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Old 11-30-2010, 11:00 PM   #1
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Default How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

I made a few posts in a thread about Amazon product websites where I shared niche market website of my own. I received A LOT of response about my website, DogCrateSizes, so I have decided to write a guide on how to find a niche market. I hope some of you will be able to use it to find a profitable niche market, plus it will give me something to refer people to when I am asked this question in the future (because it happens once a week at least).

This guide on finding a niche market outlines all of the steps that I take to find a new Amazon product niche. I feel like the niche selection process is one of the most important steps in building a successful Amazon product site. Even if you pick the best or most popular products to promote, you will never make sales on a regular basis without a great search engine ranking to bring targeted traffic to your site. This guide will teach you how to find a niche and a keyword phrase that will allow you to easily get a top ten search engine ranking on a keyword phrase that actually receives traffic.

This guide will NOT teach you how to actually build your website - it's just a guide to get you to the point of being ready to start building your website that will actually be successful and make you money every single money!

Product Selection
I always begin my search with product selection. You have to figure out what products you are going to be promoting before you can proceed to keyword and domain name selection. I use a number of different websites to find products. Ebay Pulse is a good website to see what people are looking to buy, although some of these products may not work well for this type of website. Even more so, some of these products may not even be available for sale on Amazon.

Everyone has their own method of finding products, but I personally prefer to find them on Amazon itself if I am going to be making a website that promotes Amazon products. This saves me a lot of time in the long run because I never find a product that ends up not being available for promotion.

I mainly use the tools that are available to the general public on Amazon. Just go to their main page and select a department. You can then further refine the department until you get down to specific types of products. Any of these are potential niche ideas, although more research will be needed to find out if it's a niche that you will be successful with. Start by simply making a list of some possible niche markets.

When you are searching within a particular category on Amazon, you can sort your results by 'Bestselling', 'Avg. Customer Review' and even by price. I like using these features to find some of the popular items or to target higher priced items. It does help sales a lot for a product you are promoting to have customer reviews.

You can also find out what people want to buy on Amazon.com by checking out Gift Central. Gift Central shows you some of the most wished for items in various categories or for different kinds of people (grandpa's, for example). This is a superb way to find out about popular niche products that you would ordinarily not even think about.

A lot of people will only select products with a price of $150 or higher, but I don't always agree with that policy. You will get lower commissions but better conversion rates with lower priced products and the opposite with higher priced products. This means that you will need more traffic to convert a single sale when you have a site promoting higher priced products. I really like it when I can find a niche that offers a bit of a variety of product prices so I have some cheaper items to promote that will get frequent sales and more expensive items that sell every now and again but bring great commissions.

Try to avoid the most mainstream high-priced items that are already over-promoted: TV, computers, etc. Although I do not have any specific places to recommend to find these specific products, new types of products that become available to the pubic are often the best niches to make a website for and they will usually have available domain names. Once you have a general product category, try to find new products made in that category within the past year or even products that will be coming out next year.

Keyword & Domain Name Selection
When I am trying to find a new niche market, I will only choose a primary keyword phrase that has the exact phrase available to register as a .COM domain name. This is one of the most important aspects of my entire campaign besides actual product selection. Without it, getting search engine rankings will take more work, time and effort. I prefer spending my time researching and making new websites - not marketing and maintaining!

Obviously, almost everyone will know about keyword resources from Google: Google Insights and Google Keyword Tool.

Google Insights is great to find out whether a product is on the rise or decline. You don't want to get on board with a product that people won't want to buy a few years from now and on the other end of the spectrum, you'll make a ton of money down the road if you get in on a product that is just starting and gains popularity over time. Insights will also give you suggestions of other relating search terms that are popular in addition to breakout searches featured on the right hand side of the page. An important point that I want to stress about Insights is to NEVER rely on these keywords to decide on a primary keyword phrase or domain name. Use this information as a guideline only to have an idea of the popularity of your products and whether they have seasonal tendencies.

Google Keyword Tool is used to actually select a keyword phrase for your product(s). You want to find a keyword phrase that has a good monthly search count. Although you will not see this option when you first make a search on the keyword tool, after your results are displayed you will be able to mark check boxes for "Broad, Exact and Phrase". You can check each of these boxes to give you an idea of the power for your keyword phrase in various areas. I've provided a brief explanation of each of these settings below.

Broad - This number shouldn't be taken too literally because you will likely never receive all of this traffic. This figure is a general traffic stat that will tell you how much traffic that subject receives, although the actual searches can be very different from your keyword phrase. If you end up creating an authority site that essentially covers every single topic for a subject, you could possibly see a portion of this search traffic.

Exact - Most people only go by the exact monthly search traffic in their keyword research. While this is a good practice, I don't think the other numbers should be ignored. I have had many websites with low exact monthly search traffic that gets many times more traffic than sites with considerably higher exact monthly searches. That's where the other two factors come into play, because you will usually target more than a single keyword phrase over an entire website. Depending on the price of the product I want to sell, I usually look to get a bare minimum of 200 exact monthly searches for my primary keyword phrase. Obviously, more will be better but it's hard to find available .com domain names containing the exact phrase for keywords that receive more than 1000 exact monthly searches. Some people claim to only make new sites with that kind of keyword traffic, but I believe automated scripts have snatched up almost all of these domain names. Whether that is true or not is not important because you don't need that many searches to have a successful website that makes daily sales.

Phrase - I like using this stat in combination with the 'Exact' stat to get an idea of the traffic that I can reasonably go after with a new niche market. I will give you a brief example of how important this number really is. Let's say your exact keyword phrase is "niche markets" and it receives 200 exact monthly searches (all made up figures, by the way). Most people will never consider this to be a good choice for a primary keyword phrase. However, if the 'Phrase' monthly traffic figure shows a reasonable amount of traffic then I would never pass up this choice as a primary keyword phrase. In fact, I want my 'Phrase' traffic to be considerably higher than my 'Exact' phrase traffic for my primary keyword. This gives me something to build my website with because all of those other keyword phrases that contain your primary keyword phrase will make for excellent content pages on your site. You optimize the main page of your site for the primary keyword phrase and then have many other pages that are each optimized for a single long-tail phrase that contains your primary phrase (ie, "new niche markets" or "product niche markets"). When you add up the traffic of all of these keyword phrases, you receive the 'Phrase' traffic number. I view this as the real potential for a website.

