A great way to find what you should sell online is to check out websites for sale. At these times, website owners are more likely to reveal invaluable information on their businesses, from which you can learn from.

For instance, sellers would reveal their web traffic reports, income reports, income sources, optimized keywords, hosting information, expenses and the daily maintenance required. Also, by reviewing the questions and answers posted on the Questions to the Seller section of each posting, we acquire even more information about an online business.

You’ll gain insight on some of the ways these sellers promote their websites. (Some of them will only reveal details of their methods over private messages to serious buyers). In fact, you will also observe the business models deployed by sellers, and possibly the potential of their business.

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If you are finding it increasingly difficult to search engine optimize your site, you may want to check out your competitors.

To do this, Google your optimized keyword and see who ranks at top ten. Then, enter their URL into the search field and look at the number of results returned. Use the following format link:website.com, to determine the number of incoming links to your competitor’s website. Substitute your competitor’s URL with yours and check out the difference in the numbers.

Incoming links

Google uses the number of relevant incoming and outgoing links as one of their criteria for search engine results ranking. Therefore, a lower number of incoming links may also be the reason why you are ranked lower. Of course, the Page Rank of these sites where the incoming links originate from also matter in search engine optimization.

What is YOUR link strategy?

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How can we combine traditional marketing methods with online marketing strategies?

While running a search on “What to Sell Online”, I came across this post by Ray Edwards. Essentially, it highlights steps on what aspiring online marketers should do to find a product or service to sell online.

Product surveys, personal interests and data analysis are some of the methods advocated by Ray. Granted, these are all traditional marketing research techniques commonly utilized by marketing gurus. They are thoroughly effective for either 1) Large corporations with a huge marketing and distribution budget or, 2) Brick and mortar small businesses with customers within an X-mile radius. Ultimately, these are great if you are answering the “What to sell” question.

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In my previous post, How to Generate Ideas on What to Sell Online, I explored the various idea sources of possible product niches. Looking at what people bought, talked about, asked about or researched on, pretty much sparks off your imagination on how you can fulfill their needs.

Now that you have an entire list of product ideas, your next step is sieve out those with too much competition. Essentially, the key to a successful online product is the specific KEYWORDS used and optimized in a blog, sales page or website. The strategy here is to find niche keywords with some volume of searches and low competition from other websites, especially web 2.0 websites.

How do we do this?

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