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February 11, 2008
Over the past few days - I have seen several people asking about how to identify a Niche market that is NOT worth pursuing. Erik actually wrote a Niche research Questionabout just that earlier today and it definitely deserves some detailed review. Since he talked about using effect pedals as a niche store but couldn’t justify the store with the search data he found, I am actually going to use that niche as an example for this post.
When you checked over at wordtracker for the term Effect Pedals, the results were somewhat dismal… showing less than 10 searches over a 90 day period. First and foremost, the results from wordtracker are trended results. Meaning they use a formula that measures the number of times a word appeared in their data over the last 90 days. It is my understanding (which could be wrong) that the count you see is the average number of daily searches over the last 90 days. The predict column, represents the predicted amount over the next 24 hours, based on the source of wordtracker data, when compared to the current trend. Meaning… if the predict is higher than the count, it should be safe to assume the trend is growing in popularity.
Back to effects pedals… and spotting the niche!
When I plugged effect pedal (no plurals, wordtracker will pluralize automatically with a tick box) the results were:
Obviously, it is easy to assume this is a dead market based on that number 15 above. BUT, how about when we strike out the word effect and view the results.
Obviously, I highlighted pedal pumping because it just struck me as odd!! When I looked it up, it is about starting a car! :-) Back to the niche subject… Never assume the order of words in the wordtracker data are completely accurate, all I have done is told wordtracker to show me ALL meta search data for the two words combined…
The point is… when the initial research of the niche looks dismal, dig deeper if it is something you are interested in!
To dig deeper, I searched google for effect pedals, chose one of the top results and went to look around. I found the word reverb seems to be involved in quite a few of the pedals… back over to wordtracker:
The Niche Store about Effects Pedals has its first potential category: Reverb Effect Pedals
Within that first store category, I anticipate there could be product pages for:
Essentially, I have identified 10-20 product pages within the “Reverb Effect Pedals” Subcategory… the 10-12 on this image alone account for about 100 predicted searches a day. This does include the other 100+ results for the word reverb in wordtracker.
At this point it is worth taking the research a step farther and going over to TeraPeak to see if there are any sales.
Within the results, I can see that the general term “Pedals” generated higher than a 60% sell through rate on 27,000 ++ listings over the past 30 days. The average selling price was more than $90.00!!
Overall - with a little extra research, you have stumbled yourself onto a very good niche market!
Comments anyone?
Mark
5 Responses to “Discovering gold in an otherwise unprofitable Niche Market!”
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Fender Sidekick Reverb
Vox Reverb Pedals
Gibson Reverb iii
Deluxe Reverb Pedal
Fender Deluxe Reverb
A few of those items/keywords that were mentioned are not even products listed on eBay when I did a search for them. Would you still consider adding a product category by adding them to them menu listing in the store?
Hey Mark,
This is great advice on how to rethink the niche. I am definitely going to start thinking creatively like this for the niches I am researching. As for Sean’s question, I was wondering about that too. Are the high-KEI product names we come up with now necessarily going to have to be products that are sold on Ebay? Or are we going to use them as bait for the search engines and people looking for those terms who might be willing to buy something similar to what they were searching for?
Erik
Erik & Sean -
I have not gone to eBay and looked for actual products yet! :-) That would have been too much like, right!
The message of the post is that even though the generic niche of effect pedals is not in demand with high numbers, a little bit of research may turn it around into a very good market.
Searching eBay for the term pedal shows more than 4900 active auctions in the music category. With a small bit of research, i bet there is a great niche within the broad category.
@ Erik -
Bait is a VERY good way to use the “Oops cannot find a product” pages to get visitors interested in other products as well.
Mark
Regarding pluralization, if I put in ‘effect pedal’ into Wordtracker there are 23 searches/day for ‘effect pedals’.
If I put ‘effects pedal’ there are 36 searches/day for ‘guitar effects pedals’.
In this case inputting plural forms revealed some higher searched phrases.
Varying the word order or phrase can make a difference too. ‘natural weight loss’ and ‘lose weight naturally’ have significantly different demand.
Mark,
Two things:
1. Can the pages in BANS be customized so that if there are no products available a message is displayed directing users to other pages on a site?
2. In your example above 100 searches over 8-10 keywords is not very significant by itself, but compound that by 100 or so pages/keywords you suggest and one can see the possibilities.
Keep up the good work.