How do you estimate your market?

More ideas...

Look for industry trade groups and related groups (i.e., for an ebook about 'steak', check with the Beef Council and BBQ-related trade groups).

Find a good list broker (or ask your reference librarian) and see what size lists are available, particularly from magazine and catalog houses. These are people who have enough interest/affinity to buy subscriptions and request catalogs. Some even offer "buyer" splits, people who have already made purchases. Even if you don't buy a list, you can get some idea of the numbers involved.

A quick way that I check traffic in general is to use google and search a term say "bbq grill cleaning" on the top left it will show a number of results. In this case there are 1.9 million results or pages out there pertaining to this subject. The next step is to go into Google adwords and check the traffic. In this case it is 90 people per month.

Keep in mind that Google uses a 90 day average as it pertains to traffic count in adwords. And of course it being the middle of winter, not to many people are cleaning their bbq's.

What these 2 numbers show... #1 how many pages are out there on the subject. and number 2 how many people are looking. you can then break this into a ratio of sorts. I usually use 1 million as a base and the divide the word search count. in this case you would have a 45:1 ratio ( 45 views per million )

As another example we could look up "bbq grills" and the ratio there is 100:1. Or we can look at "Xbox One" and see there is a ratio of 900:1.

Keep in mind when bringing a product to market your competition factor is going to be the total number of pages you are competing against. As good as "Xbox One" looks in the ratio, you are competing with 453 MILLION websites to get that traffic.

I personally work a market / product with a 16,500/1 ratio. The great thing for me in this market is that there are 2 million pages and 33,000 searches per month. As they say on 'American Pickers' that is a "Honey Hole"!

So if you are looking for a profitable "Niche" or determining product potential, that is a quick and easy way to do it.

Hope that Helps!

The "pros" (ie major companies) may spend millions of dollars in market research before entering a niche or launching a new product. And even they may often flop in the marketplace. So being a rather simple kind of a guy, I have always chosen the most highly competitive niches, because generally the heavy lifting in market research and product testing has already been done.

A good place to start is to visit the best sellers on Amazon and virtually anything being sold on dummies.com. These are highly professional marketers, and there's a high probability the products and/or niches covered therein are big hits. Those guys are absolutely brilliant when it comes to finding the hottest niches.

Using this simple research, nearly every niche idea from these has turned out to be an astounding success for example in promoting affiliate products. In my estimation, if the ebook or product doesn't fit these criteria, then don't even bother trying to promote them.