Best-Selling eBay Products 1-2-3
Whether you want to find products to sell on eBay, carry in your own online store or sell in the offline
marketplace, eBay can be a great place to find out "what's hot now".
eBay Pulse (http://pulse.ebay.com/) provides you with a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks
and popular search terms. See what terms and phrases people are looking for. From there you can get more
specific.
Using this tool is a quick and easy way to do market research and get information about consumers that was
difficult to get ten years ago. Don't underestimate the power of eBay Publse simply because it is free to
use.
Another tool you can use is http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/sellbycategory.html . On this page, you can search
by category to find out about insider selling strategies, which items are in demand, and the most popular
searches. The Hot Categories Report (http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf) is also worth taking a look at. The
report is updated every month and displays the most in-demand products in each and every category.
eBay
Keywords shows the profit potential of thousands of popular search terms (http://buy.ebay.com). If you want to check out popular products by category, use
http://product-index.ebay.com/best_selling_1.html.
Besides eBay, you can use Amazon.com to get information on popular products. In each product category,
there is a "Top Sellers" tab at the top of the page. Pick your category, and then view the top sellers in that
niche.
Amazon also lists over 80,000 magazines. If there is a magazine covering a particular topic, you can bet
that there's a substantial market that you can sell to.
Once you find a magazine that appeals to a certain sub-culture, order some back-issues. Thumb through the
older versions and find which advertisers have been advertising their product in multiple issues. By doing
this, you'll know which products your target audience is buying.
If you want to save your money, you can usually view back issues of popular publications at your local
library.
Similar to magazines, you can find out a lot about a market by seeing which classes they are paying to
take. The Learning Annex (http://www.learningannex.com) contains a complete list of adult education classes
available on the web. By finding out what people are paying to learn about, you can uncover a multitude of
profitable niches. Here are just a few of the niches I discovered the last time I explored the Learning
Annex:
- Real Estate
- How to learn a foreign language
- How to create gift baskets for fun and profit
- How to become a special event / party planner
- How to talk to your cat
- How to make money doing voice overs on Radio & TV
- How to become a successful travel writer
- Speed Reading
- How to be a mystery shopper
Are you starting to see the unlimited amount of opportunities?
Direct Mag (www.directmag.com) is a monthly publication that includes a feature known as List line,
which displays announcements of mailing lists, their number of subscribers, and what and how much of a
product they are buying. Directmag.com will show you exactly what people are buying and how much of it they
are buying. This is an invaluable free resource that you can use to find hot products and markets.
Profit Analysis
After getting information on some potentially profitable niches, take a look at actual eBay listings related
to your target market. A good sign is when there are lots of listings, lots of bidders and bidding wars going
on.
As you look at different markets, keep in mind that you want a market with activity and competition, but you
don't want an overly-saturated market where it will be difficult to compete.
Here are a few questions you should ask yourself about your potential market:
- Is this market wildly passionate about their interests?
- Do they have their own events?
- Do they have their own celebrities among this market?
- Are there magazines that target this particular topic?
- Does a typical member of your target market have a credit card?
- Are there related products being sold to them online?
- Does a typical member of your target market have disposable income?
- Are members of your target market buying products online?
- Are advertisers paying good money to advertise to your target market online?
If you answered yes to most of these questions, then you have probably found a profitable niche.
The many in-demand products and keywords that you find during your search can transform into hundreds of
different web sites, info-products, and ebooks. They can also lead to successful SEO and pay-per-click
campaigns.
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews & SEO-News newsletters. You can also find additional tips and
news on webmaster and SEO topics by Kim at the SiteProNews blog (http://blog.sitepronews.com/) . Kim's
email is: kim @ seo-news.com
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