Assume I have an online store selling a niche product line. Let's say I am selling tools for building things around your home for the purpose of this article. My site is doing pretty well. I may be using pay-per-click or seo to generate business and sales, but the specific method doesn't really matter.

While my site is doing well, I have one problem. My sales are somewhat limited because there are only so many tools that people can buy. I need to expand the site with other product lines. How do I go about doing this? Many sites get it completely wrong.

At this point, most businesses go in a couple directions to develop new business lines. First, they just sit around and brainstorm ideas and come up with product lines they think would be good. This is known as the fantasy approach. The second method is to take note of the fact a couple customers have asked if the site will carry a certain product or product line. This is known as the extrapolation theory, to wit, if one or two people asked for it, there must be a huge demand. Both of these approaches tend to fall on their face unless a key step is taken.

When attempting to identify a new product line for your site, you must do keyword research. The web makes life easy for businesses because the needs of your customers are so readily apparent. All you have to do is use your favorite research tool to see if there is demand for a product. If there is, then go ahead and add the line. If not, move on to a new idea. Let's look at an example.

Going back to my tool site, I need a new product line. I read client emails and brainstorm ideas. How about adding bathroom fixtures to the site? Remodeling bathrooms is a popular home improvement project so surely people would be interested in buying fixtures. Is this correct? There is only one way to find out ? research it!

I am going to use Wordtracker for the purposes of this article. I run ?fixtures? through it and find there are about 2,000 total searches a day for the total bathroom fixture keyword list. In short, there appears to be enough interest to add this as a product line to my site. Now I can do so confident that people will buy. To show how it works the opposite way, let's look at another example.

Instead of bathroom fixtures, let's assume I want to add a line of wooden toilet seats for some strange reason. Hey, it is an example! Before I go through the time and cost of adding the pages to the site and buying inventory, I do my research. Using Wordtracker again, I find there are only 10 searches a day for wooden toilet seats. Do I want to add this product line? Problably not. There isn't much demand online. I would be far better off going with the bathroom fixtures.

Although these examples have pretty obvious findings, you should use the same technique with your online business. Taking this approach lets you pick the products people are interested in while avoiding those lines that are not going to help your bottom line.