One of the easiest mistakes to make when you’re looking for ways to make money is confusing interest with buying interest.
They aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Thousands of people can be talking about something without having the slightest intention of spending money on it.
So when I’m looking at an idea, I like to look for signs that people aren’t just interested.
They’re buying.
Or somebody else thinks they’re likely to buy and is spending money trying to reach them.
There are all sorts of ways to find those clues and I came across a few useful ones this week.
See what Etsy shoppers are actually looking for
Etsy now has its own Marketplace Insights tool.
This is interesting because the data comes directly from Etsy rather than one of the many third-party keyword tools.
You can see how often something has been searched for over the previous 30 days and how many listings are competing for those searches.
You get 15 searches a week free.
https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-gb/articles/35122361353239-How-Do-I-Use-Etsy-s-Marketplace-Insights-Tool
Find out what advertisers are spending money on
I love the Meta Ad Library for this.
Search for a product, problem or niche and you can see the ads businesses are currently running around it.
https://www.facebook.com/ads/library
Competition doesn’t put me off.
Quite the opposite.
If somebody has been paying to advertise the same sort of thing for a while, there’s a reasonable chance those ads are doing something for them.
Have a nose around TikTok
Even if you have no desire whatsoever to make TikTok videos, its Creative Center is worth bookmarking.
You can see trending products and hashtags and look at ads that are performing well.
https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter
It’s a useful way to see what people are trying to sell right now.
And sometimes the interesting bit isn’t the product itself.
It’s the angle they’re using to sell it.
Reddit can tell you what people are talking about
Reddit Pro Trends lets you track keywords and see the conversations happening around them.
https://www.redditforbusiness.com/reddit-pro
Reddit is particularly useful because people tend to be rather forthright.
They’ll tell you what they bought…
What they regret buying…
What they can’t find…
What costs too much…
What doesn’t work…
And what they wish somebody would make.
Which brings me to another favourite…
Read the bad reviews
Go to Amazon, Etsy or wherever products in your market are being sold and ignore the glowing reviews for a while.
Read the disappointed ones.
Someone who says:
“I bought this because I wanted X, but…”
has just given you some very useful information.
They wanted X badly enough to pay for it.
And the thing they bought didn’t give it to them.
That’s potentially an opportunity.
And here’s another Etsy rabbit hole
eRank has a section called Trend Buzz which lets you explore searches and trends across marketplaces.
There’s a free plan, so it’s another useful place to poke around when you’re investigating an idea.
Just don’t disappear down the rabbit hole for the rest of the afternoon.
Because I think you only need to find a few signs that money is already there:
People are searching for it, selling it, advertising it…
And buying similar things.
They’re also complaining about what they’ve bought and asking where they can find something better.
If I couldn’t find any of those, I’d start wondering whether my brilliant idea was quite as brilliant as I thought.
Something worth watching
I found a very good TED talk that ties into this.
It’s called The four-letter code to selling anything, by Derek Thompson.
The four letters are MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.
The idea originally came from industrial designer Raymond Loewy and, put very simply, it’s that we’re attracted to things that give us something new while still feeling familiar enough for us to understand them.
Or, as Thompson describes them, “familiar surprises.”
That’s a rather useful thing to think about when you’re deciding what to sell.
Something completely familiar can be boring while something completely new can be difficult to explain.
But take something people already understand and give it a different twist…
And things get interesting.
It’s had more than four million views and is well worth watching:
Of course, there’s a point where you have to stop investigating and actually sell something.
Which rather conveniently brings me to Pick Your Profit.
I’ve put six of my bestselling money-making systems together in one package for the Bank Holiday weekend.
You get all six, worth $582 altogether.
But you only need to pick one.
Choose whichever looks most doable to you, check there’s a market for it and get started.
Then you’ve still got another five waiting whenever you want to try something different.
It’s on a very low dimesale, so the price goes up as people buy:
P.S. If you’re investigating a new idea today, try the three-sign test. Don’t spend hours trying to prove there’s a market. Find three decent signs that people are already spending money in it, then decide whether it’s worth pursuing.