Prosper Newsletter: June 2007 > Ecommerce

You understand that the following information is educational in nature and is not intended to be legal, accounting, or tax advice. You are responsible for your own financial decisions and should consult your own legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making your financial decisions.

Supply and Demand

An aspect you need to consider when you are selecting a product is the idea of supply and demand. It would not be beneficial for you to select a product that very few Internet users are looking for.

Supply and demand is the basis or foundation of economics and business. For an example of demand, think of children. Children are demanding; they want things now. Demand is the measurement of how many people want what we have to offer or might choose to offer.

Demand

The Internet offers information on what people want and what people are looking for or how many people searched for a specific keyword. One website you can visit to find out this information is www.inventory.overture.com. Once you are at this site you will find a keyword selector tool. You can type in a keyword or a product that you may want to sell. Remember that before we get to this point we should put a large list together of items we may want to sell. Be creative. Expand your thinking. Start with areas that interest you, but also try different areas of interest. You'll be more motivated to make it a part of your life if it's something that interests you.

Another website that you can look at is www.pixelfast.com/overture. These sites provide you with an idea of the demand on searches by keyword. These sites will also give you a list of generic keywords that may be related to the keyword that you entered. You probably want to find a keyword that has search hits between 500 and 20,000 a month.

One example is basketball. Maybe basketball could be one idea. Enter the word basketball for your keyword. You will get the results after just a few seconds. It shows you the number of searches that were done on this topic in the past month. These results come from Yahoo!. It will also list some related topics.

Basketball is a very broad subject. There is fantasy basketball, basketball uniforms, college basketball, basketball camps, basketball shoes and other sub-topics in basketball. The website may show a count of 21,000 people that have searched for basketball. Yahoo! was used for 21.4 percent of the searches for basketball on the Internet last month. So the total is about five times higher on all of the search engines put together. Remember, when you are considering demand, more is better.

Supply

The second principle is supply. Supply is the number of competitors you have that are using the same keyword to market their website. You can check this at www.google.com by typing in the keyword in the search bar. This brings up the total number of hits (websites). Generally, anything under about 4 million would be considered a good keyword.

Google is the largest search engine on the Internet. Google drives 50 percent of the search-engine traffic. To determine the supply, go to Google and enter in the keyword. In this example, use basketball shoes. In February there were 21,000 searches done in Yahoo!. Somewhere over 10,000 is usually best. Type basketball shoes in the search field of Google and it brings up a page that shows websites that relate to basketball shoes. This page shows a list of 1-10 of 21 million different pages or sites. This number may fluctuate, but these numbers are for the entire Internet. Numbers change as Google gets new updates. That total number is the amount of supply. That is the number of web pages that Google has found that reference basketball shoes.

The reason that finding a niche is so important is because you want to have the best product and you want to be at the top of this page. Ideally, you want the supply on the Internet to be low. You want demand to be high, but supply or competition to be low. Twenty million sites is a high amount of supply. A better number is five or six million.

We want demand, or the number of searches being done on this topic to be a high number, and supply, the number of search results, to be a low number. Twenty thousand people looked for basketball shoes, and Yahoo! has just one fifth of that. In Google there are over 20 million sites to compete with. This is an example of a product that doesn't meet both criteria. Basketball shoes shows an acceptable number for demand, but there are too many sites relating to this product to compete with.

Here are some other examples. In the Rocky Mountains, there is a lot of skiing. Go back to www.inventory.overture.com and type in skis. In Yahoo! there were 100,000 searches for skis in last month. Now go to Google and type in skis and you get 18 million results. There are a lot of people looking but there is still too much supply or too much competition. Now go back to www.inventory.overture.com and look at related searches. There were 11,000 searches for ski rentals. Then back to Google and search for ski rentals. That comes up with 34 million, so that's not a good example either.

Since the purpose of this article is just to get you thinking, we will not list a good idea for a product. Instead, we will let you start thinking about things that interest you. Be creative and follow your passions.

Testimonial

Designing for Success

In January we signed up with Prosper Learning to learn how to build and market a website. We had already built a website, which was getting a lot of visitors, but no customers. Naturally we were frustrated and confused. After only a few weeks of classes with Prosper we realized our website was not that bad, but we were targeting the wrong audience. People coming to our site were looking for information, not to buy our products. So, we started over, built a new site, which targeted a more specific niche, and learned how to market it properly. Within a few weeks of completing the site and the marketing strategies taught to us by Prosper; our site is in the top ten of allinanchor for Google. We still have not gotten any customers to buy our product; but we now know that is because of the product, not the website or the marketing. We are continuing to market the site using the techniques taught by Prosper. What we have learned from Prosper has been invaluable and has sent us in a whole different direction, one we never anticipated.

My sister, who works for an advertising agency locally, called and asked us if we designed websites. Her boss had some clients who either needed websites or were unhappy with the people who were supposed to design one for them. We told her what we had been doing and told her to show her boss the site we designed. After looking at our site, she called and asked us to come in to talk. We went home with the information, did some research, and went back to her with an estimate to do the work. She gave us one of her toughest clients to work on first. A week later, we had designed a new website for him, showed it to him and told him what else we could do if he decided to hire us. That day he hired us and wrote us a check!! In the meantime, we decided this was something we could definitely do on our own; so we set up a business called NetDzyne, made up some business cards, and were ready to go out and find some clients on our own. Well, so far we haven't had to because we sold this first website that we created for her client and now she wants us to design a website for her! We've been trying to find time to design a website for our new business; but have been so busy doing work for other people, we haven't had time.

This is exciting and fun and something we can do together at home, which is exactly what we were looking for!!!! Thank you Prosper for giving us the knowledge and tools to succeed!

Mary Ann R. and Brad P.

Tip of the Month

Statistical Tracking Resources

Chances are that your web-building program has some type of tracking software included with it. However, if this is not the case, or you simply want better tracking software, there are plenty of options available to you.

A website that offers tracking services for free is StatCounter, at www.statcounter.com. Visit the site and investigate their services. You may find that they have exactly what you are looking for, or you may want something more sophisticated. Either way, it may provide a good starting point from which to proceed. Other free tracking software may be found at the following websites:

Most of these programs offer more sophisticated software for specific fees. We recommend purchasing more advanced software if you are able to. It will enable you to track such factors as what keywords the traffic came from, and what search engine and what words a buyer used. With this kind of software, you not only know what words are receiving the best results, as far as traffic goes, but also which words are bringing in paying customers. Paying for more professional tracking software may ultimately save you advertising dollars. You are encouraged to use the major search engines to find additional site-tracking tools.

In addition, if you are using a tracking service, remember to place the tracking code on each and every page of your site. If you only put it on your homepage, the homepage will be the only page that you will generate statistics for. By placing the code on every page, you will be able to track each page-making the most of your online business.

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