One of the most important things you need to do before creating a new product or service is understand the market demand for it – if you don't you could be wasting your time and money in developing it and then finding no-one buys. There are a number of ways to determine market demand including surveys, online forums, PPC advertising and analysing your website and sales statistics.

When you are thinking about developing a website, it is a good idea to perform some market research - in particular competitor research.  There are a number of tools and techniques you can use to identify how competitors of yours have optimised their websites for success.