Another important thing to look at for your keyword phrase with Google Keyword Tool is the search volume trend shown in the bar graph for each keyword phrase. Unless you are targeting a seasonal product, you want to see a fairly steady bar graph or a bar graph that is on the rise. Never go for something that is really high to start and almost gone towards the end of the bar graph. This means the keyword phrase is losing traffic. You should also remember that the monthly traffic figures that Google provides are based on a 12 month average (an average of the months shown to you in those green bar graphs for each keyword). If you find a keyword that is quickly gaining popularity, it could show a low monthly search average but actually be receiving many more searches. When I find some real prospects for a keyword phrase, I ALWAYS download the CSV file from Google for the keyword results (there's a download button at the top of the results). Open that file with a spreadsheet program and take a look at the search volume counts. It will show you a count from the previous month - this figure will give you a real idea of it's current monthly search traffic. I believe this aspect is overlooked by automated programs and I have found keyword phrases with 500-800 average monthly searches that actually are receiving 1400 monthly searches as of last month. In almost all of these situations, I found the .COM domain name to be available for registration.

That brings me to my next point - domain name registration. ALWAYS get a .COM that is an exact match of your primary keyword phrase. An an example, if your keyword phrase is "niche market" then you want to be able to register "nichemarket.com". Keep searching through keyword possibilities until you find one that has an available domain name. Unfortunately, after you make your way through all of these steps, this entire process can take numerous hours or even longer to find a good niche. You can even go all the way through the process only to never find a single available .com domain name. In this case, you just have to brush it off and search for another niche.

When you find an available .com domain name for your keyword phrase, you need to do one more bit of research on Google before you make a final decision.

Go to Google and search for your keyword phrase. You need to look for a few things when you do this search:
  • Paid Advertising (Look at top and on right)
  • Authority Sites in the Top Ten (About, Wiki, Amazon or other major sites in your niche)
  • Websites in the Top Ten with ALL/ANY of your keywords in the domain name
  • Websites in the Top Ten with the exact keyword phrase in the title and/or description
  • Websites in the Top Ten with more than one listing for the keyword phrase
It is OK to see some of the above things when you search for your keyword phrase, but if you see all of these things then you may want to consider another phrase. This should simply tell you how hard it is going to be to get ranked in the Top Ten with a quick look. If you would like to look at the competition a bit more, do the following on Google:
  • Search for the keyword phrase contained within quotes (ie: "niche market"). If you see more than 30,000 websites in those search results, you will need to put more effort into marketing, on-site optimization and content building. If you can find a keyword phrase with less than 10,000 results in this search, you should have a fairly easy time getting into the top ten if you follow the other guidelines I've talked about.
  • Search for the keyword phrase contained within quotes with "allintitle:" in front of it (ie, allintitle:"niche market"). If you see more than 10,000 websites, you will need more effort as stated above. In an ideal situation, I like this number below 1,000 or even below 500.
  • Go through each site in the Top Ten and perform a search to find out how many pages that particular website has (ie, site:example-domain-name.com). I don't have a set number I'm looking for here, but I like to mostly see websites that have a lower page count. When you find sites that have hundreds or even thousands of pages, this will let you know that you may need some extra effort to top these websites. The more pages a website contains, the more weight they will have in the search results in general (this helps to translate into a higher page rank for a site, which is why sites with millions of pages like wikipedia have high PR).
  • Just like before, go through the sites in the top ten and look to see how many backlinks Google shows for the website (ie, link:example-domain-name.com). Unfortunately, you can't take these exact numbers literally because new links will usually not show up in these results even if Google is already considering their weight. If a page other than the main page of a website is the ranking page in the top ten, check out the backlink count of that specific page as well as the entire domain name. This also helps you to determine the overall power of a website that you will compete with. Some people say to try and get as many backlinks as all of the pages in the top ten have combined to get a #1 ranking, but this isn't needed in most cases unless you are in a high competition niche. You can be #1 with zero backlinks while the other sites below you have many backlinks - it's just one of the many factors in the ranking equation.
Ultimately, you want a keyword phrase with decent exact and phrase monthly traffic that has relating Amazon products, an available .exact phrase .com domain name and fairly low competition in the search engine rankings. It is a lot of things that all need to come into alignment just right in order to be successful, but I hope you will be able to find these with more confidence after reading this guide.

Once you have found your keyword phrase and domain name, you are ready to create your website. Set up a Wordpress blog on your web hosting account. Create nothing but "pages" for your entire website. Use one of these pages to replace your front page. I like to use this front page as a guide to the various areas of the website. My DogCrateSizes site should give you a pretty good idea of what I am talking about (it's a .com website by that name, by the way).

I realized after reading a lot of people's comments that they are failing at promoting Amazon products because of their poor niche, keyword and domain name selection. If you get these three factors right, I have actually found it difficult to FAIL promoting Amazon products. I put very little effort into marketing my niche product websites and am able to quickly obtain top ten search engine rankings. With a bit of marketing work, I can usually get to #1 within a couple months of starting a new site. I run a lot of different websites and constantly make new ones, so I really don't devote a lot of time to the marketing process. I find that if you put some serious thought and effort into the planning of your website then all of the other pieces will fall into place with ease.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments.

I hope you have been able to take something useful away from this thread and are able to find a niche market. In the end, you will probably need multiple niche product websites to make a good monthly income, so put the work into the most important aspect - your research. There is nothing worse than spending a lot of time making a website only to never make a single penny with it and I hope you will be able to avoid that situation using this guide.

Ryan


Last edited by phpnetpro; 11-30-2010 at 11:03 PM. Reason: Domain Name example auto-hyperlinked - removed it
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Old 11-30-2010, 11:03 PM   #2
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Pretty complete guide you have here, I may send a few of my customers over here to check it out.

Thanks

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Old 11-30-2010, 11:06 PM   #3
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

You went through a lot of trouble to write that, and it's pretty darn good information. Going to print it out and take some notes. Thanks for the share!

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Old 11-30-2010, 11:09 PM   #4
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Thank you for such detailed information - very timely and much appreciated!

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Old 12-01-2010, 12:46 AM   #5
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

I'm really struggling with niche research for some reason. Every time I find something that I think could be decent, I take a look at the top few results and it's already some other IMer at #1, or it's some big authority site like consumerreports, etc.

Why do you insist on a .com rather than .net/org? Does it really make that big of a difference? I'm finding that it's nearly impossible to find an exact match .net/org, let alone a .com. I've never dug that deeply into the lower amount of monthly search terms, though...

Your example with "dog crate sizes" goes against all of my instincts, really. I have a site at around #7-10 on Google, keyword has about 3000 searches a month and I'm getting about 750 of those to my site (well, extrapolating my current daily average, anyway). If you're targeting something with such a low number of searches, is it vital to reach #1 in Google? Just looking at your "dog crate sizes" numbers, I would be getting like 2 visitors a day at the bottom of page 1. I'm looking at your site, and the keyword numbers and can't, for the life of me, figure out how it's successful.

