Imagine you decide to start with the business and, full of enthusiasm, put your heart and soul into a product that is the best according to you.

After several months of hard work, a significant investment in time and money, you proudly launched it.

And then you discover that your market doesn’t want it. Customers don’t take out their wallets because they don’t have any desire for your product.

Or you started with affiliate marketing and decided to promote something you liked. You picked the product, created landing pages, paid for solo ads, FB ads, Google ads, or other types of advertising. So you promoted and promoted and promoted, but no one bought it.  

And you must agree with me that’s a big problem.

How do you make sure your prospects will click the payment button on the launch day? 

You must research before starting producing or promoting anything. 

Here are the tips on how to find if your product/service is profitable?

Find Out What People Are Already Buying

In other words – Follow the money.

We know that people buy and pay for supplements, books, education all the time. Examine their past behavior.

One of the quickest (and surest) ways to determine if people will buy your product is by examining their past behavior. In other words, if your market is consistently purchasing a particular kind of product, then there’s a good chance they’ll buy that type of product when you roll one out too.

For example:

• Go to marketplaces such as Amazon.com, Udemi.com. Then search for your niche keywords (such as “organic gardening” or “online marketing” or “weight loss”). Look for the bestselling products, as well as products with a lot of competition. 

E.G., There are several “get rid of belly fat” products in the weight loss market, and some of these products are also bestsellers. So those are both clues that this particular type of product is a big seller.

• See what the top sellers in your niche are selling. Go to their websites, join their newsletters and follow them on social media. You’ll soon see that these sellers tend to promote certain types of products more often. When multiple sellers promote similar products, it’s a sign these products sell well.

• Check out paid advertising. This includes banners on niche sites, solo emails, and sponsored ads in the search engines. If marketers invest money over time to promote a particular product, that tells you that their advertising is profitable.

Take an example here from the info market.

So, does this mean you copy other peoples’ products?

Of course not!

It means that you do your market research to find out what your market is buying, and then you create something similar yet better. In other words, you build a better mousetrap.

Let’s suppose you’re going to pursue the idea of creating a product about getting rid of belly fat. If you review the existing products yourself and read customer reviews, you’ll quickly get a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the top existing products. Your job is to improve on those products.

For example, maybe you notice that the existing products don’t show exercise illustrations or offer extensive meal plans and recipes. If you add these two features to your weight loss product, you’ll have a feature-rich product that’s not only a proven seller but one that’s better than the existing products. That takes you one step closer to creating a bestseller!

Next…

Run a Quick Test

Another way to determine if your market will buy something is to take out ads for a particular product. You don’t need to create the product just yet. Instead, your ads will point to a sales letter for your prospective product. But when people click on the payment button, they’ll be told the product isn’t ready yet (and that they can join a newsletter list to be alerted when it is ready).

Simply put, all you have to do is look at how many people click the order button to get an idea of the level of interest in your prospective product.

This isn’t a foolproof way to determine if your product will sell, but it is quick to gauge interest. And it gives you some confirmation that your market research is correct. Plus, as a fantastic bonus, you get to start building a mailing list of potential buyers!

Next…

Survey Your Market

That’s right, ask your market what they want.

But heads up…

What people say and what they do are often two different things. So use this tactic as part of your overall market research. Use it to confirm what you discover with the other two steps, rather than relying on this information to make a decision.

Find Your Competitors’ and see what products/services they promote and how they are promoting.

Let’s start with good ways to find your competitors and see what and how they promote.

Look For Reviews And Content of similar products.

The first thing you’ll want to do is hit up Google to search for the names of your competitor’s products along with search terms such as “review” or “comparison.”

TIP: Better yet, you’ll also find out which keywords tend to be good at search engine optimization. If the same products hold multiple key rankings for various competing products, that’s a pretty good sign that you should be able to drive traffic your way, too, if you create a better product.

