Finding Paying Customers Abroad Starts with Google Suggest, Not an AI Chatbot
Recently, I've been learning about AI programming for overseas markets — simply put, building websites for international audiences and getting them to pay. The first step is deciding what the website should do, which means finding a demand.
1. False Demands
For beginners, the instinct might be to chat with an AI, generate a demand, and start building a site. But these AI-generated demands only look feasible; they don't consider real user needs. Often, after building it, no one uses it, or a mature tool already exists.
2. Real User Demands
Using tool websites as an example, here are two methods to find real user demands.
Google Suggest
Google's autocomplete feature. Enter a keyword into Google Search, then try typing a...z before, inside, and after the keyword. The dropdown list of search suggestions that automatically appears contains records of real user searches, which can serve as a reference.
Social Media Platforms
Search for user questions and discussions on foreign social media platforms. For example, a user with a weight-loss goal needs to know the calorie count of foods — is there a tool for that?
Recommended social media platforms: Reddit, Product Hunt, Hacker News
3. Where Do Keywords Come From?
You've probably noticed that both methods require a starting keyword. Only by searching based on this keyword can we know if a demand exists. This keyword is the root keyword. So, where do we get root keywords from?
Note: a root keyword shouldn't be understood as just a word, but as a user's action or behavior, such as: generate, calculate, convert. Based on this, we can get a set of action-based root keywords.
But actions alone aren't enough. The final content format or type the user needs should also be listed as a brand asset library, for example: PDF, image, text, video.
This gives us a category keyword library.
Combining these two gives us the candidate keywords we need.
4. Expanding Candidate Keywords
Some of the candidate keywords above can't be used directly. Extract only the usable ones, like "image generator," and search for keyword expansions on Google.
Using the expanded terms, we can continue searching. This method of finding words through words yields a pile of candidate keywords.
5. Finding Sites Through Words, and Words Through Sites
Similarly, tool websites will appear in the search results. We can click into them to look around. These tool sites also do a lot of SEO. For example, through "AI image Generator," we might find a website called PixLr. Inside that site, we can find keywords like "AI Video Generator" and "AI Image Generator."
Websites ranking high in Google search results have definitely done extensive SEO. Multiple keywords can lead into a site's content pages. Based on newly discovered candidate keywords, we can find another batch of sites. Repeating this operation many times turns one candidate keyword into many.
6. Google Trends
https://trends.google.com/trends
Besides the manual search methods above for finding keywords, we can also look for recent trending terms on Google Trends.
7. Automated Keyword Discovery with Agents
The operations for finding demand keywords described above can now be handed over to an AI Agent for automation. Google Trends data can be obtained via RSS, and Google Suggest has an API that can be called. Here, I used Hermes to do this. After a few rounds of conversation, I set Hermes to crawl data daily, filter keywords suitable for building a tool website, and send them to me for review every day, greatly reducing repetitive work.
8. Summary
Finding a demand is only the first step in building a website. After we find a bunch of keywords, the next step is to verify whether a keyword can support a website. Simply put, it's about figuring out if building a tool site around it can make money. Stay tuned for the next article.