Ugh, this is tough.

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Old 12-01-2010, 12:51 AM   #6
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Your post is greatly appreciated. I'll get this printed so I can reread it offline. Thank you.
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Old 12-01-2010, 01:31 AM   #7
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

First, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for their kind words so far. I'm glad that everyone is finding it useful.


Quote:
Originally Posted by mattward View Post
I'm really struggling with niche research for some reason. Every time I find something that I think could be decent, I take a look at the top few results and it's already some other IMer at #1, or it's some big authority site like consumerreports, etc.

Why do you insist on a .com rather than .net/org? Does it really make that big of a difference? I'm finding that it's nearly impossible to find an exact match .net/org, let alone a .com. I've never dug that deeply into the lower amount of monthly search terms, though...

Your example with "dog crate sizes" goes against all of my instincts, really. I have a site at around #7-10 on Google, keyword has about 3000 searches a month and I'm getting about 750 of those to my site (well, extrapolating my current daily average, anyway). If you're targeting something with such a low number of searches, is it vital to reach #1 in Google? Just looking at your "dog crate sizes" numbers, I would be getting like 2 visitors a day at the bottom of page 1. I'm looking at your site, and the keyword numbers and can't, for the life of me, figure out how it's successful.

Ugh, this is tough.

Mattward...
The dog crate sizes site is a great example. Most people think they need thousands of monthly searches to be successful, but this is simply not the case. The broad phrase gets 4,400 monthly, the phrase gets 880 and the exact phrase gets 590. Most people will look at that and think that they're only going to get a couple of visitors a day. I'm ranked #2 at the moment (at least on google.com). To give you some info on the site, two days ago (something I have sales stats for) I had 51 unique visitors, over 100 page views and 3 sales (about $15 in commission). I was actually getting decent traffic and sales as soon as I hit #10 for my main keyword.

I have noticed that most people talk about conversion rates of 2-3% (clicks on Amazon ads to sales ratio). Personally, I seem to get 6-12% conversion rates on most of my Amazon sites. The dog crate site converts at 10-12% and higher priced products convert at the lower rates.

If you're not able to find .net or .org names, then you are looking at numbers that are too high. You'll likely spend days, weeks or more searching for one of those sites and if you find one you could easily end up spending months or more marketing. Don't be afraid to be a bottom-dweller - the money is good down here, lol. You don't have to make hundreds or thousands of dollars every day from each site. My goal is for each site is to make $1/day or better. A decent portion of them make $5-10/day and a few of them make up to $50/day.

It's not that a .net or .org name is bad, but if you end up in competition with the .com name you will likely always be on the losing end unless the other person is just a poor marketer. Having the .com name just gives you that much more of an edge. I want to have as much natural power on my side as possible so I can start getting rankings and traffic just by writing out 20 pages or so for the site.

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Old 12-01-2010, 01:33 AM   #8
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

What a truly fantastic post dude !

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Old 12-01-2010, 01:50 AM   #9
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

You've really set my mind going in a completely different direction than I have been. I've honestly spent all day (it's almost 4AM and still am) doing niche research and haven't come up with anything, but if you're doing as well as you say you are with the super micro niche sites, that really seems like it could be a better way to go. It seems like nearly every single keyword above 1000+ exact searches is already saturated with other IMers.

How much of your traffic on dogcratesizes is from keywords other than "dog crate sizes"? I happened to look up your categories and only one of them was ranking on page 1 (I'm not sure about the specific product pages).

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Old 12-01-2010, 02:05 AM   #10
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Quote:
Originally Posted by mattward View Post
You've really set my mind going in a completely different direction than I have been. I've honestly spent all day (it's almost 4AM and still am) doing niche research and haven't come up with anything, but if you're doing as well as you say you are with the super micro niche sites, that really seems like it could be a better way to go. It seems like nearly every single keyword above 1000+ exact searches is already saturated with other IMers.

How much of your traffic on dogcratesizes is from keywords other than "dog crate sizes"? I happened to look up your categories and only one of them was ranking on page 1 (I'm not sure about the specific product pages).
I don't recall off the top of my head how much of my traffic comes from search engines, but I get about 50% of my search engine traffic from the main keyword phrase. 90% of my search engine traffic is from Google, but I get a trickle of traffic from other search engines.

My categories are actually a problem at the moment (if you're talking about the various size categories). I think there's a lot more traffic there that I can tap into, but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. My main problem is that my actual category pages aren't getting ranked because of the content on them (just the tables from the top of each page). I think if I add an article before the listings on those category pages I would start ranking with those pages. Some of the other pages (covers, furniture) were more recent pages I set up but have not marketed yet. I was curious how high they would rank by just writing them on the site. It looks like with a bit of additional work I can get on the top page of those terms as well.

Although the main keyword phrase is important, I really just use it as a jumping point to many other keyword phrases (which will contain at least a piece of the main keyword phrase). I try to look at the grand scheme when I figure out whether a niche is worthy or not.

I really wish I could give out some more examples, but I have quite a few sites in niches that still have available domain names and I don't want to give those niches away. I know they would get snatched up in a heartbeat .

Although I have offered to sell it to some people, my next project (assuming nobody buys it) is going to be to develop a chain of 50+ sites on a particular type of product. Each of the 50 sites is really just to target a single product model. They vary from about 100-500 exact monthly searches, although there is a more general term (half of the domain name) that gets considerably more traffic. I'm still searching for another domain to go with them that will be a central hub for all of the sites (a more general keyword phrase hopefully). Once all of the sites are complete, all of the model sites will link back to the main site and the main site will link out to all of the model sites. I really have some high expectations for this one, even if each site is only able to make $1-5 a day the whole venture should yield a full-time income.

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Old 12-01-2010, 02:56 AM   #11
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

This thread has been a huge help, thanks a lot.

I think I may have found my next website already, but I'll have to sleep on it. Maybe when I can see straight it won't seem like such a good idea anymore.

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Old 12-01-2010, 09:27 AM   #12
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Yes thanks a lot from me too, Ryan.

I know how much work goes into writing that volume and quality of output.

Cheers

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Old 12-01-2010, 09:49 AM   #13
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Quote:
Originally Posted by leanfang View Post
Yes thanks a lot from me too, Ryan.

I know how much work goes into writing that volume and quality of output.

Cheers

Fraser

Thanks Fraser!

It did take a while to write the thread, but I am glad that everyone has found it useful so far.

