Think about it – by their very nature, successful keywords will attract more and more attention.  There will be hot contests going on for ranking using the top five words in a given market.  But what about words ranked, say, six to ten, or eleven to twenty?  Quite often, by looking at these words, you can realise some real benefits.

Research has shown more than once that the search volumes for the top five terms in a market are lower than the search volumes for all the lower ranked words combined.  Here’s a method to follow:

1.  Rank the keywords - you’ll already have this (hopefully) for your market sector.  If you haven’t, then Google’s Keyword Tool is the place to go.

2.  Find the major players in the market, and cross-reference them with the keywords.  When you find a company featuring high up on certain keywords, but lower ranked on others, then it’s clear which keywords they are investing time and effort into chasing.

3.  Find the little guys – the niche listings – some of whom will be specialising on the less popular keywords.  Check out their sites and see if they are making an effort, and you can assess the competition you are likely to face.

4.  Go for it! You should now have identified some areas where the big players are not interested, the niche players are not particularly numerous or active, and where a bit of targeted effort on your part can reap rich rewards.

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This small period of time in an unexpected place reminded me that upselling is so important – it will ensure money is not left on the table when making a deal.  If a market stall holder selling fruit can do this successfully then top Internet Marketers like you should be able to put this into action in your business.  I use the InfusionSoft system for all my sales and marketing – and using the API I have written some great 1 click upsell order forms for InfusionSoft which work very well for this sistuation.

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In this comprehensive CD Set you will discover:

Take a product that you have in mind to sell.  It could be kitchen equipment or herbal teas.  If you can’t get the same wholesale prices as the big stores, you can’t match their retail price either without losing money.  But they might only be selling the top brands; there are countless manufacturers for any product and many more models and brands for your business to sell.

Don’t only compete on the headline price

Niche products have one huge benefit: the competition is more limited and so it’s more manageable.  You’re up against other independent retailers rather than the superstores, so you can charge a realistic and competitive price for your products and still make a profit.

There are several ways to make your product and your company stand out.

Specialised knowledge

Become a specialist in whatever interests you and make your store stand out from the other retailers.  If it’s kitchen equipment, you might concentrate on a particular product.  When customers shop online, they prefer to buy from a specialist, and once they find a store that knows its products, they’ll return to shop there again.

If you find a great niche product where demand has outstripped supply, you have the opportunity to get in there and become a specialist about that product – even if it wasn’t your area to start with.

Add Value

Beyond the basic product, there are many ways to give your customer something extra.  With kitchen equipment, a leaflet of recipes; with herbal teas, a chance to try out a new variety.  If you can create a relationship, you build up your customer loyalty and give the visitors to your site a reason to shop with you again.

Apart from increasing enthusiasm for the product, you can provide your customer with a better experience shopping with you than shopping in the superstore.  A wide selection, excellent customer service and knowledgeable information will all make a customer feel they’ve chosen well.  Most online shoppers like to research extensively so provide them with background information: reviews and comparisons of the products you offer.  Even if it’s not all viewed, making the information available gives a customer a sense of confidence in the website, and that gives them the comfortable feeling that they’re making a wise choice – of the product and the retailer.

Establish Trust

With that confidence, comes trust in the retailer.  Research has shown that most buyers would prefer to spend a little more with a retailer they trust, rather than get the cheapest deal from a website that feels transient and basic.  The trust comes in the detail: a well-laid out website, accessible contact information such as freephone number, email and street address, customer comments.  All these will increase consumer trust.

It’s all about finding your niche, and supporting the customers who don’t have mass market tastes.  Your success lies in finding the markets that have the demand without such intensive high street competition.

The expression is often applied to sales, of course, on the basis that you should always be chasing the highest value sales and that most of your time should be invested in the biggest opportunities.  After all, it often takes no more effort to write an order for £10,000 than it does for a £1,000 transaction.

By extension, then, you may find yourself reducing your ROI by offering the wrong thing to your customers.  There are only really three ways to increase your income – more customers, more orders or more value per order.  As long as you don’t incur additional cost in achieving one or more of these aims, then your ROI will improve.  So how do you do it?

More customers

Make sure you attract more visitors and, crucially,  convert more of your visitors into customers.  You can do this by monitoring the traffic your site is currently getting, concentrating on your SEO, and making sure that the site is structured in the most effective manner for your visitors to find what they have come looking for.

More orders, more value

Try and identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities.  Find products and services that will generate repeat business, or improve the benefit to the customer of the base purchase.  If you sell outdoor clothing, do you also sell maps and guidebooks, for example?  Look at everything that your customer might consider alongside your current offering and you are bound to find additional opportunities.

You’re likely to start with a product you have an interest in, that you’re familiar with or have a particular reason to sell.  That’s a good start, but if your market research suggests that there isn’t a market for the product, then you need to be flexible enough to spread your net wider.

Some products will sell better in one place than another, so research where you plan to sell or your research is giving you misleading information.

• Choose your category and find the keywords that are doing well there.
• Identify the competition.
• Check out the average sell-through rates and closing prices.
• Trim your category to match your research – go for the profitability.

Here are some of the free market research resources you can find online:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/ – keyword research, showing you trends and the amount of competition for particular words.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – indicates the level of activity on Google for a keyword, and allows you to check the competition for your own keywords.

http://pages.ebay.com/help/search/questions/search-completed-listings.html – allows you to search completed sales on Ebay to see how many items of a particular type were listed, and what they sold for.

With free tools, you’ll need to do the analytics yourself – look beyond the more generalised results to see what message those statistics are giving you.  Make sure you’re matching precisely with those figures: if you’re selling new items, for instance, it’s misleading to compare an average selling price with eBay’s new and used product figures.

Paid-for tools will analyse the data for you and interpret it, providing you with reports on competition, pricing, demand and advertising.

The key is to let that market research dictate your actions.  There’s no point trying to sell a customer something you yourself want, or think others should want – look for the product that they’re asking for and provide it.  Consumers have a huge range of interests and the rarer that interest is, the more likely it is that they will go online to shop for it.  The product won’t be on the high street – but it will be in your online niche market store.