One of the most common mistakes new Internet marketers make is to get caught up in their own enthusiasm over what they want to sell. Enthusiasm is great but unless you couple it with solid research and a hard, honest look at your business plan, it can blind you to fatal flaws you might otherwise avoid.

The Un-fun Side of Online Business

You get excited about a product or a line of products or a way of presenting them. You build your website. You do the marketing. Then you wait with bated breath for the orders to start coming in. You hear crickets chirping. You see a tumbleweed roll by in the lonely breeze. But you don’t see orders, or at least not enough of them. It happens.

It’s easy to find people to whom this has happened. Some of them are the ones angrily spouting on every forum that will have them about how Internet marketing is all a steaming pile of nature’s fertilizer.

How to Avoid It

Clearly, you need to do some serious research before you launch your online business. You need to know if there’s really a market out there that will look for what you want to sell at the price you want to sell it. Let’s say you’ve got a great connection for tropical fish. Are people really looking online to buy tropical fish? Or are they more likely to buy them from a local shop? Maybe people are looking for that local shop online.

A great way to start is by visiting a site that already sells something you intend to sell. Some of those sites, like Amazon, Zappos, and many others, tell you what the best selling items are in a certain category. More customers buying a certain product means a better chance that you'll be able to capture some of that business.

Once you have an idea of what sells well, use the StoresOnline Reverse Search Tool to see what keywords people are using to find those items. What niche keywords do you see? You may not be able to sell tropical fish using just the term “tropical fish” but you may be able to sell them using the term “angel fish Atlanta”, assuming you live in the Atlanta area.

In order to compete, you often have to find a very specific group of people who want a very specific product. That way, when you do your marketing, you can market using the specific keywords that group of people will use to find your products.

What Else You Can Do

There are plenty of other factors you should research, if you can. Is your target market responsive to online marketing? Are they averse to shopping online? Do they have money to spend? Do they mainly buy seasonally? Will they only look at the price of your product or will they look at other factors you can provide?

One final point: Even with all the research done, not every online business will succeed. But if you look at the Success Stories page on this website, you’ll notice that there’s one thing that many of those people have in common. That is that while many of them failed at first, they kept trying different combinations of products and marketing until they found one that worked. If your first attempt fails, you’re in good company. Don’t give up or get angry, just try something else. Resolve to keep trying until you find the right mix.