Mattward, glad you found a site (unless it's just sleep deprivation talking, lol).



Mods - Why in the world did my thread get moved to the Adsense/PPC/SEO forum?

I know there's some SEO information here, but this is far from being a relevant thread for that forum.


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Old 12-01-2010, 10:42 AM   #14
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Hi there,

So you create sites for specific models? do you promote only amazon.com products?


As i recall Amazon commission rate is quite low in comparison to many other affiliate programs.
EDIT: what sort of category do you target?

Thanks!

-Brandon
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Old 12-01-2010, 11:22 AM   #15
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

A really great post, Ryan. Thanks!
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Old 12-01-2010, 11:29 AM   #16
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Quote:
Originally Posted by 0b1 View Post
Hi there,

So you create sites for specific models? do you promote only amazon.com products?


As i recall Amazon commission rate is quite low in comparison to many other affiliate programs.
EDIT: what sort of category do you target?

Thanks!

-Brandon

Hi Brandon,

For these types of websites, I only promote Amazon products (I do use other Amazon country sites for certain websites). I run other types of websites that use CJ, Clickbank, Adwords, etc.. but my Amazon sites make more money than any of my other websites.

The commission is low compared with other affiliate programs, but I try not to think about it that way. Most other affiliate programs are for services or digital products where you have a lot less cost involved compared with a physical product. The truth is that most services and digital products are marked up by 100% just to cover the affiliate payments.

I find that you have to talk people into buying services and digital products, but there are already tons of people searching everybody looking to buy physical products. All you have to do is put yourself in their path, provide them with some useful information and then pass them along to complete the sale.

Amazon.com starts you off at 4%, but some of the other Amazon countries start you off with more (I think Amazon.co.uk starts at 5%). They all have different rules for moving up in the commission scale, but Amazon.com only requires 7 monthly sales to get bumped to 6%. I found that it was rather easy to move up to that pay scale with just 1 or 2 semi-successful Amazon product sites. At 6%, the commissions are pretty decent if you are promoting products that are $80 or higher (around $5 for a $85 sale).

Consider how hands-off these websites are to run, I don't mind the low commissions. Sure, it would be nice to be the person selling those products, but you're talking a lot of extra work to be the one providing customer service, payment processing, refunds, shipping, etc. In reality, the people that do all of that to sell physical products probably don't end up making more than 6-10% on the sale themselves, especially once you factor your expenses.

I do usually take a look at other affiliate programs when I make these sites to see if there is anything worth promoting. I know some people have made sites for CJ.com products. At least for the websites that I've made, CJ.com really didn't have anything good to offer. There were products available but I found that the prices were too high (with a slightly better commission - 8%) or the commission was too low and the prices were still too high. I usually find CJ.com sites to sell their products for the price that is slashed out on Amazon.com. Even if CJ can give a better commission, I want to sell the lower priced product because that's something that the customer will actually buy more often. I would much rather sell a $40 product for a 6%+ commission than the same product for $60 with an 8% commission. I get a 8% commission from Amazon.com currently, although electronics are a set 4% (not really a bad thing, because they are usually high priced - I have one site promoting multi thousand dollar electronics products that gets great commissions).

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Old 12-01-2010, 11:38 AM   #17
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Ryan,
thanks for the detailed info. One question, when you select domains do you choose only keyword and longtail domains (dogcrate.com) or specific brand name domains (ultima1000crate.com) for example?
Thanks, Mark
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Old 12-01-2010, 12:01 PM   #18
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I never go after brand name domains. Some people will do it and make money, but I won't risk all of that time and effort on potential legality issues.

However, I will sometimes target a particular model if I can find a good keyword phrase with traffic. I guarantee this niche is taken, so I'll use it as an example: televisions. Instead of just looking for things like "plasma tv", you can try "50 inch tv".

This is kinda what I mentioned in one of my previous posts about the network of 50+ sites that each target a model. As long as the model is not some kind of trademark/copyright name, then you should be ok. Something like "medium dog crates" would be good but "life stages dog crates" could be asking for trouble.

Legally speaking, if you do make a site that uses a trademark or copyright name, the company can contact you and force you to turn over the entire website and domain name to them - free of charge. Just imagine building a site to make $50/day and then having a company contact you and tell you it's theirs now.

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Old 12-01-2010, 12:38 PM   #19
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Now I'm sort of hopping back and forth between ideas again. Sigh.

I've found an exact match domain (.com) that had 800 exact searches in November (upward trend) and could easily rank #1, but it's for a specific type of product and wouldn't really make sense to have different types of products on it. Using your example, it would be like "XXLdogcrates.com". There wouldn't really be any sub-category pages that would make sense, other than informational articles. However, there are a lot of similar search keywords for this type of product with the same kind of numbers (~500) but they're really just another way to search for the same product (like, "scubadiving wigets", "recommended scubadiving widgets", "widgets for scubadiving", "underwater diving widgets", etc). Does it even make sense to go after a ton of similar longtail keywords on a single page like that? It wouldn't make any sense to have a bunch of different pages all saying the same thing in a different way.

I'm finding that there aren't any exact match domains available for the general type of product. There is really only one available, and it has very few searches (250/month exact) and it's not really an optimal keyword. But then there are variety of different keywords that might be possible to go after for the general item ("widgets for golfing", "widgets for skiing", etc). The EMD would have to be a very low searched term. But then there would be probably 10-15 different keywords that could be gone after, although then I'd be going against Amazon/Nextag/etc with a subpage category rather than a domain.

Any opinions on which scenario would be better?

Trying to decide whether to go with. I'm not at the point where I can easily grasp/analyze things like this yet.

"Keep moving forward."
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Old 12-01-2010, 12:59 PM   #20
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I don't necessarily have a problem with making a website that only targets a specific type of product, although it can be hard to create the content for the website in those situations if there aren't other keywords that you can target within the site.

For your examples, I would go for the shortest form of the domain name that contains keywords found in other similar keyword phrases. Of your examples, I would go for "scubadiving widgets" because you could make other pages on the site that would target all of those other keywords.

Of those two scenarios, I would probably go with the first choice that has the higher search volume. When it comes to making the pages for the site, you could even consider keyword phrases that don't contain your domain phrase. These could be phrases that Google might relate to your phrase (ie, phrase is "dog crate sizes" but you make a page for "Midwest iCrate"). If I really find myself lacking in content/keyword choices for a site or if the site will only product a single type of product, then I may end up making it like a review site. This way, you can make a page for all of the various brands of that single product type. When it comes to capturing traffic from brand/trademark keyword phrases, this is the way to do it legally (as long as it's not in your domain name and you're not claiming to be the maker of the product). Look at see how many different keyword phrases you can come up with for that particular site. If you don't think the competition will be tough, then you may be able to go with a site with less than 20 pages and still get ranked high. You can also make numerous pages that target your primary keyword phrase. If there are different aspects that you can talk about, make a page for each one. If you really are limited in information, you can always rehash the same information on multiple pages. Just try to design the site to where people will be less likely to end up viewing more than one of those rehashed pages on a single visit.

