Online Market Research - The Foundation of Building an Internet Business to Make Money Online

Whether your online business plan is to start a content website or blog to make money with Advertising programs like Google AdSense, text link ads and, etc; or your big plan is to set up an e-commerce website to market your products and services, you must conduct online market research prior to your online business launch.

The Internet has plenty of free and inexpensive tools to help you research your market or niche online independently. Online market research is essential for a number of reasons:

1. To determine whether there is a targeted market or group for the products, services, or information you would be providing through your website.

2. To find out the competition on your target niche or market. If your research shows that there are hundreds millions of websites competing in an online niche or market, this could mean that the niche is already saturated.

3. To identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors as compared to your own online business.

4. To understand better the target audience of your niche, their needs, and how to reach your products, services or information to them.

Below are a number of online niche research tools and tactics you can use:

1. Search Engines – The 2 biggest search engines on the net, Google and Yahoo are simple tools that allow you to research any niche or market at no cost. Google and Yahoo are best use for determining the competition of your niche. Simply enter the common search phrases of your niche and press the search button; you'll discover how many websites roughly are competing for your niche. So you'll know how tough your competition is.

The search engines are also helpful for your website SEO such as checking your competitor’s website incoming links, so you can target the similar sites in your link-building campaign.

2. Keyword Suggestion Tools – Keyword suggestion tools will give you an idea of the demand level and the size of your target niche. Simply enter a search phrase commonly used by people to search websites in your niche and the tools will show the total number of searches done in the last month. If a niche has more than 50,000 searches monthly, then you can assume that the niche has a good level of demand. You should avoid entering into niches that have less than 10,000 monthly because they are lacked of demand and hard to make money. The 2 Keyword tools that often used by people to do niche research are Overture and Wordtracker. Overture seems not working properly right now, you may use another free tool here.

3. Online Market Research Reports – There are online companies and researchers conduct online market research and compile their research into reports available for the public to download online. Some of them charge a fee for the download and others offer the report absolutely free. Speaking about free market research reports, ebay has a section at http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/whatshot.html where you can access to download several reports that tell you about what's hot in ebay market. Since ebay market is very large and worldwide, whatever items hot in ebay could also mean hot in the Internet market. So if you want to know whether your niche is profitable, you could always refer the ebay reports to get an idea of how profitable your niche is.

4. Online Survey – Conducting online survey is a great way to gather feedbacks from your target audience. One of the methods to conduct online surveys is by using poll sites like http://www.quimble.com and http://www.dpolls.com. You can join these poll sites and create polls to get a general consensus of what people want, how people think and how they make decisions among other things. Once you know what people are interested in buying or knowing, you can start setting your website up to offer them the products and services they need or to provide the info and content they are looking for.