Business Research Methods need to be updated.
As I was walking through Barnes and Nobles today, I was reminded of how much waste there is in business these days because people simply neglect to check before they produce something for consumer demand. I realize we all have “passions” we have and we should pursue them sometimes even if nobody out there is interested in what these “passions” can produce. However, I’m going to argue today that after you decide you want to pursue something, just check with the Adwords Keyword Tool first to see if there is even any demand for what you want to produce.
Before heading upstairs to see what sort of inventory of SEO books they had at the store, I walked down the discount aisles to see if any of the SEO books happened to land in the graveyard of texts that couldn’t sell on the normal shelves. However, what I noticed wasn’t any SEO books since it seems the topic is still sexy enough to keep these books from landing here on the discount shelf. However, what I saw were at least 3 different books on Abraham Lincoln sitting on the discount shelves to most likely be given to some local library eventually since nobody would ever buy it. Regardless of quality, there is one simple fact with almost any subject or product in society: demand. Some items or topics are more in demand than others. And if these authors of this very fascinating man, Abraham Lincoln would of bothered to look at the Keyword tool and compared it with the number of books that exist already on the subject matter, they would possibly realize they have a very difficult uphill battle meeting the demands of society.
So, my little way of breaking this down isn’t scientific by any means, but let’s take the broad metric of searches that Google supplies us with for any given term. I look up 5 of the “heads of states” that appear to be popular on Amazon.com and find these following to compare:
- Abraham Lincoln
- George Washington
- John Adams
- Harry Truman
- Thomas Jefferson
After looking up the number of monthly searches each of these previous Presidents generate on the Keyword Tool, I looked up the number of books that were active on each President in Amazon.com. I then divided the broad number of searches by the total number of books and found that there were more searches per book for the other 4 heads of state than that of Abraham Lincoln.
- Abraham Lincoln – 66.34 searches for every book in Amazon on Abraham Lincoln
- George Washington – 131.80
- John Adams – 91.93
- Harry Truman – 242.37
- Thomas Jefferson – 110.34
So, the point here is that there are more people searching for information on 4 other past American leaders vs. Lincoln. If the authors who decided to write about Lincoln simply did a little research on a free tool available to all of us, they might have a few more dollars in their pockets. Barnes and Nobles would as well. And if Barnes and Nobles doesn’t want to land in the same state as their once competitor Borders, they may want to train their Book Buyers to consider this before placing on their shelves texts that people are not interested in.
The Google Adwords Keyword tool is a very, very powerful tool.
Business Schools and their Professors should be preaching to their students that they use this tool before developing ideas about the next big thing. Entrepreneurs throughout the world should be checking with this tool before launching into a new dot com that could potentially fail because it never had any underlying demand. Leaders in the Political chambers of the world could see what public sentiment is at any given time. And all business people – small or large could figure out what to do about almost anything in their business if they became a little more reliant on this tool.
I don’t know why I tell everyone about this amazing tool. It’s a little known fact that fails to garner the attention it deserves. But perhaps that’s why I have no problems preaching about this little tool…nobody seems to listen. However, I will continue to say it until everybody “gets it” that it is simply the most powerful free tool online.
