Find Hot Niches with Amazon

Most people who’ve been around niche marketing (niche blogging) has been taught to use Amazon.com to find popular / profitable products that you can create micro niche sites around.

Let’s take a look at how to fully leverage Amazon for niche discovery…

 

Step 1 – Where To Look

The Lists

There are several resources available to us in Amazon, and the easiest place to access this resource is by going to this page:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers

While this will take you to the “Bestseller List”, it also gives you easy access to some of the more useful areas of their site, including:

  • Bestseller List
  • Top Rated
  • Hot New Products
  • Movers and Shakers
  • Most Gifted
  • Most Wished For

And you can access these by just clicking on the tabs:

Each of these categories will give you tons of ideas on potentially potentially profitable niches.

Another option is to use…

The Wild Card “Hack”

You simply type an asterisk (*)  into the search area, like this:

With this “trick” you can display ALL of the products on Amazon…

From here you can dive into any category in the sidebar navigation and have full visibility of all of their products (and it’s faster to navigate than using their usual shopping pages, which include information you don’t necessarily need).

Step 2 – Sorting Through The Mess

When looking at all of these results, it can be a bit overwhelming…

So, let’s take a look at how you can go about finding a decent product you can build a site around.

 

1. Pick a category

For our example, I’ll first run the wild card search, which will give us a list of categories in the sidebar (to the left of the screen):

Make sure you expand the navigation by clicking on the “All 33 Departments” link.

From here, we’ll pick the “Tools & Home Improvement” category, which will bring you to a new page with a new set of sub-categories:

While I would recommend you to go through some of the sub-categories, for the sake of brevity, we’ll just go ahead and sort the list.

Note: I recommend you go through the following sorting process for each of the sub-categories

 

2. Sort your list

To sort your list of products in your chosen category, you can simply use the drop down menu at the top right of your search results:

I like to set this to either “Popularity” or “Avg. Customer Review”.

For this exercise I’ll pick the “Avg. Customer Review” option… which will bring me the following results:

 

3. Product Selection Criteria

So, to narrow down this list, I will take a look at the number of reviews for each of the products (since more reviews generally means that more people have purchased the item).

And I will also take a look at the star rating for the products (since we sorted by avg. customer review, the star ratings on the page we’re looking at will usually all be 5 stars).

From this list I will first take a look at the products that have more than 100 reviews.

(In case you’re wondering, the number of reviews for a product is displayed next to the star rating for the product.)

So, let’s select a product.

Based on the criteria above, and because I like knives, let’s pick the US Marine Corps Fighting Knife:

As you can see, it has over 100 reviews, and a 5 star rating.

So, what’s next?

While you could stop here and go through your keyword discovery process at this point, I prefer to take the extra step to find out the “product viability” of my selected item (in other words, let’s see if people are REALLY interested in buying this sort of product).

So, let’s have a look at…

 

Step 3 – Product Viability

I talked about how to do this in the post about More Guaranteed Profitable Niches, but I’ll go through this process using our selected Amazon product.

So, we found the KA-BAR US Marine Corps Fighting Knife…

Now you’ll want to head on over to eBay.com to find out whether people are selling this knife and whether or not people are bidding on the auctions over there.

I didn’t get a lot of results from typing in “KA-BAR US Marine Corps Fighting Knife”, however I was able to get decent results when I typed in “KA-BAR USMC”:

Note: I recommend that you try using different variations of your product keyword since many people will use different combinations of keywords to find a product on eBay.

  • So, in this instance, you’d want to try things like:
  • - KA-BAR Fighting Knife
  • - KA-BAR US Marine Corps
  • - KA-BAR USMC
Tip: When looking for product viability on eBay, be sure to:

  • Choose “Auctions Only” from the tabs (above the auctions – this way you get rid of the “buy now” listings)
  • Look at the number of Auction Results (in the example above you see 81 results for the phrase “KA-BAR USMC”, which is more than sufficient)
  • Look For Bids on the Auctions! This is important. If there’s a ton of auction listings but not many bids, it may not be a “hungry market”.
  • Look at the “Related Searches” - eBay tells you what keywords are relevant to your search (these keywords “could” be used as additional keywords on your site).

 

Step 3 – Discovery & Creation

I won’t go into the details of how to go through this process since I outlined it in Step 3 in this article.

But, in a nutshell here’s what you do:

1. Keyword discovery – find suitable keywords related to your product that you can build a site around.

2. Find a domain name – in this instance you’re dealing with 2 trademarked terms: “KA-BAR” and “USMC”. So, if you want to stay clear of potential trouble you may want to do some searches around “fighting knives” or “Marine knife”. I use DomainTools.com to search for domain names…

3. Setup site and publish content - I use WordPress for this, but it can be a static HTML site as well.

4. Monetize it - You could monetize using Amazon’s affiliate program, EPN (eBay’s affiliate program) or even AdSense…

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Leave A Reply (3 comments So Far)

  • http://arindamchakraborty.com Arindam Chakraborty

    Off-topic perhaps but I would really appreciate if you put in the recent posts widget somewhere on your blog. A lot of times I am not able to grasp the full meaning of an article so have to revisit again later on. A widget like that would make navigation easy for me. Thanks :D

  • Chuck

    Steven,

    thank you, thank you and thank you!

    I greatly appreciate the time you took to go through this for me and I know that many of your other readers will get plenty of value from this too.

    I’ve never seen anyone go into detail like you have. Other marketer’s have only ever briefly glossed over this topic and that’s why I struggled to come up with any truly meaningful results using this method, but you just clarified it all for me.

    I’m going to be using this method right now and it came at the perfect time, I was just about to start niche researching when this little gem of a post turned up in my inbox.

    In short, thanks for the great post and I’m a very happy subscriber on your list, I also greatly value your product recommendations too because I know that a lot of thought goes into it.

    Thanks again for taking the time,

    Chuck.

    • Steven

      Hi Chuck,

      You’re welcome.

      I’m glad to hear the post came “just in time”. :)

      All the best,
      Steven

Steven
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