So How To Find Top Selling Products To Sell?

In Michael Ross' thread-- "WANTED: Your Participation - The info in this post could make you money" Michael posed the question to me about how I would go about finding top selling products to sell myself or possibly even "tweak" a little and sell as my own product.

Before I get into some of the steps I would take to uncover top-selling products I'm greatly interested in how some of you would go about identifying top-selling products.

So "spill your guts" and then I'll spill mine -- how would you go about finding products that have some potential to make you some money?

Please consider this a brainstorming session-- there are no "bad" answers!

Michael,

Thanks for ASKing.

As I mentioned already, but consider it better placed in this thread, one method is for finding a product which sells (it might not be top selling, but does sell) is ...

1: Do a Google Search for something. For example, "How to repair rust".

2: Save a copy of the Google Ads in a Text File. In this case there is Only 1 ad which reads...

Repair & Prevent Rust Now
Stop Rust For 10 Years, Guaranteed.
No Prep, Easy To Apply & Maintain!
www.RustBullet.com

Note: A Search for Rust Repair got three ads on the side...

eBay Rust Repair
Make money, sell your Rust Repair
Compare Offers, Get Our Best Deal
www.eBay.com.au

Zero Rust for rust repair
Corrosion Coating, rust protection
barrier at the steel surface level.
www.zero-rust.com

Easy Quick & Inexpensive
Treat-Stop-Prevent Rust & Corrosion
for tough safe & lasting protection
www.floodaustralia.net

3. In two month's time do the same search. In fact, it's wise to save the Search itself - copy the location bar - and then paste that back-in two months down the track. If you see the same ads from the same company you Know they are either Making Money (people are buying their stuff) - or - they are insane and are spending money to get Brand Awareness without the matching sales (something the Big Boys do but the small guy generally will not do).

If you assume they are making money you have identified a Viable Market. A Market and often a Product people are buying.

4: Check out their website for Finer Details - how they market it on the web, do they do email as well, bonus items, etc. Even BUY their product as Additional Competitive Research.

This should not only find you a Viable Product but also show you Part of How it is marketed. And I say Part because you will only be aware of the small marketing methods you have seen. They may also use Offline methods you aren't aware of.

There are Other Methods, but let's see what others share to see if those other methods are revealed.

Michael Ross

[Ankesh]

Thanks Michael for asking.

I tend to follow what Bill Myers et al teach:

1. First find the crowd.
2. Then find / create what products they want.

Finding the Crowd:

* Through magazines (consumer as well as trade related)
* Workshops and seminars and trade shows
* SRDS and rental list services
* Online Groups
* eBay

Then just research - either online or offline - to see what these crowds are buying.

Ankesh,

Thanks for the Two Step.

Would you Expand on your answer please.

HOW do you Find A Crowd in a magazine or online groups?

HOW do you Research to find what they are buying?

Michael Ross

[Ankesh]

Thanks Michael for asking "How."

Btw - I do agree with you that because not many people write "how" to do things - readers don't follow through. But I think that makes a good barrier. It will get rid of people who make excuses.

Anyways, back to your questions.

>HOW do you Find A Crowd in a magazine or online groups?

I dont find crowds "in" magazines and online groups. The magazines and online groups themselves represent a crowd. If there is no crowd, there will be no magazine.

For further research, just ask the magazine or the online group owner to send you more information about their readers / visitors because you are thinking of advertising with them. (The industry term is demographics.)

Most magazines will send you a very glossy rate card that has their number of readers. Assume its inflated.

Many online groups may not have anything like that available. But you can see the action happening on the websites - the number of posts per week, the number of regular posters, the number of new posters.

>HOW do you Research to find what they are buying?

Just as you do. By reading and following ads or "wishlists".

* On Google (how many ads are there for the keyword)
* Other websites like ebay, clickbank etc
* Top lists - like amazon, New York Times etc
* How many ads are there in the magazine
* What kind of ads are those
* Have they been running for a long time

* On forums, I try to see if a question is being asked again and again.

I use a number of tools / techniques / questions / criteria. But I don't rely on just one of them to make my decision. And there is no formula that tells me tool A is worth 20% and tool B is worth 15%. Its more a feeling after going through a lot of information.

I would love to know if someone has a more scientific process.

Sellers are everywhere for everything and anything.