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Old 12-01-2010, 01:38 PM   #21
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Thanks again, you've given me a lot to chew on.

I suppose the main question is if I can rank on the first keyword with a sub-page rather than the exact match domain. I really need to develop a sense for sizing up SEO competition.

Actually, I guess there's no reason why I couldn't do both ideas. The first EMD would probably rank on page #1 with minimal (if any) backlinking, which would then be a decent indicator if it's worth putting the work into a much more in-depth site.

Oh, what to do. I'll figure it out eventually.

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Old 12-01-2010, 01:55 PM   #22
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Ryan,

Thought I could write lengthy posts

Looks like another worthwhile piece to explore, have just downloaded as PDF to read at my leisure.

I'm trying to recall where I've seen your site come up before, maybe on BTF? It was somewhere interesting.

Thanks for taking the time to post this.
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Old 12-01-2010, 03:47 PM   #23
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Ryan,

Thought I could write lengthy posts

Looks like another worthwhile piece to explore, have just downloaded as PDF to read at my leisure.

I'm trying to recall where I've seen your site come up before, maybe on BTF? It was somewhere interesting.

Thanks for taking the time to post this.
You're quite welcome Key Largo.

I'm pretty sure that the Warrior Forum is the only place I've ever shared the dog crate site - it's really one of the few forums that I participate on.

I did post about the site in a thread here about Amazon affiliates making money (within the past couple of weeks).

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Old 12-01-2010, 05:24 PM   #24
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Very detailed. Thank you

No affiliate links in sig files
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Old 12-01-2010, 06:00 PM   #25
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Hi Ryan,

An exceptional post, thank you.

Neil
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Old 12-01-2010, 08:13 PM   #26
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Why do you not advocate the use of the other TLD's, .net and .org?
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Old 12-01-2010, 08:39 PM   #27
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Hi Ryan,

An exceptional post, thank you.

Neil
Thanks Neil. Glad you enjoyed it.



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Originally Posted by brendan1 View Post
Why do you not advocate the use of the other TLD's, .net and .org?

Brendan,

It's not that I think the other TLD's are bad, but I don't think they receive as much natural strength as .com domains. I think Google just gives a .com more weight. I used to mess around with some .net domains, but I found myself always coming 2nd to the .com variant unless I put in a lot of work marketing. If the person running the .com is an experienced marketer, it ends up being a never ending battle that the .net is usually on the losing side of.

I also feel like I get more return traffic with .com's from people remembering my domain name. I tend to see far less of this with a .net site.

Since I go for somewhat lower traffic phrases than most people, I can usually always find a .com domain if I look around enough. Sure, the .net domains are readily available for phrases that have more traffic, but I'm just not looking for a competition battle. I like going after the niches that don't really know anything about SEO. I always wonder what the competition thinks as my brand new sites fly past them in the rankings.

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Old 12-01-2010, 10:27 PM   #28
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

What an incredible post you got here.

I'll print this out and make this as a quick-reference. Thanks.

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Old 12-02-2010, 01:57 AM   #29
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Thank you for posting all of that. You made me realize some errors I was making in checking out the competition!

Do you have any specific advice one what you have found that works with Amazon sites as far as the type of banners you use, how you lay out your pages etc. or is that beyond this thread?

Affiliate website building software as well as information on affiliate marketing, SEO and other aspects of doing business online.
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Old 12-02-2010, 06:21 AM   #30
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Thank you for posting all of that. You made me realize some errors I was making in checking out the competition!

Do you have any specific advice one what you have found that works with Amazon sites as far as the type of banners you use, how you lay out your pages etc. or is that beyond this thread?

Hi Fortony,

I have seen other people say that they get better results just using text links for their Amazon products. I have not personally seen a website that uses text only links, so I can't really comment on how well/poorly that works.

I have tried a few different approaches with various sites of mine, but I really wouldn't say that one works better than others. Take the dog crate site, for example. I went with the standard small rectangle widget that shows a pic, name and price for the product. Since I've done some price comparison on the site, I feel like that particular method works well for that site. When someone goes to one of the page categories for the various sizes, they'll be able to look down the list and quickly see the prices.

I think people that use the text links probably have higher click-thru rates, but I often hear of them getting 2-3% conversion rates. I don't really track my click-thru rates because it's not important to me (as long as clicks/sales are indeed coming in), but I do know that I get 10-12% conversion rates on the dog crate site. I think this is because people actually click it knowing that it's going to sell them something. When you put out a text link, half the people that click it probably don't realize what they are clicking (which results in the low conversion rates).

Two of the product websites that I've made since I made the dog crate site (my November projects) have used the new tooltip widget that Amazon recently made available. With this option, you set up an image link or a text link for a product. When someone hovers their mouse over the link, they get an Amazon box that shows info for the item. I've actually been using both an image and a text link for each product to create my own product box that I show at the bottom of pages. This tactic seems to be working out pretty well for me so far - both of those brand new Amazon sites have already made sales with 6-10% conversion rates.

I would share one of those sites with you guys, but I'm not finished with the niche yet and I know my plans would be ruined by sharing. One of the sites is a product that was just released this year and the keyword phrase is quickly gaining popularity. There's tons of untapped domains and keywords for the niche. I've only seen a few articles out there trying to promote this new product, so I've rather been enjoying the lack of competition .

The best advice that I can give is to put yourself in the customer's shoes. Figure out what they are looking for when they search your keyword phrase or when they come to your website. Try to identify their problem, help them solve it and then pass them along to a recommended product choice. That's exactly what the dog crate site does and one of the biggest reasons it's so successful.

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Old 12-02-2010, 09:31 AM   #31
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

This is what I love about this business. You can invest a few bucks in a domain name and hosting and put up a website. In a few weeks if done right you can have a valuable property.

@phpnetpro Your dogcratesizes site looks awesome. Fantastic job and how cool if you flip that site you made in October 2010 for $3,000 plus!

Just love the potential and possibilities in the online world of internet marketing.

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Old 12-02-2010, 09:59 AM   #32
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Ryan,

This is great information. I am just starting into doing some niche research in preperation for next year and this thread has popped up just in time.

