Researching a Market

Researching the market for a website is the most essential part of brainstorming after determining your website type and topic. It is an important process which you have to collect, record and analyze the needed information on the market of your website in order to find a hot and profitable niche.

Niche Finding is the result of an accurate and appropriate market research process which will be explained in the next sessions as the last step of brainstorming a website. Now, we are going to go through the process of researching a website.

At this point, you have chosen your website type (model) as explained in the last part. Also, you have come up with some topics that are in your interests. Some general and broad terms that you are knowledgeable or passionate about. Now, you are going to research that topic, market or industry to check if it is worth creating a website in that market or not.

During the market research process, you have to take 3 important factors into account. After gathering the needed data and information on the basis of those important factors, you will then need to analyze it deeply and carefully. It will end up to some specific information which will be used as the basics of the Niche Finding process.

3 Important Factors You Should Always Keep In Mind While Researching a Market:

1. Demand

The very first aspect you have to consider during the entire market research process is to check if your chosen market (topic or industry) is in demand or not. It is an extremely crucial factor for any business owner to know. If there is not enough demand for a specific topic, then chances are that you will hardly be able to build a profitable online business around that topic. So, your market should be high-demand. The following questions may help you get a better picture:

  • What is happening in the market at the moment?
  • What are the hottest market trends in your topic?
  • How many people are talking about your topic in the market?
  • What are consumers talking about the products in your market?
  • Who are the market potential customers and where are they located?

You see, the above questions are very helpful in this step and you have to consider them all the time. After narrowing down your chosen market, you will find out some sub-topics in your broad market that are more specific. Your job is to list as many high-demand sub-topics as possible and record your data. Then, you might bring your data to the next step and check the second factor.

2. Supply

The second factor in this process is to determine how much supply there is to meet the current demand. In other words, you have to check the competition out there in your market and find out the quantity and quality of them. So, get the data you gathered before and check the supply for each and every of them. The point is find a low supply market. A topic or sub-topic that has a zero-to-low competition. That way, you will be able to make a wise decision. The following questions would be helpful:

  • How many website are talking about your topic?
  • How many products or programs are meeting the demand?
  • Is the quality of the current supply convincing and satisfying?
  • Is there a missing link in your current competition that you can cover?

Bear in mind that there are more questions and aspects you should think about for checking the current supply. Don´t overlook this part. You will hardly succeed if you simply underestimate the strength of competition out there. You will soon realize how important this factor is even in the very last steps such as monetizing and marketing. So, don´t ignore these elements!

3. Profitability

Just because you have found a high-demand and low-supply market does not necessarily mean you have discovered a winning and profitable market. The third factor of a good market research for a website is to determine if the market is quite profitable or not. If there is not enough money to spend in that market, how would you be able to earn money and run your online business around that topic?

Asking the following questions may help you understand the concept of profitability:

  • Is there any product or service being sold today by your competitors in the market?
  • Is there any advertiser out there willing to pay to promote their products or services?
  • Is there any affiliate program that pays you commissions for promoting their products?

As you may see, these questions give you a better picture of profitability in a specific market. If you can find a high-demand and low-supply topic with convincing amount of profitability, then you will definitely be able to discover a hot niche market which you have to start building your website around.

Niche Finding is an amazing result of a good market research. It should not technically be considered as a fully separate step. Perform a complete market research for your future website and you will have accomplished the Niche Finding step, as well. In the next posts, I will cover Niche Finding in more detail, which is the ultimate goal of Brainstorming phase.

Stay tuned and subscribe to the blog RSS Feed today, because I am going to provide you with more valuable information!

Take Care!

Hooshmand Moslemi