Supply and Demand Research UNLEASHED!
Last week's newsletter generated a bigger response than all of my other newsletters combined!
In fact, over 30% of the subscribers to
the Yahoo! Store Profits Newsletter - that's nearly 6,000 emails!
If you recall, in that newsletter, we
asked what you would like to see us write about, research, and recommend
in this year's newsletter.
After a few days tabulating gobs and gobs
of information, here's the results:
It's pretty much a tie for first place!
So, you asked for it, and now we're gonna
talk about it!
Drum Roll Please.....
--- The Winners are "Speeding up supply
and demand research AND new ways to Source Products".
Honestly, because you took the effort to
respond, you've enabled us to target the information that you want to
know about with precision.
So, without further delay, let's take a
look at the latest, greatest method that Audrey and I have come across
to speed our Market Research...
At the end of this newsletter, I'm going
to introduce some fantastic new software that you can download and test
for F R E E that's based on everything we've learned about Supply and
Demand research.
For those of you that can't wait, here's
the link:
http://www.yahoo-store-builder.com/marketresearchwizard.htm
--- First, a little back story...
As you know, deciding what kinds of
products that you want to sell in your e-commerce store, on your eBay
auctions or in your mail order catalog can make a big difference in how
quickly your e-commerce business grows - if it grows at all.
In fact, before we refined our own little
method of determining how ripe a market is for sales penetration, we
made some DISASTROUS inventory choices. And before we discovered the
ease and convenience of drop shipping, all of those bad choices were
actually wholesale purchases - meaning, we kept inventory.
Frankly, we were left holding the bag on
most of the stuff. I mean, we actually had trouble selling the
remainder of it for pennies on the dollar at a garage sale!!!
So, we decided that before, in fact, IF we
ever make an investment in inventory again, we needed to figure out a
way to test supply and demand.
--- Present Day.
Well, it worked. Ever since we adopted
our supply and demand techniques into our product research, we've NEVER
had to close a store because a product wouldn't sell.
The problem is, it can take us WEEKS of
study before we can successfully evaluate a products potential in the
marketplace.
You see, we spent time at Overture, Word
Tracker, Find What, in Google Ad Words Keyword Tool, in eBay... And at
each one of those sites, we had to enter all of the supply and demand
data into our spreadsheet.
Then, we crawled the free search engines
and figured out what kinds of stores were selling in that industry.
Then, we crawled through the Pay Per Click
Search Engines and figure out what kind of money people were willing to
spend on clicks and how many of them were bidding...
Then, we went to all of those advertisers
sites and took a long, hard, critical look at how they were selling
their product, and what sort of price point that product was
commanding...
WHEW! It's a Ton of work - This I can
tell you first hand!
But, the truth is, it works - for us,
every time we do it. So, even though we spent a lot of valuable time
deciding whether or not a product was worth our marketing effort, the
results paid off in the form of a profitable store.
Unfortunately, this kind of concentrated
research left a lot of our Yahoo! Store Profits customers in a state of
"Research Burn-Out". The ones who stuck it out would usually report
back and tell us that all of that effort had resulted in sales for their
stores.
On the other hand, we also got a lot of
emails from folks saying that they were growing frustrated spending all
this time on research when they wanted to be building their store.
Look, you MUST do the research - there's
no way around it. It's the foundation on which an e-commerce store is
built.
Not only could your research efforts
result in discovering a highly lucrative product line, they also equip
you with a list of Highly Relevant keywords and Keyword Phrases for you
to use when your optimizing your store for the Free Search Engines and
creating your keyword list for your bidding strategies in Overture, Find
What, Google Ad Words, etc.
--- Still, we thought there should be an
easier way. And now, there is...
After months of trial and error and some
very rigorous beta testing, our friends at World Wide Brands have
created an incredible piece of software called "The Market Research
Wizard".
I was privileged to part of its
development process, and I must say that this product has been put
through some of my own torture tests.
Here's a brief overview:
-- First, the Market Research Wizard
allows you to do 90% of your supply and demand research from ONE program
on your computer. No more skipping around from web site to web site,
entering passwords and waiting, navigating the CONSTANTLY changing web
menus.
From the Market Research Wizards
Interface, you can quickly and Automatically check supply and demand
data from:
Google
EBay
Find What
And Overture.
These web sites are the 4 key portals that
we used to use when doing our supply and research demand manually.
-- Second, not only does it research a set
of keywords, it will suggest ALTERNATIVE and RELATED keywords. It's
exactly like an automated brainstorming machine. So, from one set of
keyword searches, using the Market Research Wizard might give you
HUNDREDS of alternative Keywords and Products to research - which you
can turn around and re-research automatically...