The downloading of the CSV file from Google was total news to me. Great idea and makes a ton of sense.

Your approach is to build a strong site foundation with well researched niches, keywords, domain names, etc and then allow the site to grow with minimal work. Good stuff.

Anyway, I have a question:

When I choose an exact domain .com name can I use the Hyphens (- _) to seperate the words if a whole phrase match is not available?

Do you think doing so will effect the rankings of the site?

Cheers,

Andy

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Old 12-02-2010, 10:18 AM   #33
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This is what I love about this business. You can invest a few bucks in a domain name and hosting and put up a website. In a few weeks if done right you can have a valuable property.

@phpnetpro Your dogcratesizes site looks awesome. Fantastic job and how cool if you flip that site you made in October 2010 for $3,000 plus!

Just love the potential and possibilities in the online world of internet marketing.

Thanks for your comments LilBlackDress, although you certainly make it sound easier than it really was . I don't want to give anyone the impression that it's a piece of cake to just throw up a site like this. There's a decent amount of custom programming work to make the site work how it does. My objective in making the site wasn't to turn around and flip it, but I have had some people ask how much I would sell it for so I figured I would make a public offer. I really think I'm giving this site away for a great price. I already have some other great Amazon sites and I expect this site to be one of my top Amazon sites in 2011 (unless someone else gets it). Ultimately, it won't kill me to lose a good property for a fair price and I'm sure it would really help someone else to gain it.


Other people really don't have to go to the extremes that I do with my websites though. I've been programming websites for over 15 years, so I like to make every single site of mine to work exactly how I want it to. I will also do custom programming to my own sites to save myself time, work and/or maintenance. On the dog crate site, I use an advertising manager plugin to store the Amazon ads for the site. However, on the actual pages, I use some custom php code to call a php file that generates the layout the information found in the colored tables at the top of all of the crate product pages (or on the size category pages). This allows me to go to this php file and easily make changes that will get reflected on every single page on my site.

I've even gone another step further with some of my other sites that have tons of Amazon ads, especially if it involves products from different Amazon country sites. There is a plugin that will show people ads from various Amazon country sites, but I needed something with more customization for one particular site. This particular site (which I can't name, sorry - an untapped niche of mine still) promotes an electronics product. Not every model of these products are the same in other countries. So, I built a php file that stores the information for all of my Amazon ads - this file just stores the Amazon product ID, anchor text for the ad link and an image url for a saved image of the product on my local server. I then used a country plugin for Wordpress that lets you filter post/page content based on the visitor's country. I add filtering code to each page that has advertising to detect the visitor's country and store it to a php variable. This variable is then passed along to another php file that pulls the needed product information and displays it to the user. This 2nd php file has templates set up for the Amazon ad code from each country site. It also adds some of my own styling to the ad and then spits it all out to the user. Now, if I want to change ads or the way they are output, I only have to edit one spot instead of hundreds.



I also thought that some of you might be interested in some more keyword information to give you an idea of what sort of keywords you'll be able to get rankings for (besides your primary keyword phrase). In it's short lifespan so far, the dog crate site has a number of other top ten rankings and quite a few more top twenty. Some of the top ten rankings besides the primary keyword phrase are: dog sizes, dog crates sizes, dog crate dimensions, dog crate size guide, dog crate size chart, large dog crate dimensions.
A number of decent phrase rankings keep bouncing between the top of page 2 and bottom of page 2 like: dog sizes, xxl dog crate, dog crate size, medium size dog crate, midwest life stages.
These aren't complete lists (just impressions from a single day), but they should give you a good idea how easily you can get traffic from other keywords besides your primary keyword phrase.

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Old 12-02-2010, 10:46 AM   #34
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

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Ryan,

This is great information. I am just starting into doing some niche research in preperation for next year and this thread has popped up just in time.

The downloading of the CSV file from Google was total news to me. Great idea and makes a ton of sense.

Your approach is to build a strong site foundation with well researched niches, keywords, domain names, etc and then allow the site to grow with minimal work. Good stuff.

Anyway, I have a question:

When I choose an exact domain .com name can I use the Hyphens (- _) to seperate the words if a whole phrase match is not available?

Do you think doing so will effect the rankings of the site?

Cheers,

Andy

Hi Andy,
I don't ever register domains with hyphens to use for this type of website, although I can't say that I would never consider it. Similar to the way .net and .org domain names don't have quite as much strength as a .com, the .com name with a hyphen will have less strength compared to the same .com without the hyphen.

It's not that I think hyphen names, .net or .org are bad, it's just that I find they require more work to get the same rankings with the premium domain choice.

I would consider registering a hyphen name in certain situations, although I rarely ever come across these. If I really, really want to go after a certain niche or keyword phrase and it's simply not available, I may consider it if a few things are true. If the premium domain is being sold for an absurd amount of money instead of being used, I'll think about it because I won't have to compete with that site (most likely, or at least I should have my foot in the door first). If the keyword phrase gets a lot of exact search traffic and the competition looks reasonable, that would help as well. If the premium domain name and/or non-hyphenated .net or .org versions rank in the top ten, I won't even consider it. Again, I just don't want to spend too much time competing with other sites for my rankings. I just like to blow past them and move on to the next site.

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Old 12-02-2010, 12:44 PM   #35
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

phpnetpro - I saw your "need niche research" link in your signature, took advantage of your offer, and must say - I am extremely pleased with your results. Saved me hours of research time alone. And the research certainly demonstrates your expertise. I even double-checked your findings via Google and other tools - and they are "on the mark," including:

- Traffic Estimates
- Google Insights
- Competition
- Suggested products and other related products
- and more...

For anyone reading this - I'm in no way associated with phpnetpro. Found this thread last night. Signed up for his niche research (VERY reasonble price). Had results by this morning.

I'll definitely use this service again.

P.S. - The info you've shared in this thread was already impressive...many thanks for all!
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Old 12-02-2010, 04:32 PM   #36
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Hi Ryan .
Interesting and very detailed thanks for that,but I have question?
how I can accelerate the process of indexing in the SEO Google, yahoo,etc ,you pay a lot money in Adwords ? this domain was created in 15 October 2010 and
in less than two months and are in the air and well positioned,
Some tricks are welcome.
Thanks
Jorge
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Old 12-02-2010, 05:42 PM   #37
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Originally Posted by zigstonk View Post
phpnetpro - I saw your "need niche research" link in your signature, took advantage of your offer, and must say - I am extremely pleased with your results. Saved me hours of research time alone. And the research certainly demonstrates your expertise. I even double-checked your findings via Google and other tools - and they are "on the mark," including:

- Traffic Estimates
- Google Insights
- Competition
- Suggested products and other related products
- and more...

