To make cash on the web you need to carry out market research to assess the market you are going into.
This is particularly important for affiliate marketers looking to make cash on the web. The reason so many people fail online is because they don’t spend enough time on market research. They just want to know how to make ‘Big Bucks Fast’.
In this article I will explore the 3 key tools you need to use to succeed at promoting physical products on Amazon..
The two websites which we will be using for our market research are Amazon and Google. Both provide all the information you need to find out if the product you wish to promote will be a winner or not.
So to get started go to:
This will show you the most popular items in the store. On the left hand side of this page you will see all the different categories there is. Whether it be ‘Cameras, Electricals, Home & Garden or through to Watches’
Take your time to explore the different categories….
The next two tools we are going to look at are both from Google.
Depending on where you intend to sell products the first thing you will want to do is change the ‘Filter’ setting from Worldwide to for example USA
To look up useful information on a product you have found on Amazon, put the product name in the search bar and press enter.
For example type in Philips Sonicare Essence and press search. The results will show all sorts of interesting information.
You can see that people are searching for Philips Sonicare Essence all year long, but sometimes they are searching more than others. Along the bottom of the search panel you can see the year. The peak for Philips Sonicare Essence is January 2008 and December 2008, this is similar repeated in November 2009 & 2010. Peak searches happening occurring in the months around the Christmas period.
At the bottom of the page are the ‘search terms’ people are entering to look for the product. This nicely leads on to our next market research tool.
Set the country setting to the USA (unless already in the USA
The Google keyword tool gives us a better understanding of how people search online. This is a very important point to learn for an affiliate. Keywords are terms entered in the search engines when people like you and me are looking for information on something.
Taking my previous example - Philips Sonicare Essence, lets head over to the Google Keyword Tool. Enter this term into the search box and press enter.
Ok, now I will give you a brief explanation of what to look out for under each column
‘Keyword’ this not only shows the word we were looking for but other terms that are also being searched for, e.g. philips sonicare essence toothbrush. philips sonicare coupon, sonicare etc…
‘Competition’ this is advertising competition, the amount of people paying to have their advert shown for the particular keyword. The higher this is the better, as you will know it is a profitable keyword.
‘Global Monthly Searches’ the estimated 12-month average of user queries for the keyword you selected’
‘Local Monthly Searches’ again this is the estimated 12-month average number of user queries for the specific countries and languages chosen.
To the left of the screen we have ‘Match Types’
Broad: this will include general search terms ‘phillips’ and ‘sonicare’ however this can be in any order and also include other words.
Phrase: Includes the number of people who searched for the term ‘philips sonicare essence’. This also includes people who search for ‘best philips sonicare essence’ or ‘where to buy philips sonicare essence’
Exact: Is only the exact phrase so in this example that would be ‘philips sonicare essence’.
As you can now appreciate using these 3 key tools together will give you an edge over the competition when promoting products for an affiliate commission, making you cash on the web.