You can do all the research you need before creating your information product. Here is how.
The Internet is absolutely amazing for research. Take Google for example, Google allows you to do a lot.
So if you’re deciding, “Okay, I want to create an interview series on goldfish tricks,” have you ever heard of this? There are people who have informational products on how to train your goldfish to do tricks.
There are niche products like that everywhere. So you need to find out, “Is this a realistic topic to create an information product on?” So, I would go to Google first. I would write, “Goldfish Tricks.” Now with Google, I don’t know how recent this is, but if you type something from the Google search engine, do you know how those numbers appear on the right? Well, it’s a simple way to determine, are there other people in the world looking for goldfish tricks? Is there a demand for a product like this?
There are other ways to determine if something is selling. You can go to Amazon and you can type “Goldfish Tricks”. See what books there are on goldfish tricks. You can just call the publisher and talk to him and say, “Hey, I’m thinking of doing an information product on goldfish tricks. What’s the market like? What kind of money are these people spending? How big is the market?” market? How has it gone well for you?”
Another incredible resource is the SRDS, the Data Service and Standard Rate. This is like the phone book for mailing lists. If there’s a mailing list for anything, you’ll find it at this resource. There is an online subscription. I think it’s about $750. You can sign up for SRDS and you have access to all the mailing lists in the country. I bet there are probably some mailing lists out there about goldfish enthusiasts.
You can find lists on any type of topic imaginable or specific lists on every type of niche imaginable out there. In today’s information age, it’s amazing how much information exists.
Now another great resource would be business directories. Let’s say that within the pet market, there is probably a fish pet association. I guarantee that the retail stores that sell fish and fish tanks, there is an association for them. They have trade shows, and these guys are really at the top of the market. So if there is someone specialized in that type of niche, you can contact the association. You could become a member of that association. In fact, you can rent lists from that association.
These associations, when they organize their fairs, usually organize seminars for all the attendees who come to the fair. They have to do their research. When they put on a big trade show like that, they’re like the pulse, the eyes, and the ears of that industry. The topics of the seminars that they provide at that trade show, you can imagine that there is a pretty good demand. Just looking at the type of speakers at any trade show will give you a good clue as to a good information product to create using digital audio interviewing.
Another great tool, and it’s called “Alexa.” Alexa will give you an idea of how popular a website is. They list them numerically from one to I think a million of the most popular websites, and you can see the traffic patterns of these websites. So you can tell if a particular website is related to some topic, is it getting a lot of hits? Is popular? How many visitors come to it? You can see how many people are linking to it.
Therefore, there are all kinds of tools out there. If you just do your research, and if you just ask, you can determine if there is a market for my information product.
I would also say that if there’s a market you’re looking to get into and you see a bunch of people in it, sometimes that’s not a bad thing. You might already think it’s pretty crowded, but that could be a really good thing. I guarantee you there are not many people doing audio interviews to sell a product within that market. You may have all that competition doing the standard marketing methods poorly, but it will just blow them away with the audio.
You could absolutely dominate a niche if you enter it using audio to promote and create audio information products as products to sell within that niche, but yes, you need to figure out, “Is there a good hungry demand for that niche?”