For anyone reading this - I'm in no way associated with phpnetpro. Found this thread last night. Signed up for his niche research (VERY reasonble price). Had results by this morning.

I'll definitely use this service again.

P.S. - The info you've shared in this thread was already impressive...many thanks for all!
Wow zigstonk,

Thank you so much for that review. I am glad that you were pleased with the results. I don't hold anything back when I do research or work for others - I just treat it like doing work for myself (and I'm kinda picky about quality).

I don't really pull myself away from my own projects too often to do work for others, but I truly enjoy helping others get a good business running.


Quote:
Originally Posted by internica@gmail.com View Post
Hi Ryan .
Interesting and very detailed thanks for that,but I have question?
how I can accelerate the process of indexing in the SEO Google, yahoo,etc ,you pay a lot money in Adwords ? this domain was created in 15 October 2010 and
in less than two months and are in the air and well positioned,
Some tricks are welcome.
Thanks
Jorge

Hi Jorge,
There's really not one single trick to speeding up this process. I have just adopted a method of research, niche selection, site design and marketing that uses a decent combination of some of the most important factors.

A decent portion of my initial post details the important initial steps that help to build a good foundation for everything that follows.

I get the feeling that I may end up writing the details on the entire process of making one of these sites, lol. Oh well, I'll just turn this thread into an ebook when I'm done.

I think the way that I set up a new site is a crucial detail to getting rankings. Every single Amazon product site I run is based on a Wordpress installation (self-hosted Wordpress sites). I really believe that Google may identify sites as being a Wordpress site and give it some sort of benefits. This is really just speculation, although my Wordpress sites have been indexed considerably faster than some of my previous sites before I used Wordpress. I don't necessarily think that Google gives any kind of extra weight to Wordpress sites, but I have considered the possibility that Google has a faster crawl rate for Wordpress sites and likely other blogs as well. Again, this could just be speculation as well. I don't claim to know the secrets of Google - I just know what I have been able to do over and over again that consistently works.

I always use a particular list of update services for each of my Wordpress sites. I could probably take the time to add or remove some from this list, especially for particular websites, but I keep pasting it into each of my new sites. Sometimes if I know something isn't broken, I just don't want to mess with it.

Update services are sites that accept pings from Wordpress and other sites about new content. To be 100% honest, I've never even visited a single site on this list I'm about to give you. However, this is a list I've put together from a combination of partial lists I've had shared with me over the past couple of years. I have gone through and removed/added some over time, but there could very well be a site in this list that isn't even running anymore.

To edit/add update services to a Wordpress blog, go to Settings->Writing within your admin area. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll see a text box under the heading 'Update Services'. If you want, feel free to just paste this list of update services into your site. Whenever you post new content or update existing content on your site, these sites will be pinged to let them know. I think this is another reason that the Wordpress sites get indexed so quickly. I would imagine Google crawls through those ping services and finds my sites that way. Google always has me indexed before I get around to submitting my own site to be indexed or publishing a backlink. I remember the days when it wasn't quite so easy and you had to sit around and wait 6+ weeks for your site to get indexed... ah the good 'ole days.

My Update Services List
Code:
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://geourl.org/ping
http://ipings.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.pingerati.net
http://www.pingmyblog.com
http://www.feedsubmitter.com
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
Beyond that, it's really just about website content, optimizing your pages for particular keywords and building backlinks to bump them up the rankings. You can also build more pages to add some power to your site. Some people will set up a site that only has a couple of pages and then spend tons of effort building backlinks/writing articles. I try to have at least 20 pages on each of my sites. If my competition looks more difficult, I may easily boost that up to 100+ before I ever build a single backlink. I write all of my content myself. I don't outsource any work that I do. A lot of people like to rush through content creation and use poor quality articles or even republished articles from other sources. Ultimately, a site loaded with poor content like that is going to have a difficult time getting good rankings for keywords with decent traffic. I can tell the search engines favor the original content over rehashed content and so do the website visitors.

I am actually in the process of building another niche product website and recording the entire thing. I'm going to put together a series of video tutorials that will walk people through every step that I take. When they're done, you'll see there's really no magic tricks. It's just about learning what works and what doesn't.

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Old 12-02-2010, 10:02 PM   #38
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

"Thanks for your comments LilBlackDress, although you certainly make it sound easier than it really was . I don't want to give anyone the impression that it's a piece of cake to just throw up a site like this."

Believe me, I have a lot of sites that are super nice. I know how much time it takes to do a great site.

But where else can you invest such a little bit of cash and your time and get such a great return?

Working online rocks!

What are you doing to drive traffic to your sites? Sorry if you covered that and I missed it.

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Old 12-03-2010, 05:51 AM   #39
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Hi Ryan,

I also just signed up for your Niche Product Research offer. I am now going to patiently look forward to receiving your work.

I will post a little review about it in this thread once I have gone through everything.

Thanks

Andy

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Old 12-03-2010, 05:56 AM   #40
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Wow.. Great content!! Its been interesting reading the original post and the comments have made Ryan go into much more detail

- Andy

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Old 12-03-2010, 06:56 AM   #41
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Default Why create only pages and how to creat?

Quote:
Originally Posted by phpnetpro View Post
nce you have found your keyword phrase and domain name, you are ready to create your website. Set up a Wordpress blog on your web hosting account. Create nothing but "pages" for your entire website. Use one of these pages to replace your front page. I like to use this front page as a guide to the various areas of the website. My DogCrateSizes site should give you a pretty good idea of what I am talking about (it's a .com website by that name, by the way).

Ryan
Thanks for this very informative thread. I have one question as you said just create pages. Please elaborate it little more. If we create pages it appears like navigation horizontal bar. How to creat your style pages and displya like posts?

- Pradeep

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Old 12-03-2010, 12:29 PM   #42
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Awesome Guide,

I think this is fantastic....

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Old 12-03-2010, 01:17 PM   #43
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

For anyone seeking out more info, Make Money on the Internet has a lot of great information on becoming an Amazon affiliate. Chris Guthrie sold over $1,000,000 in Amazon products last year if I remember correctly, so the guy knows his stuff.

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Old 12-03-2010, 01:25 PM   #44
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Lots of catch up on post comments. I've replied to everyone below:

Quote:
Originally Posted by LilBlackDress View Post
"Thanks for your comments LilBlackDress, although you certainly make it sound easier than it really was . I don't want to give anyone the impression that it's a piece of cake to just throw up a site like this."

Believe me, I have a lot of sites that are super nice. I know how much time it takes to do a great site.

