Have I Found a Profitable Niche?

You should be able to out rank the Amazon and eBay pages without much problem. You will gain traffic in the top #3 spots regardless.

However, to make sure you get maximum clicks you need to have a strong title and description. Something that will make searchers want to click on your site over the big brands.

I think it's always a little intimidating to see the big retailers in the top spots for the products you want to sell. I agree that you need to have a strong, unique title and an eye-catching description to get your clicks. If you're right up there with the big guys on the first page, you should be getting a fair share of the traffic.

Excellent. This is what I wanted to hear. As this is my first site I am not looking for big profits. Just looking for a little success to give me the confidence to keep working towards bigger and better things. Thanks guys!

You'd most likely have to be even more 'niche' by creating a site about a just a few tihlty related products - for example if it canon printers, then you'd have to focus in on just 'canon laser printers' and accesories or 'canon bubble jet', but not canon printers as a whole.

The other way to go about it would be to drive the traffic yourself and forget about trying to rank above those authority sites. Still focus on on-page and off-page SEO, but you'd have to go out and find as many other sites that you can get a back link from, for example: upload videos, pdf, powerpoint, articles, do 7 day email mini course that drives them to your site each day for the next part of the course, make your site really intuitive and ask your users/visitors for referrals, ask them to share on facebook and twitter, use a tell a friend script, advertise on facebook, give away a freebie that they have to share to unlock like 'paywithatweet.com' which i'm using to get shares for a freebie on my site.

The main idea is to go out and get as much backlinks and ads from other related but non-competing sites, so you get a continuous flow of traffic from all those external sites, as well as swapping or buying ads from other related sites. For example you might find a site that only sell canon ink and might be able to swap ads with them so they link to you and you link back, or just buy a link or banner on their site.

you'll get traffic from search engines, but that shouldn't be your main approach. the way i see it, it takes time, but if you get say 1000 backlinks you can expect to get 1 or more visitors from each of those external sites every day or every few days, even if you only got 1 per month that would be 1000 visitors per month - once they get to your site try to get them on a mialing list or have them register to use the site so you have a way of contacting them with a monthly newsletter, you can even link to latest news or other sites in your niche - anything that you post that also allows a link back to your site can generate visitors.

i'd focus on commenting on other sites and blogs and facebook and twitter and try to get some ad swaps or buy ads from hundreds of related sites, ofcourse you have to test slowly and keep what works.

important point mentioned by BarryOnline, remember that you are trying to get the attention of other humans, so make sure your search results are catchy to a human reader, and likewise all content you produce like comments should speak direclty to humans

Thank you Meta. I don't plan on focusing only on search engine traffic, but I wanted to choose a keyword that I could rank for. I plan on promoting the site in every way I possibly can, and to take a very evenly distributed approach to backlinking to make the site look as natural as possible. My job is seasonal and I have the next 3 months off, so I am taking the time to test every avenue and see what works best for me. Thanks for the ideas, I will be sure to try them all!

Regardless of manufacturer being in the top spot, you should get a good trickle of traffic even if you rank below. With the numbers you are stating, It seems worth a shot.