Bill Myers - Feburary 9, 2008

One of the things every successful product developer learns is to always determine if there is demand for a product before you actually go to the trouble of creating the product.

In the old days (pre-internet), determining demand often meant running small classifieds in print magazines offering freebies related to your potential product, to see if anyone would be interested.

Then, based on the number of responses to your freebies, you could determine if the market justified the development of a product.

That kind of testing was expensive and often took several months before you'd know the results.

These days there is a better way that won't cost you a dime, can often show a measure of interest in a matter of minutes.

Here's what I mean.

Suppose you want to know if anyone would be interested in a DVD on how to make 'wire wrapped bracelets'.

A quick way to find out is to go to www.youtube.com and search for 'wire wrapped bracelets'. Then scroll through the results, and check the number of views the videos on that subject have.

If you find YouTube videos on the subject with 10,000+ views, it means there is probably enough interest to support how-to products on that topic.

If no YouTube videos on the subject have more than 1,000 views, it suggests not many people are searching for (or are interested in) that particular topic.

Doing this before you develop your next product can help you from developing things no one is interested in buying.