5 Ways To Do Your Market Research Right

The most important success factor in the affiliate business is doing your homework. When you do your homework and know your market inside and out, you can tap into the potential of the market and satisfy the unique needs of your prospects. So how do you do market research? It really sounds intimidating and many people think of that as a super secret method that is only known to people graduating from Harvard or Yale, but the truth of the matter is, you may be already doing market research without knowing it.

Thanks to Google and a few other companies, there are many tools out there that allow you to keep your ear on the ground and figure out the hot markets. In addition, you can keep a eye on your market to see trends and upcoming developments that can give you an edge over your competitors by using these resources:

• Google Alerts/Google Reader: Google Reader is the tool to keep track of your favorite industry RSS feeds to keep yourself up to date. In addition, you can use it in conjunction with Google Alerts to keep track of your market by keyword phrases. If you want to go ninja with this method, you can grab the RSS feed of Google news per key-term and import it to Google reader. But you can’t go wrong with these tools.
• Google Trends: Google trends is an absolutely amazing tool that allows you to see the trends in any market. If you track the shopping industry with Google trends you can see the seasonality easily. You can try it for any market, and it gives you a lot of information about the viability of your market.
• eBay Pulse: eBay pulse allows you to keep a tab on the pulse of eBay market. You can figure out the hottest items, the items that people are searching for, and much more. You can easily draw conclusions if you gather enough data from eBay pulse.
• Ninja tools: there are a few ninja tools that not many affiliates use but are extremely powerful tools that can expose your competitors and the markets that they are targeting. One of these tools is SpyFu. SpyFu allows you to figure out the top advertisers, their ads, top keywords, organic and paid search movers, and much more. The information you can gather from such tools is simply incredible.
• Market Sources: last but not the least you should keep an eye out on Jupiter Research, Forrester, and comScore. These guys make a living out of keeping an eye on thousands of markets, and there is no reason you shouldn’t take advantage of data gathered by these folks,

Gathering data about your market may look daunting at first, but it is not really that complicated. It is time-consuming however. In addition, you should avoid the temptation of hypothesizing before having enough information to back it up. But if you use all these resources in conjunction, you will have enough data to draw powerful conclusions that can move your affiliate business to the next level.