{Edit - This post is merely meant as educational. This post does not encourage copyright theft.}

Widely known but heavily underutilized and nobody has brought it up on the blog or forum so I will go ahead and cover this easy method of producing information products. I would like to say right now that I do not produce nor intend on producing information products. I tried it once and totally got burned by a buyer. However I feel outside the Internet Marketing realm there are a ton of actually good ebooks out there. There is also a lot of money to be made. If I decided to sit back and withhold something I know is valuable just because I do not use it for my own financial gain then that kind of makes me a hypocrite. Besides, if I am not doing it and you like to produce ebooks than I rather see someone make money with it instead of it just floating about and you not knowing about it.

Without further rambling, I want to first remind you of a great niche research tool that is completely free and only requires that you have eyesight and a little bit of your *out of box thinking* cap turned on. In addition to this niche tool I will also refer back to the niche we focused on, which was *Diabetic Recipes*. (It’s imperative you read that last linked article) for you to completely understand where I am going with this.

I showed you killer ways to find a niche that has active discussions but I also provided you the means to get all the information necessary to solve this niche’s problems. In this case diabetics were looking for foods and recipes to eat healthier. While I pointed out that you could basically take diabetic recipe ideas from files and samples easily, here’s another great way to just grab more ideas from information that has already been published.

 {Edit} All graphics for this post were lost.

In my last post we talked about utilizing Yahoo Groups to conduct some initial market research. While there are tons of options available to assess markets and look for hungry people wanting solutions to problems, let’s shift our focus a bit and utilize a source I love personally to conduct some PRODUCT research.

Kaboodle is one of those sources that are one in a rare few. When I first started scanning their site and assessing products and reviews it kind of reminded me a little bit like Amazon and Ebay in one. However, the social interaction aspect of Kaboodle is a heck of a lot cooler than either of those two in my opinion. It’s because Kaboodle was built on the foundation that it was initially a social networking site. However it has evolved into a system that allows users to create lists of products, articles, websites/webpages and share them among the Kaboodle community. A hidden gem among this is optimizing each product you list within your targeted theme lists with proper on-page SEO and you can snag some great Search Rankings as well.

I am going to cover Kaboodle in depth this week (maybe like a series) but for now let’s look at it on how we can go there right now and get ideas on what type of products we as affiliate marketers may want to promote.

The first thing you need to do is sign up to become a user. I am not telling you to do this for the hell of it. I am going to show you an image of my account right now and hopefully you will see why the inside of your profile is truly a gem for product research. There are hundreds of features to utilize on Kaboodle, but let’s look at the goodies that are presented to us right off the bat after joining.

Widely known but heavily under-utilized. Yahoo Groups are one of the best ways to conduct market research online. This resource is nothing new, in fact it’s been used for a long time now. However not a lot people really talk about it. Well, let’s dare to be different.

Yahoo Groups is vast. It is worldwide. As a matter of fact here are the countries they cover along with the US:

Yahoo! Groups Worldwide: Asia • Argentina • Australia & NZ • Brazil • Canada • France • French Canada • Germany • Hong Kong • India • Italy • Japan • Mexico • Spain • Yahoo! Telemundo Groups • Taiwan • UK & Ireland

There are thousands of established groups already covering nearly every topic on the planet. For all the digital information sellers this is a potential goldmine for you. This is like the biggest forum ever covering everything from questions, discussions, problems, and answers in one easy to manage place. There are niches I have never even thought about in there. Let’s look inside some of the health groups:

To effectively utilize Yahoo Groups you really need to look at groups with a large member base (obviously) as well as the amount of recent activity going on within the group. As an example I have picked out Healthy Recipes For Diabetic Friends. Now before we jump right into market analysis I want you to think about why I chose this group.

1. First I chose it because the headline “Healthy Recipes For Diabetic Friends” told me right off the bat that a potential niche for diabetics could be formed here. Not only are there going to be a large number of diabetics involved in the discussion here, but there are also a large number of diabetics that already have TONS of problems identified for us, and will give us the easiest of easy answers of what they are eating.