Vending Machines New or Used Soda Snack Coffee and Cold Food Vending Machines

Market research is all about getting a better understanding of the market that you are planning on entering. A market is made up of both customers as well as operators. You need to understand the current state of affairs in order to allow yourself to position your new vending business for success.

Your market research will help you to identify some of the risks and opportunities in the market. It will help you to identify good locations and the kind of machines and products that would do well in them.

Hiring a market research company to put together a report on the local vending industry would be great. This option is cost prohibitive though so it is more likely that you will end up doing your own investigations.

When it comes to starting a vending machine business, market research should be the first thing that you do. Here are some ideas on the kind of information that you should collect and how to go about it.

Demographics

Before you attempt to vend products to people in the area that you are targeting you have to understand as much as you can about them. This will help you to know where to place your machines and what products to offer.

If, for example you are in a fairly young area with lots families then you might look at a product line that targets children. If the population is older then it might be worth trying to place machines within retirement communities.

Surveys

If you are trying out a new vending machine niche it will be important to gather some data from prospective customers. This will help you to confirm whether or not your business ideas are viable and if there is enough demand.

Put together a brief questionnaire and ask people within your target area what they think. Would they be prepared to buy the products that you intend to sell via vending machines? How much would they reasonably expect to pay for such items?

You should get the best response from your surveys if you do them in person but you could also look at purchasing a database and doing them by phone or mail. To get a better response you could offer respondents some kind of free gift such as a voucher for a free coffee at a local cafe. This may end up costing you but the information that you end up obtaining from local prospects could be of considerable value to you.

Try to talk to some business owners about whether they think your product line would sell on their premises. If you get a positive response from them then you can contact them again at a later date once you have started your vending business and have machines ready to place.

Scouting the Area

Once you have decided on the area that you want to target and have marked out your territory on a map go out for a few drives and explore. Visit some of the places where you would expect to find vending machines. Take note of the range of machines that are in place, if they are being used, what products are being vended and how well maintained they are.

The Competition

Research some of the other vending machine players in the local market. You should see their company details on the side of their machines and you will find many of them listed in local business directories such as The Yellow Pages.

Learn as much as you can about their machines, products and the vending services that they offer. Call them on the phone posing as a 'decision maker' for a possible machine location and find out how they work with their clients. Do they offer commissions? What can you learn from the way that they are doing their marketing? How can you improve on what they currently offer?

Don't forget that regular retailers are also your competitors. Some vending locations almost have a captive audience in that people either have to use the machines or they have to walk for 10 minutes or more to a store. People always have alternatives though and if they don't like your machines or your service they bring products from home or take the trouble to purchase them elsewhere.

Distributors and Suppliers

Machinery manufacturers and dealers may be able to give you specific information relating to your market when you are starting out in business.

An even better source of market information will probably be local distributors or the suppliers of the inventory that you use to stock your machines. They will be dealing with other local vendors and will be able to tell you what products are selling well in vending machines and what product combinations and volumes you should start out with. Of course every location will be different though so you will also want to start collecting your own data as soon as each machine starts making sales.

Updating your Research

Don't forget that things change. Your initial market research will be extremely useful but it must be updated from time to time so that you keep up to date with an ever changing market. Changes in demographics and product trends will mean that you may have to consider switching machines, products and locations from time to time. Keep your finger on the pulse so that you don't fall behind and lose market share to those that are paying more attention.

linktrip

18 - The magic number?Search engine optimisation experts who have studied page rank vary in their calculations, but there is a magic number in the range of 18 - 20 that they come up with. What is this magic number?

Well, it is the number of themed links from a page ranked page that you need to get the same page rank on your site. So get 20 links from PR4 mortgage pages and your own mortgage site should also get a PR4, for example.

There are loads of "ifs" and "buts"! The page should have no more than 50 external links and should be closely themed. More external links increase the number, less decreases it.

Does this hold water?Does this work? Well, looking at the page rank calculation in a very basic way and you receive 85% of a share of the page rank of the pages that point to you. So if 1 PR4 page points at you and that only has your external link, then you get 85% of that PR4 (about PR3.4). If that page has 2 external links, then that share is halved.

Apply that to a link exchange directorySo look at the typical link directory page. Say 40 external links on the page would mean that on a PR4 page, the links value is worth 1/40th of 3.4. But most links directory pages are lucky to have even a PR1!

Looking at the maths again, if you accept 100 exchanges with links directories with page rank 1 pages and each has 40 outbound links, then you receive back 85% of 1/40th of a page rank of 1, 100 times. Work that out and it seems quite good - it would indicate a low Page Rank of 2.

Getting a Page Rank of 2Going back to the magic number 18, the same experts also state that about 105 links are need to get a page rank of 1 above the donating site. So 105 links from PR1 sites should give you a PR2 - agreeing with the formula calculation above

Surely double that number for a PR4? Well, actually no. The experts calculate that again the magic number goes up by a factor of around 5 to increase the ranking to the next stage, so around 500 - 600 good PR1 links give a PR3 and 2,000 to 3,000 PR1 links give a PR4.

What does a link exchange need?So, what does this mean for the average link builder? Well, trying to find a good number of links from directories is difficult enough, especially when the pages must be themed and must be at least PR1. When many link directory pages are less than PR1, the maths really gives us huge figures and makes frightening reading.

But, the result is that to get a decent page rank through link exchanges would require literally thousands of link swaps through highly themed sites with at least a page rank of 1 with no more than 40 external links per page. Difficult enough to find a couple that fit this description. But 3,000 of them?

I think not. That is why I just delete every link exchange request without looking at them.