Build a Niche Store Empire Series in 12 Weeks - Niche Market Research Continued

February 7, 2008

In yesterdays post about researching your niche market, I left off right at the point that we start getting into some of the more advanced tools you can use to research your newly discovered niche market. I should also note that today, in between posts, Sean posted a very good article on how he gets an idea as well as the research tools he uses! Some of these will be discussed more in a few minutes!

So far, we have talked about:

Step 1 - Using eBay for initial research
Step 2 - Checking Google to see if a BANS competitor already exists
Step 3 - Checking Google for overall web competition

Today… we are going to talk about determining how popular your niche store has the ability to be, as well as more details about some of the free and paid tools you can use for the research.

Niche Market Research to Discover the Market and Profitability of Your Niche Idea (Part 2) 

When I develop an optimized niche store, I now try to do so just like any other e-commerce website. in other words, it should have a logical set of main shopping categories, followed by subcategories or product pages, within each main category. Grill Auctions is probably the best example of this, meaning there are a group of 10-20 main categories on the left side and within each category are 10-20 sub category or product listing pages.

With the Hybrid Golf Clubs site, I will follow the same principal and look to develop 10-20 main categories that are related to hybrid and golf, then develop those into sub category or product pages. A good example would be a main category of Hybrid Golf Club Sets, with sub categories of 10-20 different manufacturer specific sets of hybrid clubs.

So… you must be tired of reading the fluff and asking yourself, why did he just waste 5 minutes of my time telling me that, shouldn’t that be much farther down the road? No! Even though you are only in the research portion of your store, you need to have a very good understanding of what a it will take for your BANS store to be the best it can be! Some folks will tell you that ANY affiliate site can be as simple as one or two pages, drive some PPC (Pay Per Click purchased traffic) to it, and just cash in on the profits! While this may hold very true for people with deep pockets and no long term goals of really pushing the 1-2 page site into anything else, it is not true with Build a Niche Store! BANS, like any other content website, needs to have just that… content. As many pages of product specific content you feel you can add! I find that 100-200 pages makes for a good and profitable site! ie: 10-20 main categories, with 10-20 sub category or product pages within each.

Now, you might be saying… gosh, 200 pages, I don’t have time to do that! I agree, and one of the great things about BANS is that you only need to think of the topics or categories, Build a Niche Store does the rest! :-) The two tools I use most for research are Wordtracker and Wordze. Each has its own set of features which are explained a bit below.

Wordtracker ($30/week, $50/month or $329/year) - Wordtracker is a keyword research tool that shows actual search results over a cumulative period of time and delivers the results of the trends. in a nutshell… it tells us what we need to know from step 3 - The exact terms people are searching for, the number of times they searched AND the amount of other web pages targeting the same terms!

Wordze($7/day or $40/month) on the other hand, shows you very similar data, but it gets its own data from different sources and includes the trend data in a graphical format! Along with several features not found in Wordtracker… I am starting to like it quite a bit! I guess its just hard to let go of a resource tool you have used with success for so long, so this new niche market website I am focusing on will become my guinea pig for the product! :-)

Google Sandbox Keyword Tool (Free) The sandbox tool is really supposed to be used to help PPC advertisers find additional words to use in the campaigns. Essentially, you type in a word or phrase and it will show you related terms that are most likely to deliver traffic in relation to the main terms you provided! Wow… that was a mouthful! The one thing the free tool does not tell you is the actual raw numbers… instead, like Sean mentioned, it shows bars or graphs.

Step 4 - Determining the Reach of Your Niche Market

Lets open up the Google Sandbox Keyword Suggestion Tool . In the keyword box, type in the following on separate lines:

• hybrid golf
• hybrid club
• hybrid iron
• hybrid putter

Complete the anti-spam image image box and click on the Get Keyword Ideas button and sit back for a second. What we are trying to do at this step is find additional main level categories that might have high volume searches! Phrase efficiency is not as important yet, but knowing that terms are searched for, and how often, is important!

When the results are displayed, drop down the box for “Choose Columns to Display” and select Show All. This will provide the most information you can get! I always click twice on the column header for “Avg Search Volume”, so it sorts the highest to the top of the list. Now what does this tell me?

• Golf Hybrid - Average competition, average volume, peaks in the mid summer. Good!
• Hybrid Club - Pretty much the same…
• Hybrid Golf Clubs - HIGH Competition, with roughly the same volume and trends as the other phrases!
• This is repeated with several terms in the niche.

