looked for car accessories. So in the Overture advertising network car accessories is a definite hot term. It is also a good search term for the 7Search network.