Can’t decide what to sell? The best ideas are often in front of your eyes!
How often do you look around and actually take in your surroundings?
Always, every day, you may assume, but actually there’s a difference between ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’.
You may spend an hour eating lunch with your closest friend, but once you have parted company, if I asked what he or she was wearing you probably couldn’t tell me!
That’s because you’ve looked, but you haven’t seen!
If you start ‘seeing’, you’ll suddenly find that you are surrounded by numerous product ideas and I’ve got a super simple method that you can use to help you see the potential.
This isn’t even complicated. It’s super simple stuff but it will help you to get going, so please read carefully and follow my three steps to kick start your product research in a new niche.
1. See potential products all around you
So, the first thing to do is to simply look around you wherever you are and start making a list of the different items that you see. If you’re in an office you might start with a laptop, printer, stationary or photo frames. If you are at home you might write down cups, ornaments, kitchen equipment, shoes, clothes, cushions, toothbrushes.
When you are out and about you might see umbrellas, children’s toys, dog leads… the list goes on and on! You shouldn’t feel silly about writing down even the smallest of ideas that you see and it should be relatively easy to come up with a list of a hundred or more items.
2. Now reduce your list
Once you have completed step one you will have a list of many, many products but don’t be daunted because now is the time to go through that list and highlight between five and ten of the items that particularly catch your attention. This could be because they are something that you are interested in such as cooking, clothes or pets, or just something that you might be knowledgeable about.
There will definitely be a few options that will jump out at you or that you are initially drawn towards. Spending just a few minutes on this task will produce ideas for potential products that you can research with a view to sourcing.
Remember that these items don’t necessarily have to be within a niche market that you might already operate in as you can always sell from different venues – eBay, Amazon, your own website or all three together!
3. Research your choices
Ok, so selecting the items that you may be interested in is easy, but you still need to know if there is a demand for the products you have in mind, and of course if it is actually possible to source these goods at a competitive price.
First things first. You should now head over and make a start with eBay and search for the first of the products that you highlighted earlier on your list. You’ll need to look out for the following:
- How many other sellers are offering similar items?
- Are any of these sellers those that you may struggle to compete with?
- Look at completed listings; how many of the items are selling?
- What sort of price did the seller receive for each sale?
In doing this you will be able to see whether your chosen product has potential. If it is not immediately obvious, just drill down into a more specific version of the item that you originally considered, for example if ‘dog lead’ was on your list, try searching for ‘extra long dog lead’ or ‘patterned dog lead’ or other more specific keywords.
You should be refining your initial ideas at this point and have a good idea of some potential products. This means that now it’s time to think about where you can actually go to find some of the products that you want to sell.
There are plenty of research avenues and techniques you can use to source your stock and I’ll leave that with you to think about, but if you need help with sourcing strategies, membership of The Source Report can help you!
Always keep your eyes and ears wide open and be prepared
Your home or office isn’t the only place where you can find inspiration for potential products to sell online though. Once you get into the frame of mind of looking at every scene as an opportunity you will soon be overflowing with ideas!
- What about magazine supplements that come with the Sunday papers. Don’t put them in the recycling bin – they are full of innovative product ideas that you can investigate further.
- When you are out and about, look around you. What are the high street stores promoting this week? Is there a product that you can take inspiration from?
- What are your friends talking about? Is there a particular item or subject that they can’t stop raving about or that crops up in conversation over and over again?
- If you have children, you’ll know that they provide inspiration every day. Listen to what they talk about not only with you, but with their friends as well – they are full of ideas!
Wherever you may be at this moment in time it’s a place where you could find inspiration for your next product.
I strongly recommend that you keep a notepad with you whenever possible so that you can jot down ideas as they come to you. This way, every time you think, ‘I could sell that!’ you can write it down and look into it later. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the success of this very simple strategy!
Have a fabulous Easter weekend and as always I wish you the best of success,