Concentrate on finding the buyers.

One Hundred buyers are worth far more than One Thousand sellers.

Jim

Originally Posted by MichaelWinicki

In Michael Ross' thread-- "WANTED: Your Participation - The info in this post could make you money" Michael posed the question to me about how I would go about finding top selling products to sell myself or possibly even "tweak" a little and sell as my own product.

.... I'm greatly interested in how some of you would go about identifying top-selling products.

So "spill your guts" and then I'll spill mine -- how would you go about finding products that have some potential to make you some money?

I started within my market (promotional advertising represents an estimated $18 Billion market in the US annually. Up over 3 Billion in the last decade, so some very nice growth for people looking to start or expand in this field.) and look for ways to find what the hot products art.

In my field it's as simple as picking up the 4 or 5 industry magazines and attending some of the national or regional expos and table-top shows. I prefer the half-day shows that visit my region, allowing me to get current info without the expense in time and money for the 3 to 5 day national expos.

The reps setting up at the table-top shows increase their earnings by driving more sales to the company(ies) they promote. They may be either employees or contractors, but either way, they need to increase sales for their market. The easiest way to do that is to direct the individual salespeople to the products in their lines that are flying out the door.

In many cases, they will even bring extra samples to give to the salespeople to help them get more sales.

At the same time, I also pick up additional sales techniques that can apply to other products, so it's definitely a good exchange of my time for increased sales in the near future.

I realize my response is specifically related to my industry, but any sales professional on online marketer can use the same idea to learn what is hot within their product lines. Dig deeper in the industry expos and magazines targeted to their field to discover hot products.

Dennis Bevers

Hi Michael,

Thank you for starting what should be a great thread.

Here are two ways I use Ebay to find what people want NOW. When you go to the main page on Ebay and you look down the left side you will see “Want it Now”. Click on that. You will be taken to a page with categories. Click on any category and you will get a list of what people are looking for right now. In real time.

Now what I do is bring these listing back to an excel spreadsheet and let my computer do a key word search. That will give me a listing of how many times the words appear. Yes you will get a lot of keywords like “the”, “and” and so forth. But you will also find the keywords like model # of hot items, brand names of wanted products, ebooks that are wanted, etc. When you have a count of 10 or 20 of the same item you know it is HOT right now.

The other way I use Ebay is to use the listings on the left hand side. Pick a category and go down the left hand side to where it has a check box and says listings. Under that there are boxes with drop down choices. The default on the first box is “ending within” and under that is a number of hours selections. I pick the “started within” choice and set the hours to 12. Then the boxes under that ask for the min number of bids and the max number of bids. I set the min at 5 bids and the max can be any big number like 100. When you click on “show items” only the items that received at least 5 bids in the first 12 hours of that auction will come up.

If an item has 5 bids in the first 12 hours of the auction being placed you know this is a HOT item. I just did a search in the music category and under CDs and got one item that had 6 bids in the first 12 hours.

http://makemoneyalert.com/Ebay.htm

These are two of the up to the minute ways to find HOT items that are also FREE ways.

Best of success,

Skip Rosell

Quick Cash Concepts

Hi Michael,

Thanks for asking.

The methods would vary depending my starting point and or my objectives.

While Hot Selling Products are nice...They are still just Indicators of a "Potential Market"

So my ultimate objective would be to find a hot Industry with many profitable players;COMPETITION.

Here is the "Starting Point" continuum as I see it.

Starting Point:

1. Braintorm/Get Ideas
2. Find: Hot Ads...which Leads to "potentially"
3. Hot Products/Services...which Lead to "potentially"
4. Hot Players/Businesses...which Lead to Other "potential"
Players in a market (Competition)


IF I am able to determine there are MORE than ONE profitable players in a market then you have a better chance of being successful.

THE MORE COMPETITION THE BETTER

THEN I would spy on the TOP 5 or 10 to determine the who, what, when where, why, and how's of their marketing.

O.K all that said. I would 1st go to EBAY, because I find that it is one of the most Transparent ways to do market research.

You can determine to the penny the last 30 days TOTAL SALES volume for a market. Real buyers and Real Sellers.

Let's use Michael Ross's example of "rust repair"

I would use his PPC method as a quick start. (sidenote: keyword elite would automate a lot of that process)

However, my preference would be to go to EBAY since THAT is where the buyers and sellers are.

