October 20, 2007
There have been many questions rolling in about Building a Niche Store and I wanted to post here with some of the most common questions and answers, or at least… my answers!
I also want to apologize for the video quality in yesterdays post. I am not a video person at all and have had a bit of a learing curve with the screen capture software in regard to size! It seems that when I ramble on for more than 5-8 minutes, the file size tends to get a little larger than the program can effectively handle… :-) From this point forward, I will focus on shorter (5 minute) videos, sticking on one subject at a time!
Building a niche Store Process FAQ’s
Q: Do I have to have 10-20 main categories?
A: Absolutely NOT! It is just my own preference to keep the visitor choices limited to what they came for. You can choose to have only 1 category with product listings if you want.. I prefer to focus on the top 10-20 high KEI terms and grab as much traffic as possible.
Q: Do I have to have subcategories below each parent?
A: Again, no. If you find your Niche market is narrow enough that it will only support XX number of product pages, you dont have to have ANY subcategories if you desire.
Q: How detailed do I want my listing Pages?
A: I want enough information to satisfy the needs of the visitor or search engine spider. For example if the site is about grills (sound familiar?) I want to break each page/category into a somewhat tightly focused niche of its own. In other words… Grills wont do much for us, gas grills is still a bit too generic, weber gas grills is better, weber charcoal gas grills is the type of detail I need on my individual pages. Long-Tail phrases will deliver the targeted traffic in the shortest amount of time!
Q: What Do I do with the default eBay Categories?
A: Rename them to something related to your Niche Store! On the Grill Auction site, I renamed the parent “Home and Garden” category (from ebay) to Grill Auction Main Page. Kitchen and several others still exist in the menu, which will be renamed to other niche focused terms related to their contents. ie: I type grill into the public search box, choose “Kitchen” from the dropdown box, and see what the results are! In this case, Indoor Grills seems to be the general type of product that shows up… I will rename the ebay default category of Kitchen, to Indoor grills.
Q: Do I have to delete unused categories?
A: Not at all - the more bait you have for search spiders, the better off you are. Try to find a balance between your Niche Store concept and too much info for users. In other words, if you are in a category that has hundreds of subs… it may be beneficial to optimize only two levels deep and just leave the rest for the engines to spider.
Q: Why are you choosing high KEI terms with only 5-10 searches?
A: Good question… I always prefer to have TARGETED traffic versus generic traffic. If, by optimizing the site for 20 main cats, each with 10 subcats (aka niche product pages) I can get highly targeted, “Found Exactly What I was Looking For” type traffic, my conversion rates will increase! By adding all those low visitor counts together, you come up with a much larger daily unique visitor count! 5 here, 15 there, 10 over there, etc… and before you know it, you are seeing 250+ daily visitors in a very short amount of time, with high clickthrough to eBay.
Q: Can I really do all of this in just a few hours?
A: Yes. Once you have completed 3-4 Niche Store sites, you will find all of this comes easier and easier each time. You will be able to load, optimize and customize your new Niche site in less than 4 hours from start to finish.
Q: When will the Grill Auction site be completed?
A: I anticipate completing the new template for the site this weekend. I dont know how detailed I can get into explaining HOW I am creating graphics and customizing the style sheet, butI am going to try my best.
Q: Why are you moving things over to The Niche Store Builder?
A: The new site has just one focus… Niche Store Building! At this point, it is all about BANS, but will ultimately become a place for all types of Niche Store building. We currently use a few different applications from Parking applications, optimized landing pages etc. We will review and post all types of Niche Store info at that site.
Q: Why are some of the Niche Store Builder pages password protected?
A: Currently, they are not done and ready for the public. Once completed, they will be open for viewing. I have however considered keeping one section, the Niche Advisor, closed to feed subscribers only, so there is an added benefit to being a regular reader of the site.
This page will be updated frequently with new Q&A… stay tuned!
If you have a question, please post it in the comments… nothing is out of bounds!
Mark
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2 Responses to “Build a Niche Store Process FAQ”
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What do you mean by KEI with 5-10 searches? Do you mean 5-10 searches per day or month?
Hi Christine -
Preferably, 5-10 per day. Higher numbers are obviously preferred, but if you can get 10 buyers per targeted term each day, versus 200 generic surfers who arent even shopping, which would you prefer?
Mark