As an aspiring entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges that you will face is finding a sellable, profitable product – be it a one-off product or an entire product line that occupies a market niche.
Coming up with innovative product ideas, and the pressure of identifying a product that the people want and is not already being sold, can often lead to analysis paralysis. Thankfully, Thomas J Powell of Resolute Capital Partners has come up with a few tips that will help you pick the right product for your online store.
How to Choose a Product for Your Online Store:
Tip 1 – Research the Market with Regards to Target Audiences and Demographics:
Thomas J Powell believes that market research is the most crucial step for any entrepreneur looking to sell a product over the internet.
Market research has a number of facets, including demographics, pain points, buyer personality types, location, psychographics, economic shifts, and market trends. Fortunately, the internet is ripe with tools that will provide you all of this information and more – and some of those tools are even free to use.
Tip 2 – Find and Cure a Customer Pain Point:
Naturally, one of the most effective ways of finding a solid product to sell is identifying a particular problem or pain point and coming up with a solution to it. You could either pick a problem that has no solutions at all, or a problem for which the existing solutions have room for improvement. Once again, effective market research is going to be the key.
However, apart from market research, you can simply take a look around the world and pinpoint the most common issues that people face. Thomas J Powell also recommends turning to platforms like Quora and Amazon and learning about the suggestions and recommendations that users make regarding specific products. If you have any existing products of your own, you can also see what customers have to say about those.
Tip 3 – Target a Segment that You Are an Expert In:
Think about an area that you are an expert on – a product that you know a lot about, or a service that you can execute excellently.
Being an expert and exhibiting your skills, knowledge, and understanding about the product or service you are selling, will give you a great deal of credibility. This credibility, in turn, will make you come across as trustworthy and reliable, thereby encouraging people to purchase from your business.
A second reason that converting your expertise into a commercial venture is smart, is that you will be entering that segment that is likely not going to be easy for others to copy.
Tip 4 – Conduct Keyword Research:
Organic search engine traffic is one of the most important marketing channels in today’s era. Conducting keyword research involves searching for products based on the queries that people are making on search engines, along with the number of monthly searches and the degree of competition for each search.
This tip by Thomas J Powell is slightly technical and does require some understanding of keywords and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The advantage, though, is that this approach will allow you to pair existing keywords with product demand, and use this pairing to attract consistent organic search engine traffic.
Final Word:
To sum up, finding the right product for an online business can be tricky, overwhelming, and frustrating. We hope that the above tips will prove useful in finding a product or service that will help you achieve your traffic, revenue, and profitability targets.