The most influential step in determining the success of your business is Market Research. There are literally thousands of ways to go about doing market research on the internet so i’ll just show you my own quick and simple way. What I’m about to show you will help you know whether or not your market is buying the stuff you want to sell and if there’s enough room (competition wise) for you to make some money in the next few months.

If you slack on market research you’ll be tossing your profits to the fates and you have no idea or have any control of what the outcome will be.

I’ve outlined 3 steps you will take to find the niche for your business.

1. Find and choose a supplier in a niche of your choice 2. Research Key words and phrases using a keyword tool. 3. Research the Competition (using a search engine)

Choose a supplier in a niche of your choice

A niche is a subcategory of a broader category. For an example lets look at Health. Health is an enormous category with tons of competition and very authoritative websites. Now we’re not trying to become a superstore because it would be very hard to be profitable competing with the big names. So we’ll dive deeper instead. What are some sub categories of Health?

To find a supplier I use Wholesalecentral.com. On the front page they give you a lot of different categories to choose from so It’s very easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for. Go ahead and choose one you’re interested in and start narrowing down to a small, focuses niche. Once you’ve decided on a niche we’ll start using the the Keyword selector tool.

www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

I found a pretty legitimate supplier withing the scrapbooking niche so I decided to type scrapbooking into the keyword tool. We want the total number of searches to be anywhere from 1000-100,000 per month so that’s what I’m looking for.

It looks like the number of searches for scrapbooking is roughly 16,000 per month which is great. That means 16,000 unique people are actively looking for things related to scrapbooking. However after typing scrapbooking into Google’s search engine it shows that there are 36,000,000 competing pages which way too high for us. were looking for 5 million or less. The keyword tool gave me a few more suggestions though, one of which is scrapbooking ideas. Scrapbooking ideas has 1040 searches per month so lets go see how many competing pages that phrase has.

It shows 455,000 competing pages which is well below the 5 million page upper limit. Perfect! Now I have a niche that I can flesh out that has good potential for ranking well in the search engines and getting some sales soon.

Remember the parameters: 1000-100,000 searches per month and less than 5 million competing pages.

Now its your turn. Find 5-10 niches that fit within those parameters and start contacting the suppliers to discuss drop shipping options. Good Luck!