But where else can you invest such a little bit of cash and your time and get such a great return?

Working online rocks!

What are you doing to drive traffic to your sites? Sorry if you covered that and I missed it.
I indeed agree with you. I just know that there will be some beginners that read this post and I wanted to be sure they're aware that it does take a lot of dedication and hard work to pull off a site like this in a short amount of time.

I completely agree with the return on investment. I've always loved developing sites, although I'm usually not out to sell them. I suffer from something that some of the "successful" internet marketers would consider a huge problem: I have a conscience. No matter how successful I have been able to make a site in the past, I have always held back from selling them because I didn't want to sell somebody a website that wouldn't continue to be successful. Although I do think this would be a great property to add to my "collection", I'm confident enough in it's future ability to actually consider selling it to someone. My asking price is probably nothing compared to what the site will make in it's lifetime. I will likely kick myself for selling it one day, but I will be happy to help someone else succeed.

Working online does indeed rock! LOL

I started making monthly money online when I was a young teenager. I'm pushing 30 now (maybe you can see my gray hair in my pic, lol). Some people could consider me to be too young to know as much as I do, but I've been around twice as long as most of those people. I've seen the internet go through so many changes, it's not even funny. My Commission Junction account is actually an original DoubleClick account, where I made my first dollar online and bought myself a new Mustang convertible as a teenager! Working online gives me the freedom to spend my life with my wife and kids instead of being a drone at a real job. I can't imagine having to do anything else. Yes, I have worked a real job on and off for 11 years where I worked my way into management. I even did it for quite a while making great money online, but I eventually just had to tell them sorry and let it go. I think my conscience kept me at that job many years more than I should have stayed, simply because I had invested a lot of my time and energy into helping that company grow. My boss there was even the best man at my wedding.

I really just do SEO to drive traffic to my sites. When I do backlink building, some of that results in traffic coming to the sites, but more often than not it is nothing compared to the Google traffic. I'll publish a few articles on ezine for some of the sites that I launch. I'm also a fan of building Squidoo lenses because you can put in a targeted backlink for 9 pages on your site. I'll also build some networks of Squidoo lenses for higher competition markets. One lens with the best keyword phrase gets designated as the primary lens and others are built to give that one power. The primary then links to my site. I'll also build other backlinks to the main lens or sometimes even the secondary lenses. I always Digg and StumbleUpon articles, lenses and especially the pages on my websites. Other than that, I really don't do too much to drive traffic. Sometimes, I won't even do half of that for lower competition markets. I didn't need to do too much for the dog crate site to get to where I'm at.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sharpturn View Post
Hi Ryan,

I also just signed up for your Niche Product Research offer. I am now going to patiently look forward to receiving your work.

I will post a little review about it in this thread once I have gone through everything.

Thanks

Andy
Hi Andy,

Thank you very much. I found an interesting niche for you and emailed the details to you already. I've love to hear back again when you get the site running to see what people make of my research.

Thanks again - Ryan

Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy Medlam View Post
Wow.. Great content!! Its been interesting reading the original post and the comments have made Ryan go into much more detail

- Andy
Hello Andy #2 (maybe even #3 on the thread),

Thank you very much for your comment. I'm planning on keeping up with this thread and will continue to answer questions for people as they arise.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bhagwat68 View Post
Thanks for this very informative thread. I have one question as you said just create pages. Please elaborate it little more. If we create pages it appears like navigation horizontal bar. How to creat your style pages and displya like posts?

- Pradeep
Hi Pradeep,

This is a good point to elaborate on because there is a bit more to it. My exact strategy will depend on the theme that I'm using for the site. If a theme offers the option of excluding pages from menus, I will use those options to prevent most of the pages from showing up in the main horizontal bar. Otherwise, I will download a plugin for excluding pages from menus. I have had a few themes that I ended up recoding the menu display because the plugins wouldn't work with the theme, but this isn't the norm. Then, I will build custom menus through Wordpress to add the other pages to the sidebar as widgets. Once the site is ready, most future pages I create go into a specific sidebar menu so I just set that menu to auto add new top level pages and exclude it from the main nav bar.

I did not actually build the dog crate site using all pages because I wanted to group the crates into size categories, plus I have planned further expansion of the site that could add more pages to those categories and likely create new categories as well. However, more simple websites that cover less products or fewer categories will get the standard all-page treatment.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew_Cheyne View Post
Awesome Guide,

I think this is fantastic....

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for your kind words. I am glad that so many people are able learn something from my thread. I usually see the successful people around here being very vague with their comments. People get excited about doing the same thing they do but really don't know how to do it. I wanted to give something to the forum members that they can actually use. I feel like there are enough Amazon niche markets to share this information and not destroy it's profitability, especially since not everybody is interested in making these types of websites.

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Old 12-05-2010, 01:45 AM   #45
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Ryan,

Thank you for the very speedy response to my
purchase of your Product Niche Research offer.

I was very surprised with the niche you had chosen for me.
I would never had thought of it!
Outside the box , yet very possible to make some money from it.

This will help me to look at niche and keyword research at a different
angle.

I am going to get started on building a site now.

Also, thank you for the extra keyword you threw in....for free! I very much appreciate it.

Your explanations of the keywords and how you went about finding them has
helped me to understand keyword research that much better.

Great service.
Thanks again.

Andy

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Old 12-05-2010, 02:39 AM   #46
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Ryan,

Thanks for the very informative post. I can see a wealth of information in there.

Your time and effort in writing in such detail is definitely appreciated.

Most Internet Marketers I know stay away from Amazon because of the perception of low commission rates compared to digital networks like clickbank. But, your explanation is very logical and should encourage more of us to setup niche income streams using Amazon.

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Old 12-05-2010, 07:50 AM   #47
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Do you ever expand your niche sites to Authority Sites and use the niches within a particular subject as categories on a WP platform?
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Old 12-05-2010, 10:02 AM   #48
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Definitely what I needed, you could have made an WSO on this.

Thank you so much.

Just a quick question if I'm not rude, how much do you roughly earn on amazon per month?

You said that you almost did no SEO for this dogcratesizes.com site, but I fount out that you have 1000 links pointing at that site, most from fireboss.net.

And 1000 links doesn't look like an easy thing...

Thank you
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Old 12-05-2010, 11:02 AM   #49
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

Thank you for such detailed information
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Old 12-05-2010, 06:24 PM   #50
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Default Re: How to Find a Niche Market - A Guide to Finding New Amazon Product Niche Markets

i have absolutely no clue how your making money on that dog crate selling website, i cant even find a buy link to check out and product and half the pictures have errors..

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