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Taking on the Big Box stores and Big Boys

by Scrambler
10 replies
I recently started promoting physical products in niche markets. I am investigating a particular product niche that has about 100 searches a day according to Market Samurai (MS). I became interested in the niche because I currenty have 2 physical product sites , each one dedicated soley to a single product within the niche. So now I would like to promote in the overall product niche.

Drilling down in MS revealed what I think is both good and bad news. The good news is that not one single site has the niche keywords MS identified in the main url; and only 2 have any decent SEO. The bad news is that most of the top sites are either big box stores selling the products (Walmart, Amazon, Shopko etc...), the others are the manufacturers themselves. Tons of backlinks, page rank, very old.

I would be most appreciative to any warriors who could give me feedback on any experience they had, good or bad, on competing with huge vendors for physical products.
#big #box #boys #stores #taking
  • Profile picture of the author TestiVar
    Always compete with the big boys if you ever expect to be one of them.

    That's a golden business rule. Never shy away from competition. The stiffer the competition... the more you know you are in exactly the right place.
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    • Profile picture of the author philhunter
      Originally Posted by TestiVar View Post

      Always compete with the big boys if you ever expect to be one of them.

      That's a golden business rule. Never shy away from competition. The stiffer the competition... the more you know you are in exactly the right place.
      Good advice, the big boys are in those niches for a reason because thats where the money is.
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      • Profile picture of the author Scrambler
        Philhunter and TestiVar,

        Thanks for the encouragement. I went back and dusted off my Jan Roos course and did some more searching in the forum. It does seem that plenty of people do well as affiliates promoting physical products of all manner, which seems to prove the box stores have weaknesses when it comes to niche promotion.

        I will admit that when I look at competing with huge and established vendors it seems a bit daunting. It's kind of like looking at a helicopter; part of your brain is saying that the thing has no business flying, just shouldn't be possible. Yet the engineers and inventors made it work.

        I will go with the numbers, the research, and the fact that others pull this off and will go for it.
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        • Profile picture of the author LilBlackDress
          It used to be pretty easy to beat the bigger sites if they were poorly optimized for the product.

          But I found with the recent Panda updates that Google seems to want to push out affiliates and put the authority product sources like Amazon and Walmart in the tops even when they are not optimized for the product.

          And reading the Google raters handbook and seeing the disdain G has for affiliates was also an eye opener.

          So if you go for the product you may want to use other methods such as syndication and not just organic traffic to be diversified.
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  • Profile picture of the author zaco
    I find it easier to compete with an Amazon page rather than a regular website..Amazon / Walmart pages rank for the relevance but its not that hard to take over their position, in Market Samurai.. How many backlinks each page has.. you are looking at the over all links for the site and not for everypage, usually Amazon has from 0-100 links and most of them are affiliate links with nofollow tags

    On the other hand, I see the keyword domain is a wrong approach, this method has been abused too much, I am not saying you did it but alot of people register domains with the keyword in it and they rank, IMO the next Google slap will take down all these sites because it doesn't make any sense to rank for the keyword in the domain unless you have an Authority site that has tons of pages
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  • Profile picture of the author businessmatt
    A few years ago I had a website selling physical products that was starting to do fairly well. The product (a line of high end LED flashlights) wasn't one that is carried by the big stores and it was fairly new, so I had almost no competition. After awhile another fairly large online store announced that they were going to start carrying the same line of flashlights. Despite my head start with that particular product and my strong customer base, I got scared and I shut my site down. I really regret that now as the site was starting to do really well and in retrospect I think I would have done just fine. I guess my point is, don't let the big sites scare you. I have since learned that there are very few markets that are so small that can't stand any competition. Bigger stores by their very nature tend to end up with a lot of disgruntled customers who are more than happy to move to the competition.

    Good luck with your sites!
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  • Profile picture of the author tpw
    Originally Posted by Scrambler View Post

    The bad news is that most of the top sites are either big box stores selling the products (Walmart, Amazon, Shopko etc...), the others are the manufacturers themselves. Tons of backlinks, page rank, very old.

    I would be most appreciative to any warriors who could give me feedback on any experience they had, good or bad, on competing with huge vendors for physical products.

    You are missing a bigger picture here.

    It is easy to outrank the big box stores for a single product!

    You may ask why I say that... After all, they have age, respect and links... And you would be right...

    What they don't have is deep links targeted to sales pages for specific products!!

    They cannot set up links that say "product a" and point to the product page, because most of them don't know if they will have that product in stock 6 months from now, so they are not going to waste their resources making sure that they own the search engine results for that product.

    You are committed to that product; they are not. And that is to your advantage, and their tough luck.

    If you don't want to compete with them, compete with yourself, and deliver several websites that cater to that one product or product line.
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    • Profile picture of the author AsaFarr
      Yeah. For single products you can ALWAYS do it better than the big monsters. Even if reputation is very important, the customer in the end will always try to get things cheaper and of course in the best available quiality.
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  • Profile picture of the author anshuldayal
    You don't always have to rely on the same old strategies for promoting physical products (create an affiliate website, SEO and then wait for sales). This can be a slow process.

    I would also look at using a Facebook fanpage to get your affiliate products out there. In fact I launched two separate fan pages just before Christmas promoting amazon products with great results and this process can often be a lot quicker using a few simple SMM strategies.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kevin G
    Do your homework and don't be intimidated by those big box stores. With effective backlinking and article promotion you will be fine.
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