August 14, 2007
The other day - a reader (Jenny) asked about choosing the right niche for your Build a Niche Store website. This would apply to ANY site, not only the BANS sites you may setup. You are likely to find ALL SORTS of different opinions and strategies on the subject of choosing the right niche - the one below, is mine only… it works for me! Remarkably, some of your research in this subject will also serve as good information for your search optimization strategies!
The goal of your reasearch is to find a niche that is:
Something YOU can be interested in!
First and foremost with ANY topic you decide to focus on, make sure you have an understanding and slight interest in the product or niche. It is much easier to become passionate about the project if are actually interested in it as more than just a monetized website. Even if it is just a hobby or sport you like, it will be easier for you to relate to the subject matter than something you either know nothing about or dont have any interest in at all! Begin by noting 5-10 hobbies, sports, products, or general interests that you feel you know at least a little bit about!
Just a few of my own interests for example:
Search Popular with low to moderate competition.
Once you have a short list about some of your own interests - take it to the search engines to see if there is any other interest out there! I use WordTracker for the demand portion of my own research, but as I said in my last post, the Overture keyword suggestion tool will work, but I seem to be seeing old results lately in the tool. Since most of my discussion on the BANS product has used the wholesale closeouts and apparel site I put up a couple weeks ago, I will continue to focus in that area, but generalize based on the first search term.
Start with a short, single word - end up with a long-tail key phrase!
In the overture tool - I simply typed the word “wholesale” into the search box. This will provide the widest spectrum of results that include the single word. Once you have list of phrases in front of you the real work begins… Lets look at the first term returned: “Wholesale Jewelry - 86,785 searches” It may be reversed and say jewelry wholesale, but use your own best judgement to form the correct sequence. From here, go to the big G, http://www.google.com/, and run a quick search on how many indexed pages have this EXACT term in their page title and in a general search. Search for the following:
You should see that approximately 58,500 pages exist in the directory with this exact phrase in the page title. It may be somewhat hard to start out being number 58,501 and hoping for results in the shortest amount of time, so lets take it a step deeper - back into your overture tool, click on the first phrase wholesale jewelry, and you will see how many times the 2 word phrase was used in searches. The second result is: “Costume Jewelry Wholesale - 26,586 searches” so lets go back to google and search for:
This time - only 832 indexed pages with the exact term in the title! There is a competitive phrase formula out there somewhere that will break this into a keyword efficiency ratio for you, but in general terms - it is MUCH easier to rank a long-tail phrase than a single keyword! You can and should continue to use this practice for each phrase you want to target on your site. Consistency will also pay off for you if you write or copy/paste these most popular terms into excel or some other spreadsheet you can use later to develop your link structure, page titles, keywords etc.
Knowing that there is 832 exact matches does not mean it is going to be an easy task - just that you have a better chance… The term itself shows more than 2 million sites with the phrase within the title tag!
If we continue to drill this or ANY term down to a longer tail - your chances of being successful increase dramatically!
Now you should have a very good idea of where this is going. By scanning the overture tool or wordtracker, you have seen there is demand in many different flavors of one word, once extrapolated (I get points for a +8 letter word) into a long tail keyphrase. In this case, using the overture results (regardless of accuracy) we can see that “wholesale bridal costume jewelry” is really in demand at 772 monthly searches. There are only 40 exact page titles out there and only 980 pages in the Google index with the exact phrase in the page! I think I just found another niche myself!
Just for kicks and to show you the power of process in your search targets - I am going to add a page to the Carolina Closeouts site titled “Wholesale Bridal Costume Jewelry” today. I am a gambling person… I am willing to risk a chance on this… but a good bet is that the page on the site carries a top 25 rank in google within 2 weeks, and a top 10 within 3!
Consumable Products?
OK - By now you have found a product or niche that interests you, and you have figured out whether you will have an easy or hard time getting the product to list in search engines. Next, you need to know if your niche product will sell, and if so, how much do you stand to earn with a site based off the Build a Niche Store script or any other affgiliate type program.
For myself, choosing a wholesale market would tend to have us think the buyers are more of a small retail presence or maybe even someone who intends to open their own ecommerce or ebay store! Our goal is to shoot for higher priced, lot type purchases, where the buyer wants more of a bulk order… basically, we want to average more than $100 per sale, and repeat that process numerous times each day, across many different websites! Sure its nice to earn a larger chunk in one sale, but those nickels all add up to dollars at some point as well! Keep in mind, a $100 top line sale will only net me 50% of the total ebay fees, which is only $1.68 - not that much for an individual sale, but definitely has the potential to multiply rapidly! For a completely different site I have been working on, the average sale price is above $2500. We have already seen success in the short month or two of that site as well, and hope to go much further over the next 4-6 months.
