Market research is the first task you should do as an affiliate marketer. Find a thirsty market, provide a product they want (not necessarily they need), bring it to them, and you are very likely to be in profit. This is way easier than finding a product and trying to find someone to buy it.

Note: If you think you’re stuck with a product and you need to sell it for any reason (proving it to yourself for example), please hang around. I’ll be posting about a method to market anything.

So .. back to market research. Let’s find a thirsty market first and make sure that someone is ready to pay money to fulfill their need.

What is a Thirsty Market?

First let’s define what is a thirsty market that will absorb your product like a sponge absorbs water.

A thirsty market is a group of people who have a really urgent issue that is affecting their quality of life in a way that they can not, or are not willing to, tolerate. Examples are: people who gained weight involuntarily and they are losing their jobs, love, or social gains because of it. Losing weight for such people is as important for them as getting hired after a year of unemployment for others.

And that’s another good example; people who lost their jobs and have been unemployed for quite long time that they are running out of savings.

How about women who want to have kids, everything is fine, but they don’t seem to be able to conceive.

These are examples of  markets that are thirsty for something to solve their problems, and if you can find that solution and bring it to them you are very likely to be making money in minutes.

One thing to consider though, some markets are not ready to buy your product no matter how much they want it. That could be due to some background issues like lack of fund or due to their location.

Now that sounds pretty easy, except that you’ll need to know where to start!

Where to Start Market Research?

You’ll need a start point and brain storm from there. That start point could be an idea that came to your mind, an infomercial, a TV commercial, a new trend in a talk show, or even something you saw on the news.

This is just the start point. The start point is sometimes all what you are looking for, but most of the time you’ll need to do a lot of research until you find a really thirsty market.

So .. the start point is not a big deal. Just do what you normally do every day but add to that a note pad and a pencil, and collect ideas. After doing this for just one day you’ll have more than more starting points than you can handle.

How to do the market research?

Now that you have a start point go to Google and search for broadest term related to the start point. Do you see any sponsored ads? If yes then there is a market. How many ads do you see? If you see a lot of ads then there is a huge market and the competition is fierce. Then start narrowing your search using Google suggestions at the bottom of the search results page. keep doing this and write down the search terms that you found sponsored ads showing with them.

IMPORTANT: Please note that the ads that you’ll find are all geographically targeted. The markets you’ll find this way are specific to your local area (country, state, or even city). If you want to see markets in other places you’ll need to use a proxy.

After you’ve built a list of potential markets keep an eye on them and make sure that the ads are still there for a week or so. Have a screen shot for your records and compare them at the end of the week.

One thing to keep in mind. You might need to keep starting market research projects every day in an overlapping fashion, and don’t stop until you find at least 3 markets.

After you find these markets you’ll need to a product or service. And this is what the next post will be about.