Secret to Success? Copy Other’s Success

Sounds easy right?  Well it actually is.  Spying on your competitors is nothing new…   I’m sure you’ve heard stories about everything from businesses snooping through their competitor’s trash to sending a “spy” directly to work inside the company.  On the digital front,  it is much easier to spy on your competitors.    I have been using several tools for years to do just that,  but I want to discuss one specifically today,  TeraPeak.

I use terapeak not only to research physical goods that sell on Ebay,  but digital goods as well.   I have a few Ebay accounts,  ones that focus on certain products.   I have two accounts that I sell digital products under.   Ebay has been tremendous in helping me gather leads for my HostForGeeks.com website as well as finding physical products to sell on Ebay and other channels.

I research sellers in the categories that I am interested in and keep them in a spreadsheet which you can find here.  I then analyze this data to narrow down what I am going to be selling using the sell through rate, price, number of sales and length of auction.    I also “guess” the tool I am going to use to reproduce what the seller is doing on Ebay then add my own little flare to it.  My own flare could be adding something of value to the auction to get them in my sales funnel to adding more for their money in terms of quality or quantity they are getting.  This is where the sales page really comes into play.  I use a carefully crafted sales page with clean graphics that not only looks professional but grabs the potential buyers attention and begs them to make the purchase.

My goal is to have 500 customers on HostForGeeks.com by years end using Ebay and other channels to funnel leads into my system.  I expect to spend very little on advertising minus facebook.  I have yet to determine the budget,  but Facebook can prove to be invaluable if used correctly to make sales.   I am yet to finish my latest project but once done it will be completely on auto pilot.

Using Terapeak to do product and seller research is well worth the $35/month I pay for the service.  I have uncovered several categories and potential niches that I plan on milking in the future.  The only problem I have is I collect so much data but have so little time to sort through it.