-- Third, the Market Research Wizard will
show you who's bidding on your researched Keywords, how much they're
bidding, and give you a LIVE HYPERLINK directly to your competitors
site!
This is KEY! You need to know what your
competition is doing! Now, instead of finding their hyperlink, entering
manually, and keeping track of the data by hand, you can simply click on
the link in the Market Research Wizard's interface and you'll be taken
directly to that site's sales page.
-- Fourth, using a carefully tweaked set
of Supply and Demand Algorithms, the Market Research Wizard will
evaluate the supply and demand potential of that product related Keyword
on a scale of 0-100.
So, finally (can you hear me breathing a
sigh of relief?), you don't need a scientific calculator and a list of
algebraic formulas to decide whether or not to pursue a product
keyword.
The word for the day - Time Savings!
-- Lastly, you can save all of your
Research Projects for future use AND export your data to an Excel
Spreadsheet.
Let me tell you why this is important -
There will be times when you're doing your Supply and Demand Research
with the Market Research Wizard where you'll find a neat little product,
but it doesn't have enough related products for you to open an entire
store around...
So what! Save the DATA anyway!
Later, after you've got your main store up
and running, go back to that data, find an affiliate program for that
product and presto! You've got a revenue stream ready to go, complete
with keyword research and your competitors advertising ready for
investigation!
You see, the Market Research Wizard is not
JUST a product evaluator. The keyword data that the Market Research
Wizard evaluated is also 100% Relevant to your Search Engine
Optimization Efforts and to your Pay Per Click Campaigns.
----- Yeah, but does it work?
This is what I did to test the Market
Research Wizard.
I took a set of Product Related Keywords
that I know sells for our stores like mad AND a set of Product Related
Keywords that result in only a trickle of sales...
The first set of Keywords was "Lord of the
Rings Swords".
After entering that data into the Market
Research Wizards Category, Product and Name Brand Fields, I let it go to
work, crawling the Internet, sponging information.
In less than a minute (with a cable
modem), it returned its results.
The Market Research Wizard told me that I
had a 78% chance of successfully marketing the "Lord of the Rings
Swords"
In the month of December, Audrey and I
sold over 150 Lord of the Rings Swords at www.a2armory.com
-- So far so good.
Next, I entered the keyword "Big Screen
TV".
The Market Research Wizard told me that I
had a 28% chance of marketing that product successfully.
We have an affiliate web site that's
highly optimized for the keyword "Big Screen TV".
Just as an aside, Audrey is about to
become an Accredited Search Engine Optimizer - she knows what she's
doing when it comes to getting good Search Engine Rankings...
Still, in the Month of December, we had
exactly 2 Affiliate Sales for Big Screen TVs for a net profit of $142.
Compare that to www.a2armory.com which did
just less than $18,000 in sales, it's clear to me that I should have
waited for the Market Research Wizard to be completed before I invested
a bunch of time in our Big Screen TV site.
-- The Bottom Line?
This is it. This is the tool that we've
been using for the last 6 weeks to decide what new products to take to
market.
The Market Research Wizard is also the
tool that we used to research the launch of
http://www.likeapromedia.com
- the DVD training product that's generated $6,432 in its first month
on-line.
The Market Research Wizard is the tool
that we have up and running on our Lap Tops whenever our PC's are
running.
I know that our R&D lives just got a TON
easier - now, you can take advantage of this technology for yourself.
Go to:
http://www.yahoo-store-builder.com/marketresearchwizard.htm
and download the F R E E Trial. It's a
fully functional version of The Market Research Wizard that's only
limited by the number of total searches that you can do.
We've only done this 2 other times, but
it's a new year, so what the heck -
--- "The Market Research Wizard gets
Yahoo! Store Profits FULL recommendation as the best, most innovative,
most PRODUCTIVE research tool in the universe"
Think about all of the products you could
have researched in the time it took you to read yet another of my long
winded newsletters... :)
http://www.yahoo-store-builder.com/marketresearchwizard.htm
Next week, we'll talk about our Trade Show
experience and how we walked away with a product line for a whole new
store.
Till Then,
Andy Jenkins
www.yahoo-store-builder.com
P.S. I forgot to mention - Chris Malta
actually wrote a little program that plugs into the Market Research
Wizard that lets you check the Drop Ship Source Directory for Products
AS YOU RESEARCH THEM! So, if you come across a killer product line, you
can automatically use the Market Research Wizard to check the Drop Ship
Source Directory Database for a company that will drop ship that
product!
Too cool!
Okay, that's it for this time...
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