How to Do Research For Your Information Product

You can do all the research you need before creating your information product. Here is how.
The internet is just absolutely amazing for research. Take Google for example, Google allows you to do so much.
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 information products on how to train your goldfish to do tricks.
There are niche products like that all over the place. So, you’ve got to figure out, “Is this a realistic topic to create an information product on?” So, I would first go into Google. I would type, “Goldfish Tricks.” Now, with Google, I don’t know how recent this is, but if you type in something from the Google search engine, you know how those numbers pop up 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’s other ways to determine if something is selling. You can go to Amazon, and you can type in “Goldfish Tricks.” See what books are out there on goldfish tricks. You can simply call the publisher and talk to him and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about doing an information product on goldfish tricks. What’s the market like? What kind of money do these people spend? How big of market? How has it been going for you?”
Another incredible resource is the SRDS, the Standard Rate and Data Service. This is like the phone book of mailing lists. If there’s a mailing list for anything, you’re going to find it in this resource. There’s an online subscription. I think it’s about $750. You can sign up for the SRDS, and you have access to every single mailing list in the country. I will bet you there’s probably some mailings lists on goldfish enthusiasts.
You can find lists on any kind of subject imaginable or specific lists on every kind of imaginable niche there is out there. It’s just amazing in today’s information age how much information is out there.
Now, another great resource would be trade directories. Let’s say within the pet market, there’s probably a fish pet association. I guarantee you that retail stores who sell fish and fish tanks, there’s an association for them. They have trade shows, and these guys are really on top of the market. So, if there’s anyone specializing in that type of niche, you can contact the association. You could become a member of that association. You can actually rent lists from that association.
These associations, when they put on their trade shows, they usually put on seminars for all the attendees who come to the trade show. They have to do their research. When they’re putting on a big trade show like that, they’re kind of the pulse and eyes and ears of that industry. The seminar topics that they provide at that trade show, you can imagine there’s a pretty good demand. Just looking at the type of speakers at any trade show out there will give you a pretty good hint about a good information product to create using digital audio interviews.
Another great tool, and is 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 look at the traffic patterns of these websites. So, you can tell, is a particular website related to any topic, is it getting a lot of hits? Is it popular? How many visitors come to it? You can see how many people are linking to it.
So, there are all kinds of tools out there. If you just do your research, and if you just ask around, you can determine is there a market for my information product.
I would also say that if there’s a market that you’re looking to get into and you see a ton of people in it, sometimes that’s not a bad thing. You may already think that it’s pretty crowded, but that could be a really good thing. I guarantee you there are not that many people doing audio interviews to sell a product within that market. You may have all that competition out there doing the standard poor marketing methods, but you’ll just blow them away with audio.
You could absolutely dominate a niche if you come into it using audio to promote and creating audio information products as products to sell within that niche, but yes, you do need to find out, “Is there a good hungry demand for that niche?”