Another very big consideration in this area is whether or not your visitors are going to need this item or item accessories more than once! I mean, nobody really buys a casket or headstone more than just once… so that would be a bad niche to get into. Clothing, tires, wheels and rims, auto CD players, contact lenses, shoes… you get the picture… these are items that an average person may buy several times during their life! IMPULSE BUYS are another big hit - have you heard of the iPhone?
Trends - Follow the Trends!
In the past 3 months - how often have you seen the word Webkinz? Sure, they are a low cost novelty type item that will likely go the wayside of beanie babies within the next 6-12 months. BUT… why not get onto that wave for that short time and try to get a piece of the action?
Google has its own set of tools for spotting trends, just like eBay and several other shopping websites. In eBay, it is called the eBay pulse, located at: http://pulse.ebay.com/ Inside, you can look through the most popular categories and search terms associated with them!
It is invaluable for picking the hottest items and getting in front of them!
Done for now - Mark
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10 Responses to “Choosing a Niche Market for Build a Niche Store”
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Mark, This is a great article.
In your opinion, should I consider a domain name as a prime factor to go into certain niche or should I choose the niche first and than think about the domain?
I own few good .us but they are in very competitive market.
On the other hand we know that good key word domain, helps a lot. Do you know if .us have the same effect as .com or .net?
I really enjoy reading your posts.
Thank you
Jenny -
You actually bring up a very good point that I did not even touch on - I wrote this without consideration of the domain name at all.
In my own opinion - if you are registering a domain name with the hopes of monetization through type-in traffic, a .com is the only way to go! The general public relates to the .com much more than any other!
That being said - if you were to develop 3 sites on the same topic - lets say - “Bright Orange Widgets”. You get the same name for all 3, with the TLD extention being the only difference, and you place all 3 online on the same day and time.
The sites that you actually do some SEO work on will outperform all others regardless of the TLD!
Take a quick shot of the top 500 sites ranked at Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global) - Several have non .com names. The most notable, wikipedia.org
So… the .com extension would matter for a domain that is only parked hoping for type-in traffic, but for a website you intend to do proper SEO and develop with unique and changing content, it wont make much difference, if any at all!
Mark
I am in the middle of development of few sites - all with different tld’s (com, net, us)
I will keep you posted on the progress.
I just did some reading on the subject and some people on the professional forums say that .us does not rank as good as .com/.net/.org.
Unfortunately, I missed the .com opportunity.
I would think that .us would be the official US tld and people would like it like .de or .ca. But I was wrong.
So i have to work with what is available.
Thank you for the information.
Jenny
Hi Jenny -
I really want to look into this deeper and possibly grab a few domain names and run a test project! :-)
I frequent seomoz regularly. There is a very thorough article written at: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors that only talks briefly about the tld of a site, however it is a very informative read for ALL factors to consider in rankings.
Mark
Great reference.
Thanks, Mark
Jenny
Hi Mark;
Top article for those really interested in getting it on with BANS - the whole site looks great and I’ll be spending a bit more time here tomorrow for sure.
To find eBay niches I developed my own script to help narrow down high value items worth putting on my BANS sites.
The difficulty I was having was finding the right keyword combos for this but after much digging I found I had to learn all about word freuency and concordance from English literature sites - heavy stuff!
The link to the script is in my site link above.
I also check keyword competition with Google ‘intitle’ and use ‘inanchor’ as well - again, to save time I developed a script to do the job for me.
Comp Finder
Thanks for the tips :)
Austin.
Austin -
I just spent about 10 minutes in the Comp Finder tool you linked to… how much traffic can it handle? :-)
Very intuitive and easy to use for drilling deep into a niche!!
Mark
Hi Mark;
Glad you liked it. I think the problem with it would be that it scrapes the results from Google (they dropped their API before I had the script made).
Because of this they *may* block the IP address if it got real busy. (it does have a delay built in but probably wouldn’t make much difference if there was multiple users at once)
What I could do is zip up the contents and make them available so users could put it on their own server.
It’s a straight install i.e. no config required.
BTW - did you use the eBay keywords tool? I really like that one myself - it has found me lots of valuable keyword combinations to use with BANS :)
Austin.