My Objective: Find PLAYERs that are or have made money in the last 30 days

So looking at my "continuum" from above:

1. Brainstorm/Get Idea:

Rust Repair!

2. Find HOT Ads/Listings: Manual Method

At this stage we are doing a QUICK "eyeball" of any number that shows in GREEN which denotes a sale.

a. go to www.ebay.com
b. enter "rust repair" (no quotations)
result: only 19 ads are currently listing
c. Check box labled "completed listings"
d. Click "Show Items" button
e. Login to your ebay account
f. Eyeball and count the number of Green: Red numbers

RESULTS:

58 completed listings (29 (Green)/58 listing successful 50%)

I want to get more specific data about the Ads, the Hot Products and the players so I'll bring out the heavy duty research software from www.hammertap.com in this market[/i].

2b. Find HOT ADS automatically: LEVERAGE SOFTWARE

a. Load up my "spy software" (hammertap.com)
b. Click on product search
c. Enter "rust repair"
d. Click on "show detailed listings" icon

RESULTS:

Headline Number #1

BODYWORK RUST REPAIR AUTO BODY SHEET METAL

Headline Number #2

Dishwasher Rack Repair Kit -repair rust

RESULT:

Headline #1 is repeated 4 times.
Headline #2 is repeated 5 times.

This means that our software has automatically checked the completed items and the 2 headlines are the ONLY ones that have been REPEATED more than 3 times each. We KNOW for certain that these are HOT ADS.

3. Hot Products/Services

a. Of the two repeated Ad, look and read each auction to determine
the product or service

Result:

We can see that Headline #1 is advertising a GUIDE ie. Information Product
We can also see that Headline #2 is advertising a physical product. Some kind of vinyl touch up paint.

4. HOT PLAYERS/BUSINESSES

We now can SPY on each of the Players that have these HOT ADS

Let's just stick with the dishwasher headline.

a. We go back to our hammertap software
b. Click on "Seller Search"
c. Enter the name of the seller (ebay userid)

Results:

We see that this seller has a 100% success rate across 18 different auctions
and has grossed $106.84 cents in the last 30 days selling his dishwashing kit thing at an average sale point of $5.74

So for this Player he is targeting a very,very slim segment of the rust market.

Who woulda thought!

Now YOU can go and SPY on HEADLINE number one and determine how much
money he has made selling his INFOPRODUCT! :->

Conclusion:

So using this methodology and the spy software we know that there is about $200 worth of volume per month. There are only really 2 players. Each targeting two different segments. One has an info product that he sells repeatedly. The other sells a physical product.

So Is this market viable? Sure! You just have to determine what YOUR OWN criteria for viability are!

As usual Thanks for reading and thanks to everybody that has contributed to this so far.

Duane Adolph

P.S

Using this EXACT same method, I "Spyed" a fellow Sowpubber making money with his OWN info product recently :->

"HE" is a player but I ain't Tellin who :->

P.S
www.hammertap.com has a 10 day free trial

Originally Posted by MichaelWinicki

In Michael Ross' thread-- "WANTED: Your Participation - The info in this post could make you money" Michael posed the question to me about how I would go about finding top selling products to sell myself or possibly even "tweak" a little and sell as my own product.

Before I get into some of the steps I would take to uncover top-selling products I'm greatly interested in how some of you would go about identifying top-selling products.

So "spill your guts" and then I'll spill mine -- how would you go about finding products that have some potential to make you some money?

Please consider this a brainstorming session-- there are no "bad" answers!

As I get older and have suffered the bumps & bruises of trying to develop products for markets that didn't have much in the way of competition I've come to appreciate the advantages of being in a market that has many competitors.

AND I'll say right now that I think if you want to make big money as an entrepreneur it's going to be in a more mature market with at least several competitors in it-- trying to make money from some of these incredibly narrow niches that don't have many competitors is just too difficult IMO.

Hey if you want to create an ebook for people interested in basket weaving, that have one arm and live in the state of George go for it if you just want something to do-- but if you want to make money I'd drop it like a hot potato. The fact is I read a lot of posts on several marketing/business opportunity boards where that's exactly the opportunity newbies are looking for because they're scared to death of competition.

The fact is that many profitable niches are filled with competitors that do not know how to market and this is where you can really make some good money.

Great post Duane!