Test The Viability Of These Products

After creating a list of initial product ideas, you will now need to do some additional checks to assess viability.
Namely:

➔ Buyer volume
➔ Seller competition
➔ Product Price
➔ General traffic volume
➔ Facebook Reach

Firstly, identify the Main Product Keyword:

Before you can begin assessment, you will need to work out what the main keyword is for each of your product
ideas. It's usually simple to work out. Just imagine what people would search for.

The main product keywords for Yoga Mats and Golf balls would simply be 'Yoga Mats' and 'Golf balls'. However if
you identified a product such as in the image below, the main keyword would not be 'Tritan Bottle', as that is a sub-
name of the main brand name.

The product is a water bottle, so the keyword would simply be 'water bottles'.

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Buyer Volume:

To check buyer volume, you will need to assess the BSR (best seller rank) of the top ranking products that appear
when you search Amazon for your main product keyword. (ie. Yoga mats, golf tees etc)

If the BSR's are HIGH, this indicates that the buyer volume is likely LOW, so it won't be worth moving ahead with a
product as you won't be selling much, even if you hit the top rankings.

Do the following:

Type the main product keyword for each product idea into Amazon's search bar, making sure you have 'All
departments' selected.

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When the search results appear, make sure 3 out of the TOP 5 listed products have a BSR of 5000 or under for the
top level category that the product is listed in. You will have to click through to each product page and scroll down
to find the BSR number. See the image below on how to find it.

Seller Competition:

If the BSR numbers are viable, you can then move on to assess seller competition.

At a high level, seller competition can be determined by the number of reviews the top ranked products have.
This is because generally speaking, the more (positive) reviews a product has, the higher Amazon will rank it and
the more difficult it will be to beat it in the search results.

If you are competing against 3 products all of which have 1000+ reviews, then you are going to need to sell

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thousands of products to get as many reviews. It's going to take far too long to get results. So...

• Make sure all of the top 3 products that appear in the results each have MORE than 30 reviews but LESS than
500 reviews (although if one has 28... or 510 then ok, let's not nit pick)

Product Price:

For each product type that passes the Buyer Volume and Seller Competition criteria, you can then assess the
product price.

• Make sure the top 3 products listed are all priced over $10 but under $75 (or the equivalent in your currency).
Look at the 'sale price' if the product is on sale, not the crossed out 'non-sale' price. (almost all products on
Amazon are 'on sale' all the time!)

Add all this information into your spreadsheet.

General Traffic Volume:

Either use www.MerchantWords.com or Google's Keyword planner tool (or both) to verify traffic volume. You
want to see a volume of at least 5,000 monthly searches in Google and more than 20,000 in Merchant Words. (I
base this on the typical volume range you generally get back from these tools. Just trust me on the numbers.)

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For Keyword Planner, go to: https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner, type in your keyword and select the
parameters as laid out in the image on the left below. Then go to the keyword ideas tab (view the image on the
right) to see the volume for specific keywords.

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If you want to use Merchant Words, which is an excellent (paid) tool that estimates actual traffic on Amazon itself,
type in the main keyword, search, then sort by volume.

During this process you may also find related keywords or other product ideas which also have good traffic volume.
(note: 'Yoga Mat Bag' in the image below) That is a good thing. Note down and also do the full research on those
products too.

Add the traffic data into your spreadsheet.

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Facebook Audience:

Next, you will need to make sure that there is a targeted Facebook audience that you could market the product to.
The audience needs to be at least 150,000 people. Preferably it should be more than that.

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Set up a Facebook account if you don't have one already.

Once you have the account set up, (or when you are in your existing account) go to the 'create ads' link via the
drop down to the top right of the page:

Then select the 'Send people to your website' ad creation option. For the URL enter any random URL (such as
www.google.com) in order for the rest of the page to appear. Then do the following (also refer to the image
further below):

• Enter the country where your Amazon product will be selling. US, UK etc.

• For the age range and gender, think about who would be buying this particular product. If the product was
surfboard covers with a skull and cross bones image, it would be a safe guess to assume the audience would
probably be males between the ages of 20 and 40. For anti-ageing face cream, maybe females between the
ages of 35 and 50. You get the idea. If it is not totally obvious, then leave gender as 'All' and set the age range
to be between 25 and 60.

(Note: there is a way to determine interests by gender using 'Audience Insights', however, we don't really want to
get too deep into that at this point. We are still at the initial research phase, so a sensible guess is sufficient.)

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There are a couple of methods to assess what the size of the audience will be for a particular product. Which one
you use depends on the product you are doing research for.

Method 1: Type in the broad market keyword (NOT the main product keyword) into the 'interests' area to see how
many people on Facebook have flagged this area as an interest of theirs. For instance:

• For Yoga Mats you would type in 'Yoga'

• For Golf Balls you would type in 'Golf'

In some cases, you may need to be more specific. If say, you were doing research for a dog collar specifically for
Labradors, you would not type in 'dog' as the collar is not for all dogs. In this instance, you would type in
'Labradors'.

See the image below as a guide:

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Method 2: Alternatively, you may need to use the 'More Demographics' option to find your audience. The reason
why is because if you are trying to gauge the size of an audience of people interested in say, 'Hooded towels for
babies' clearly hooded towels is not going to be something that people will list as an actual 'interest' on Facebook.
Nor would 'babies'. I suppose people could 'like' babies, but these people are most likely to have never experienced
having one! - And are therefore not your audience.

• Instead, you would find this audience by going:

More Demographics: Parents > All Parents > Parents (child 0-3yrs)

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Parents with a child from 0-3yrs would be your audience in this instance. They are the most likely audience to be
interested buying in 'Hooded towels for babies' as they would be using one on a daily basis at bath time.

Depending on the market and product type you are researching for, you will simply need to use your initiative to
find your audience.

Note down the size of the potential Facebook audience for each product in your spreadsheet as you will need this
number when you are deciding which product to move forward with.

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Refining Your List:

To start, you should have had a list of 30 to 40 product ideas. However, after putting each product through the
above stages of research to discover which products are viable, you should have refined this list down to hopefully
5 or 10 potential products.

An important general note about product selection and competition:

Don't stress too much about the potential competition and whether there are known brands selling the same type
of product. You are going to be able to get onto the first page of Amazon for your main keywords on day #1
anyway and get fast sales, reviews and solid rankings going forward.

It is MUCH more important to focus on the viability of the product in terms of buyer volume, potential audience,
product expansion and ease of sales.

Remember you do not need to be selling some advanced breakthrough product to make money on Amazon.
People literally make hundred of thousands, even millions of dollars per year selling the most simple products
imaginable. Stuff like dish clothes, wooden spoons, plastic plates and so on.

Don't think breakthrough. Think Simple. Think Proven.

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