Stay Closed with the Market Demand for Growing Your eBay Business

If you have followed my advice and started selling some of your own customized items in eBay, you should have got some positive results already. But in order to keep your business growing, you need to stay closed with the market trend and demand. You cannot just stick to the same old items without any change with the market and expect you can sustain for long.

There are no fixed rules how to know what's hot in the market. As long as you stay closed with the market yourself, you will know what's hot to sell.

One of my ways to know the trend is to take a look at the Yahoo home page. See what's in the "Today's Top Searches". E.g. at the time of this writing, this is the top 10:

1. The Girls Next Door
2. Sondra Locke
3. Jennifer Lopez
4. Dinner Recipes
5. 2010 Mazda 3
6. NASCAR
7. Neil Patrick Harris
8. Free Ecards
9. Income Tax Credits
10. Health Insurance

Just click and take a look. Or modify your searches as "The Girls Next Door Mousepad", "NASCAR Clocks", etc.. You may find some items related to these searches, e.g.:

http://www.plushliving.net/mousepads.html
http://www.buydirectusa.com/shop/nascar-clocks/index.shtml

See if there are something similar you can create for your own sales.

Another way to know what's hot in the market is to read the news. Pay attention to the top news, events, people, etc. One simple example is Barack Obama over the past few months. You don't have to do a professional research before you know how crazy the items were sold as long as it was related to him. Again, do some searches like "Obama Gifts", "Barack Obama Items", etc.. See what people are selling and see how you could follow the tread quickly:

http://barackobamagifts.com/index.htm
http://www.democratnationalcommittee.com/candidates/barack_obama.htm

The third way I do the most is to see what hot movies are coming up which people are talking about a lot. For example, one of the movies people are talking about a lot is the "Angels and Demons" by Tom Hanks coming up in a few months. Most people will be attracted by the concept of Ambigram as it may be the first time they hear about it. On the early teaser poster from the movie, there was no Tom Hanks. You can only see Ambigram displaying in the background, indicating that Ambigrams will be playing a critical role in this blockbuster movie.

So you know what to do, don't you? Try to search "Ambigram Items", "Ambigram Gifts" in Yahoo or Google and see if you can start selling something for the coming demand:

http://www.giftamax.com/Market/SearchResult.aspx?key=ambigram
http://www.wowgiftmart.com/ambigram.html

So these are some simple strategies that I'm using all the time. Spend some time every week for little researches. That should definitely help your business grow a lot.