I promised the other day I would post about finding great niches on eBay for people using Build a Niche Store. It’s time to start that process!

Check Hot Sellers on eBay

eBay makes this relatively easy in some ways. Go to the Sell page, and scroll down to the “Cash In!” section. You’ll see a link called Find out What’s Hot! There’s a ton of information there to help you figure out what you want to focus on.

Now there are a few big clues I can give you to help you pick. First of all, don’t go too general. Sure, lots of people buy iPods on eBay, but lots of people are trying to earn money through the affiliate program on them too. Go more specific. Tighten up that niche.

You can, of course, go for the big niches. You just have to be prepared to deal with more competition. If you’re just starting out, it’s generally a shorter learning curve and less frustrating if you start out with a smaller niche.

Another important thing is to pick something you will enjoy creating content around. While BANS creates a great site for you, you will still want some unique content that you’ve created on the site as well. You can buy and rewrite private label content, you can review individual products that tend to sell well, just create something more to draw the search engines and (more importantly) buyers to your site.

Now whether you create that content on or off your BANS website is up to you. I’ve done it both ways.

Also consider is whether the product is seasonal or sells well year-round. There’s nothing wrong with promoting seasonal products, but you should be ready for the impact that will have on your site.

You can see a lot of hot products by checking out the Hot Items by Category. It’s only updated every few months or so, so it’s not terribly accurate.

And here’s a biggie: eBay has a new Marketplace Research tool. It offers up to 90 days of completed sales data, average sold prices, top searches by category and trend graphs. It’s not free, but you can pick your subscription level depending on if you’re just doing some quick research or if it’s going to be ongoing.

For free tools, there’s also Terapeak. It will give you similar data, as well as the percentage of auctions that actually sell, which can help in deciding if sales are good enough in your niche.

The higher the percentage of successful sales, the better, but don’t be at all surprised to see many in the 30-50% range. Just wander through eBay and you can quickly realize that most products do not sell more than half the time. Many sell far less often.

The other metric you’ll be interested in, of course, is the average sale price. Since your commission is based off what eBay earns, which is based on the final sale price, you want good numbers here. However, a niche that is easier to dominate that produces a lot of little sales can be better than a more challenging one with larger sales. It’s all a matter of balance and personal preference.

Personal Interests

What do you like? Is there something you’ve bought on eBay? What do you see around your house?

It doesn’t take a lot of detailed research to find things that you know people tend to buy. Pretty much anything you own has the potential to be sold online.

Once you’ve found your potential niche, you can use Terapeak to see how well it does on eBay. Maybe it works, maybe you need to think some more.

What About Pay Per Click Costs?

Even if you aren’t doing pay per click, it can be interesting to see what others are paying for traffic on Google and other search engines. A niche with a large number of PPC ads on it is often profitable for those running the ads.

But sometimes a profitable niche has been missed in the pay per click market. This is more common on the tighter niches, another good reason to really work on choosing your niche.

There’s a free tool offered by Google that lets you check out your keywords. You can add in the average CPC in the filter section so that you can see what others are paying. Type in $50 for your estimated Max CPC to see what it thinks you would be paying for that keyword.

You don’t have to use pay per click to promote your sites if that’s not your style. Many do just fine with other kinds of marketing. But the data’s still interesting, and you might come up with a niche you hadn’t yet considered.

There are lots of other ways you can research a niche, but I find these ones work pretty well. The key is to get creative and find a topic you want to work on.

With eBay’s changes to their affiliate program, I’ve had to take some time with my BANS sites, getting them updated. But I also wanted to start some new ones.

The particular site I’m working on today is one I’d never switched to Build a Niche Store in the first place. I’d used eBay’s affiliate tools back before I’d ever heard of BANS. It’s brought in some sales depite being in Javascript, so it’s definitely a category I want to update to something the search engines will actually care about.

The installation of BANS is very simple. Create your database on your hosting, then upload Build a Niche Store. They’ll tell you to CHMOD the cont/cont.php file to 777, and the instructions tell you how to do that with your FTP program. It’s pretty simple - right click on the filename, select properties and change the 644 to 777. At least that’s how it works for me.

Then you go to your site and follow the instructions to install it. You’ll need your mySQL host and login information for this. A few seconds later, it’s all installed. Delete the install.php file and CHMOD the cont.php file back to 644.

Login, and you have one more very, very important step: Change your password. You can change the login name too, if you like, but since all BANS installations come with the same default admin name and password, changing the password is a vital bare minimum.

Next you’ll want to set up your store. I’ve circled the areas you need to fill out to get started.

There are other areas you can fill out, such as if you want to customize your site wide meta tags, but you don’t absolutely have to do that. You can also decide if you want open or closed navigation - that is, do you want links to all the categories showing or not?
The campaign ID you get from the eBay Partner Network, and you can follow the link to get your eBay category. Make sure you create a new campaign ID for every site so you can track which sites are profitable for you.