These first three items tell a bit of info about the niche, but I am still starving to see more data in order to figure out if I want to chase it or not! Above the results, place an amount of $5.00 in the Calculate estimates CPC field and click on recalculate. What I can also see right now is that the terms don’t really pay too much for Google AdSense advertising during this month. I would bet that in the middle of the demand months, the CPC would double or even triple, making me want to get more info still.

Essentially, from the free Google tool, I learned enough to tell me to research it more, but still not quite enough to know if it is worthwhile! I also copied the entire list of terms into a spreadsheet and saved them for later! :-) If you did not have access to a paid tool, like those I am about to discuss, you could use this along with other research to form your categories. We will discuss those other tools when we get to the point of building the store and optimizing.

Now that we used the Google tool for general research, I will head over to Wordtracker and do a bit of quick research. In the main search box, I will type the same 4 phrases we used in Google. The first result comes back and shows me a bit of different info than I saw in Google…

BUT, the info from Wordtracker is also a bit different than even Google! (Paid version of WT uses 7 engines data, including Google. Free version uses MSN data only) What I do however really like about my Wordtracker results, are all of the terms with high KEI (Keyword Effectiveness/Efficiency Index) Essentially, the easiest way to read the numbers above…

• Term: Hybrid Golf Clubs
• Searches: Average number of times the term is listed / searched in the wordtracker database
• Predict: 24 hour average prediction for future searches across major engines
• Google: Number of pages in index, identified with quotes around term (ex: search for “hybrid golf clubs”)
• Google KEI: Keyword Effectiveness/Efficiency Index is basically the number of times a word or phrase is searched for, divided by the number of pages targeting the phrase. It is actually a bit more complex, but that is close! :-) The HIGHER the kei, the easier it will be to rank for the term. I try to shoot for anything above .10 as a good target!

As I look through the list of terms… again, I see fair search volume (Anything above 5 predicted daily searches)  and very good kei across several terms! Keep in mind, just like the Google search, this is very cursory still… when the time comes to optimize a niche store, we will end up with 200 or more terms, based on extrapolation (I love that word) of ALL these individual terms we are finding in different places.

One more final check… and we will get into finding a domain!

Open up a browser and go to TeraPeak.com. Terapeak is THE research tool behind eBay auctions. In one of our first steps, we took a quick glance at eBay to see if there was enough product listings, enough sales and generally, just got a very brief overview of the market itself. With TeraPeak, we can actually see some serious metrics about the market! Once you have the site open, click on the free tools link in the main menu and type the term “hybrid” into the search box. Just like earlier, we will drill into the Sporting Goods / Golf directory and see very detailed metrics about the sales completed in the last 30 days.

The top portion of the report shows us all we need to know about the market. 22,167 auctions were active over the past 30 days, with 8777 successfully sold! Almost 40% sell rate - That’s HUGE!! It even goes as far as telling us he average selling price of $65-$73, which would have resulted in a fvf (final value fee) of $2.80 and sales commission of $1.40. Even if you can only garner 1% of the Hybrid club searches out there, it is $120 per month in commission! BUT, you have to ask yourself, how many people buy just 1 club or iron, aren’t they usually bought in groups? This niche is looking very good…

As a bonus, Terapeak also shows you the sold items, listed from highest price to lowest.

Now were talking… even if I can only get 1 out of 50 visitors to buy a full set, this will be a very profitable niche store!

For the past two days I have talked about several ways to determine if a Niche Market can be profitable with Build a Niche Store. The research I have done shows that this store should do very well after I spend 8-10 hours developing the menus. Thus far, we have only spent 5-10 minutes in each area we have researched… thus, we have about 30 minutes total into our niche store!

Tomorrow (after I finish up some videos) I am going to explain several different ways to get a great domain name for your niche store. (I already have 2 for the hybrid clubs) There are some hidden gems, even on eBay, where you can find older domains that already carry PageRank and authority, for a jump-start on your store! I picked up a domain on the DNForum about 3 weeks ago for only a few more dollars than if I bought it new… the catch is that the domain was originally registered in 1999 and while the current PageRank of 3 will likely not pass in the future, I put up a niche store within one week of having the domain… and the site already makes 1-2 sales per day based on older traffic! (Ninja Motorcycles)

Tomorrow… we will help all of us find older domains, usually for the same price as newly registered domains, to jump start our Build a Niche Stores! Now if I could ONLY get Shoemoney to let me do something to his www.shoemoneyshoes.com site… :-) Remember, that’s a February Goal!

I would like the group to do their own research on their initial niche sites, post the info you have found as of now… and lets compare information to see how everyone feels about your new market!

Mark

Related Posts:

• Traffic and Value
• Niche Research by Erik
• Niche Research by Eric

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