Aspects of Home Business Blog

By Stephanie

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.

Tags: bans, build a niche store, ebay, niche research

How I Research a Market for a Niche

By Stephanie

When you’re deciding what you want to market, your niche research is important. Sometimes it’s easy. When I started my first site on medical transcription, for example, it was because I was working in that industry andother moms kept asking me how to get into it. I ended up going broader than that because so many found the requirements to work in medical transcription simply overwhelming.

In that case my early research was simply conversations with people who would be my target market. Lots of moms want real information on working at home.

But other products require different tactics. It’s not often so easy to spot an interesting niche. Fortunately, there are many useful online tools.

Wordtracker is perhaps the most often mentioned. Even it’s free version is a good resource, although to really get into the depths of keyword research you need to pay. You can subscribe for as little as a week, which is $30 as of this writing. There’s a huge difference in what you can do in the paid version versus the free.

I also look at the other websites in your niche out there. The goal is not to copy them, not by a long shot. But looking at the sites that already exist tellsme a lot about my future competition. I’m not only looking at what they do well, but what I could do better.

Having a Google AdWords account is very useful. In areas that pay well, people are likely to pay for advertising. But you don’t have to have an account to use their free external keyword suggestion tool.

If it’s pure power you’re after, however, Keyword Elite is the tool for you. It helps you to analyze your keyword competition in Google, Yahoo, Miva and Enhance. That’s nice if you just want to build a website, but if you’re going to be doing pay per click marketing, it’s vital. This is one of those tools that is worth the investment.

But what makes a niche worthwhile?

It can depend on your goals. I’ve had success with keywords that have only a few thousand searches a month. These aren’t my big earners, but a couple are pretty steady in the $50-100/month range. It’s nothing to sneeze at. This doesn’t work out every time, of course.

But may marketers recommend focusing on keywords that have at least 50,000 searches per month. Keep in mind that this number is total for the main keyword and the extended phrases. A few thousand searches for one version, a few hundred for another, adds up pretty fast.

A key item to remember is that just because someone else has a successful site on a particular topic, with affiliate programs that pay well, doesn’t mean the market will work out for you. Many are expensive and/or difficult to break into. Credit cards, for example. The commissions for credit card approvals are amazing, but it’s a tough industry, even in pay per click. You really have to figure out how to stand out.

Heavy competition is not always a reason to drop a niche. If you can find that way to stand out, or you analyze your competition and realize they’re missing a lot of key areas, you can still make a go of it and succeed. But I wouldn’t recommend targeting the difficult niches until you have some experience.