Hit Save once you’ve added all your information. Your basic store is now active… maybe. Some hosts need you to switch from normal mode to curl. That’s at the bottom of the Setup page:

Just make sure you customize it. The basic templates are very plain. I always change up the colors and give it a header graphic. In this particular case I’ll be coordinating it with the main site. There are several to choose from, so it’s pretty easy to find something that matches the basic layout of most sites, and you can customize from there.

Now I know I’ve skipped over one very important step - researching the niche. There are many ways to do that, and I’ll discuss it when I start my next BANS site.

Not my income goal, my article marketing goal. It’s been a couple months since I’ve managed that, for a variety of reasons.

My goal is simple. By the 15th of each month, have one article for every day of the month written for publication through Article Marketer. I only had two left to do today, and I finished them.

This is one of the things I love about Article Marketer. I can spread out the publication of my articles over a period of time, so that a blast of writing doesn’t leave me with a single days’ exposure on the article sites. Instead I appear in various categories throughout the month.

I have my sites set up by priority. My highest priority site gets an article published every 3 days. Next priority is weekly. The remainder are approximately monthly, with a couple sites getting extra articles if I have the free time for it.

This month I’m not doing extra articles. I’m going to start researching new BANS niches instead.

Now that there’s been just about a week for the bugs to be worked out, I’ve decided to go through with updating my Build a Niche Store websites to the new eBay Partner Network program. I want this done well before the end of April deadline, after all. No point in procrastinating and losing out on sales.

I’m starting this out with one of my lower performing sites, one that doesn’t currently get a lot of traffic. This way I can learn about any road hazards before dealing with a site that has more visitors.

The update should be very easy. According to the instructions, I should be able to just upload the files, go to update.php on the relevant site, and it should be done, aside from entering my new affiliate information.

So of course I’m backing everything up first. Files, database, the whole thing. It’s the most sensible thing to do in any website update.

Deep breath and here goes…

Everything looks great! Not at all surprised really, since I gave it a few days, but upgrading any site is a bit nervewracking. So much that could go wrong.

There are a lot of changes in here. The interface is completely different, but it looks good:

Now I just have to figure out how to plug in my affiliate information. That looks easy enough to do, just by going over to the Setup page, with another tab open so that I can create a campaign ID over at the eBay Partner Network for this particular site. Always nice to be able to track the commission sources, after all.

I have my affiliate links cloaked, so for a quick check I uncloak. Sure enough, I can see my campaign ID in the links.

I have to admit, it’s a bit tricky getting used to the new terminology. I had to look in the highly useful User Manual to be certain that my initial guess that the campaign ID was in fact what I needed for tracking. I’m more used to affiliate IDs, after all, or Commission Junction’s PID.

One more little step: removing my old sitemap. The new version includes a sitemap, so I don’t need the old mod. And with the updated pages the old one isn’t even functioning, so it goes beyond redundancy. But that’s incredibly easy, and I could even switch the page off if I so chose.

Believe it or not, it was really just that simple. I may have time tonight to start a couple new sites even, although I may instead choose to work on some more of my article marketing which is my usual for this early part of the month. So much I want to do, so little time!

But when I create a store I will show the step by step process here. Probably won’t actually do it for at least a few days since I’ll have to research it, buy the domain and get things set up so it functions first. Usual little delays. But I’m really excited about the changes.

The hardest part no doubt is going to be finding the occasional eBay links on my non-BANS sites! I know they’re out there, and now I have to do something about them.

eBay is making a big change… they’re leaving Commission Junction and bringing their affiliate program inhouse. And to encourage people to make the transition quickly, they’re offering a 5% bonus for all traffic sent through their new network in the month of April 2008.

It opens April 1, 2008.

If you’re using BANS, don’t worry. They will get it updated so that Build a Niche Store will continue to work within the new system. Has to be a bit frustrating for them, since they just finished updating to version 3, but that’s the affiliate life for you. BANS has already sent an email to users who subscribe to their newsletter about this.
Migration needs to be complete by May 1, 2008. I guess I know where my focus will be at the start of April! But I can certainly appreciate that they’re giving us a couple weeks’ notice of the change, and a month in which to complete it. Much better than some programs do when they make a big change like this.

Never get a sinus infection following catching the flu when you’re trying to release an ebook. It makes your original schedule go completely to pieces.

For a couple weeks there I was sick enough or just in enough sinus pain that there was no way I could work for more than a short time at the computer. It was miserably frustrating. But now I’m far enough along the road to recovery that I can and will get things moving again!

And talk about motivation!

Beyond merely needing the money (who doesn’t?), I learned that Build a Niche Store version 3 came out today. I love BANS; it’s done well for me. And my next project planned has long been to chronicle releasing a BANS site using version 3 just as soon as it came out.  Now it’s out and I’m not quite ready!

But I’ve made more progress on my sales page. Writing a sales page is in many ways harder than writing the ebook itself. Once that’s ready I also want to prepare a solid Affiliate page to encourage affiliates to offer my book… and to encourage them to sign up so that I can notify them of future ebooks I will write.

There’s still a goodly amount of work I want to get done, hopefully within the next day or two. I really, really want to get this thing launched and earning.