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February 20, 2008
What we are doing right now (building our categories) is really hard for me. I don’t know why, exactly, but perhaps my being an over-thinker works against me at such times. Plus, when I use an eBay category structure I tend to like it at first and later (usually after pages have already been indexed) I change my mind and revise the categories.
For this series I am creating stores with URLs I purchased specifically for BANS. (And I will admit up front that I purchased the URLs before I knew how to research, and some are probably bad choices, but I’m going to make something of them and see what happens before they expire.) The first store I’m working on is www.museumqualitystore.com. Actually, I started on it a day or two before Mark invited me to participate in the series so it is about three weeks old.
Anyway, I found museum quality items in about five main eBay categories. Some are fine for top level categories but one in particular didn’t make sense, only I didn’t realize it when I created the main categories. That one was (and is still on the site as of this writing) the Collectibles category. Without thinking I made a top level category called Museum Quality Collectibles.
Now, can you tell me what might be in this category? Yeah, me either. Could be anything. And that’s pretty much what is in the category. It’s a bit of a catch-all.
Today I have been using Terapeak, as described by Mark in his video, to revise the contents of the Museum Quality Collectibles category. I don’t know if what I’m doing will help anyone but since I’m a guest blogger I’m sharing what I am doing.
What I did at Terapeak is look at all the Collectibles subcategories that contain museum quality in the results. Most of them work well as main categories rather than subcategories. I moved the following out of Museum Quality Collectibles and made them top level categories:
I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with the remaining subcategories but eventually I think I’ll phase out Museum Quality Collectibles. I’m open to suggestions, advice, help, etc. with this.
This post wasn’t so much about how I create main categories as it was a confession that this is difficult for me. I’d love to hear how other achieve their categories as it might help me and others.
Rochelle
3 Responses to “I have a confession to make…”
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Rochelle -
GREAT Post! You actually hit on the exact thing that stops most people after the first few categories… and is hard to get yourself interested in the Niche again!
in this case, I would just try to think of the things I would expect to see in a museum… and then do a bit of research in WT or Wordze.
On the collection page of the Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org/collection/) you can see several categories of what can be found on their site! In your Niche Store, the domain name tends to say “This Stuff is Museum Quality”.. but that does not mean it is all worthy of being in a museum! :-0 All you need to do is focus on filling the needs of modern art, fine art etc…
Here are a few searches from Wordze:
museum quality porcelain statue
museum quality tall ship models
museum quality lighting
museum quality furniture
museum quality wooden jewelry boxes
printing museum quality fine art
museum quality framing
museum quality prints
museum quality pen display box
mat proportions for museum quality work
specifications for museum quality vitrines
museum quality mouse
museum quality digital camera
Tall Ships, Porcelain Statues, Museum Quality lighting…
While Terapeak is a good start when you know a niche exists, wordtracker or wordze will take the base of a niche and tell you exactly where to run with it! Remember, as a Niche Store Builder yourself, all you are doing is telling search engine visitors “I heard you can buy it Here”… shaking their hand and moving them to the actual seller on eBay.
Mark
Mark,
I’m glad Rochelle brought this up because I have a question that is sort of related.
If we already have an existing BANS store that wasn’t optimized properly, what are the guidelines for deleting pages or changing names of pages that are already indexed? If we’re trying to “fix” what we’ve already done, how far should we go and what should we just leave alone? Indexing is obviously important but if changes need to be made in order to make sales, then that is more important!
I know this series is about building new sites and doing things correctly from the get-go, but there are a lot of us who already have existing sites that need changes (as well as additions) in order to make them more unique and therefore hopefully more profitable.
Thanks.
Cindy
Hi Cindy -
Before this series is done… we will spend a full week talking about what to do with an existing store that just isnt performing.
With that in mind… if your existing categories ARE RELATED, why get rid of them? All you want to do is make them different by changing the title, keywords, description, maybe even the search query…
As long as you dont change the FILE NAME (very last field on a store edit page) you have nothing to worry about, the page still exists.
Mark