Daily I’m contacted by women (and men) about the best online business for them to start. As I tell each and every one of them, it depends…it depends on their interests, their skills, their time. It’s a very personal decision on what might be the best online business match for them. However, having said that, there are tools available for you to use that will help you determine in short order whether a particular business is one in which you can be successful. And with these tools you’ll be able to quickly sort through a list of candidates to determine a winning business for you –
How to Evaluate the Online Market of a Product to Not Waste Money or Time
from wikiHow – The How-to Manual That You Can Edit
In this article we cover things you ought to do before leaping in to sell products online, using your own website. Often the feeling of excitement of starting a website business is closely met thereafter with a feeling of loss, both emotional and financial.
Steps
- Calculate. Understand what price you will need to sell at to make a healthy profit. A business like Amazon might make 10%. This is not enough for a home business; idealy you will want to be making at least 30% or more. Make sure you’ve factored in tax and any kind of discount or free delivery.
- Do your sums. Make sure you’ve really thought about what things are going to cost. You are likely to lose as much as 5% of the final cash amount (inc tax + delivery) to the credit card processors. You will also spend money on packaging, and this can be more expensive than you realise.
- Use “Google Products” to try and ascertain what kind of prices other folks are selling the product for. This is what you have to compete against.
- Use “Google Hot Trends” to get an idea of what people are searching for. Remember, you might have the right product but if people don’t search for this kind of product online, you won’t sell anything. This means that you can be top of the search engines but still not have any visits.
- Use the “Google Keyword Tool” to get an idea of what kind of traffic you might get if somebody was looking for your site, or one of your products. The ‘competition’ bar next to it is also useful.
- Use “Quantcast” for getting an idea of what brings in a large audience, and what doesn’t.
Warnings
- Don’t quit your day job. If you can’t make your site work while working, it’s unlikely you’ll do any better staying at home.
- Don’t enter a saturated or super-competitive market. There won’t be much money in it.
- Don’t buy loads of stock. In fact, instead of buying wholesale, make a loss on your first few orders by buying from competitors and reselling. It is very easy to decide after a few months the business isn’t as fruitful as you’d hoped and now you have a lot of unshiftable stock.
Related wikiHows
- How to Conduct Market Research
- How to Conduct an Online Customer Survey
- How to Use Online Product Surveys to Improve Customer Retention
- How to Start a Small Business
Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Evaluate the Online Market of a Product to Not Waste Money or Time. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.
I hope this information was helpful in your search for the best online business…Too often, and especially now in this ailing economy, you’ll be tempted to “buy in” to a business whose sales copy pushes all the right buttons. Proceed with caution. Before you make any kind of investment in a business, you must be sure there’s an adequate market, determine whether the market is crowded or not, and verify that you’ll be able to make any money with the business. The free online tools covered in the six essential steps above will help you make that determination.
Good luck!
