You’ve come up with a fantastic product idea. Now you’re ready to churn out some sales letters and sit back while the profits roll in.

Sounds good. But unless you’ve taken one very important step, your product could be destined for a speedy failure.

Many marketers don’t understand this key to making money online: making sure you have a market for your product… before you start selling.

The easiest way to find out what billions of Internet users are searching for is to use a Keyword Selector Tool, like those from Yahoo/Overture, Google, or WordTracker.

Here’s how it works…

In the dialog box, you type in a keyword related to your product. If you’re thinking of selling diet supplements, for instance, you’d try out a few different keywords that you think your potential customers would search for.

Typing “weight loss supplements” in Overture’s dialog box gets you 13,542 results, which means about 13,500 people have searched for those keywords (or similar keywords) in the past 90 days.

This gives you just a quick indication of how popular weight-loss supplements are. More people may be searching for the same keywords on other search engines – but when you get such a large number of results for those keywords on Overture, you know there are a lot of people who will be looking for your weight-loss product.

If, on the other hand, you have a different kind of product… and the keywords related to your product don’t get many results… you may want to ditch your idea in favor of something with a bigger market.

So before you spend a dime on developing your product, make sure you know that you have a market full of people who are ready to buy it.

[Ed. Note: Ready to step up to the plate and start your own Internet business? If so, online marketing expert Paul Smithson and ETR's team of friendly experts are standing by to help you. We've partnered with Paul, creator of the XSitePro website-building program, so you'll be able to come to ETR's 5 Days in July conference with nothing - no product, no marketing skills, no technical know-how - and walk out 5 days later with your own online business. No experience required, and it only takes a few minutes to get started!]