OK, so you have decided on a “product” your going to offer people. The next step is market research. Luckily with the internet and internet based businesses the vast majority of your competition is already on the net. So search for what your going to offer.
Now there are good ways to get search results and there are bad ways. In most the search engines if you search for a term without quote marks you get results that are different than those with quote marks. Suggest you try searching both ways and see what kind of results you get from the various search Engines that are out there. Your looking for the number of similar businesses or competition to your products. In the case of my Gourmet Coffee site there are MILLIONS of sites that I am competing against. 1.95 MILLION at last check for the search term Gourmet Coffee. However my main product line is Flavored Coffee so when a search for that is done it comes up with only Half a Million or 25% of the Gourmet Coffee search. Thus I have focused my Coffee site to really push the flavored coffees, adding new ones and making sure that part of my site is always updating with new things.
Now that you have an idea of the numbers of competitors you are facing it’s time to look at what they are offering. Check some of the sites that come up in the results, not just the first one (though for reasons to be discussed later and in other areas look carefully and bookmark the top 5 so you can go back to them later). You now need to decide is your product going to be able to compete against the competition? Can you offer a better price? Can you offer more information? In the case of Blog sites, can you be more entertaining, informative, or a better writer?
DECISION TIME.. Do you go forward? That is a question only you can answer, but you should not be diswaded by the number or quality of the other competitors, mearly have the confidence that you will take some part of the market share that is out there, or create more market share by virtue of your surpassing them in your marketing of your “product”.
Even with Millions of competitors out there, and more growing everyday, doesn’t mean you can not make money off a “product”. The key to any successful company is how well they are able to market their products vs the competition and the costs of doing business. Obviously the fewer the number of competitors there are, the better your chances of becoming tops in search results for search terms, but that should not be the only factor going into your decision.
More to come keep watching.
Sparky