The second thing you’ll want to do is search for the titles of your competitors’ lead magnets, as well as the titles of their articles, blog posts, and other content. You can even search for excerpts out of articles.

Where do you get this information?

One good way to do it is by simply signing up for your competitors’ newsletters, which will give you access to the content they provide to their customers. Then you can search for the titles and excerpts from this content to uncover how they promote

Join Affiliate Groups and Forums

If your competitor has an affiliate program, the following way is to find your competitors’ affiliates. Go to the places where they all congregate online. In other words, seek out affiliate forums and social media groups.

Specifically:

• Go to Facebook and use the search box to uncover groups. You’ll want to keep the searches broad, such as “affiliate” or “affiliate marketing.”

• Use Google to find affiliate forums. For example, you can search for terms such as “affiliate marketing forums” and “affiliate discussion.”

• Uncover joint venture networks. Again, use Google to uncover these platforms in your niche. For example, “[Niche] affiliate network.”

Once you find these platforms, join the biggest and busiest ones. They watch the conversations to get an idea of who is promoting what and which products are the most promoted.

Check paid ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and see what they promote on social platforms.

Ads are run by Facebook Pages, which means that your search results will be grouped by Pages. To see these ads:

1. Go to the Ad Library at https://www.facebook.com/ads/library.
2. Make sure you have the correct country selected. In the top right of the Ad Library, you can select the country you’d like to view.
3. Above the search bar, click All Ads.
4. Enter what you’re looking for in the search bar.
5. You’ll see a dropdown menu with results that relate to what you entered. Click on the result to see ads.

To search for ads about social issues, elections, politics, or housing ads: see here

Viewing all active ads

You can search for an advertiser in the Ad Library to view the active ads running from any of their Pages. When viewing a Page’s active ads, media (example: photos and videos) and text associated with ads will be displayed.

You can filter ads by:

• Country.
• Impressions. You can choose to see what ads have received impressions (when an ad has been viewed) over a particular time period.
• Platforms. You can choose to see what ads were shown on either Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or through Facebook’s Audience Network.
• Keyword search.

On an ad, you can:

• See when the ad started running. At the top of the ad, it will give the date that the ad first appeared on Facebook products.
• See what Facebook products the ad was shown on. The icons will appear at the top of the ad:
  •  Facebook
  •  Instagram
  •  Messenger
  •  Audience Network
• View the ad ID and copy a link to the ad. Each ad that runs on Facebook products has a unique ad ID, which is a part of the direct link (also known as the URL) to the ad. To save or copy the link to the ad:

1. 1. Click the menu, then click Copy Ad Link.
   2. Paste the link in your browser to go directly to the ad.

• Report the ad. To report the ad:

1. 1. Click the menu, then click Report Ad.
2. Follow the on-screen instructions to let us know why you’re reporting the ad.
   1. Keep in mind, you can report active ads that you feel are about social issues, elections or politics and should have Paid for by disclaimer and don’t, or for violating other Facebook advertising policies. You can report an ad as political only in certain countries.

• See more information about the ad. To see more information:

1. 1. Click See Ad Details at the bottom of the ad.
   2. On this page, you can view things like information from the About section on the advertiser’s Page. Ads about social issue, electoral or politics will have additional information in See Ad Details.

When viewing a Page in the Ad Library, you can see additional information about the Page, like when it was created, name changes, and admin country locations. Admin country locations are only applicable for pages with high fan count or if they have run an issue, electoral or political ad in certain countries.

Your assignment today is to do the research and see if the product you plan to promote 

• Has big competition
• Has buyers
• Has a lot of paid ads on Google, FB, or Linkedin

Use the checklist from the next page to complete your research

Discover Where Your Competitors are Advertising

This is a bit of cloak and dagger stuff. Find your competitor’s ad and copy the address of the image. Now go to http://TinEye.com and enter the image address. This will locate all the places online where this ad is being displayed. Sneaky but invaluable.