Affiliate Networks have too much overlap with offers
If you browse affiliate networks like Hydra Media, CX Digital, Neverblue, etc. you’ll start to notice a huge overlap of offer selection. There are the standard offer types: ringtones, dating, insurance, crush offers, freebies/surveys, diet pills, skin care, and a few others. I would be surprised if there are more than 75 unique niches to promote. That means, like a piñata, lots of people are fighting for the same prize.

eBay offers something unique for everyone
eBay is different because there are literally hundreds of thousands of products to promote. So you can find ways to make money on eBay that other affiliate marketers are not targeting.

How to find a good eBay niche
So how do you decide which offers to promote? I already discussed finding the right sized niche to give you a better chance at getting organic traffic.

But with so many offers, there are some brainstorming exercises that will help you think of niches with potential before you actually start to research them. I like to get a list of 10 to 20 niches to research and then go from there.

Exercise one: Look around
The exercise is quite simple. There are niches all around us. Everything you own is a niche. Take a drive. Everything you see is a niche. Everything can be used to make money on eBay.

Write down your possible niches.
Keep a pen and paper with you for a whole day. Everywhere you go, keep your eye out for niches. Write down everything you see. By the end of the day you should have a huge list of keywords/niches to research.

Exercise two: Niche Drilling
You could research every possible niche you see, but that takes lots of time. I have a pretty good system to pre-qualify niches before I start researching them. It’s called Niche Drilling.

A niched can typically be drilled 7 to 10 levels deep. But not every level is worth spending time researching. For example, level one tends to have the most searches, but also the most competition. Level seven or higher tend to have very little competition, but not enough search volume.

Here are the different levels of niches

Level one: Highest level for a given category. This would be a category like technology, sports, financial services, etc. Don’t even bother with these niches.

Level two: sub-categories of level one. Niches like computers, golf, insurance

Level three: one category deeper than level two. These niches tend to be specific products under lever two. For example laptops, golf clubs, life insurance.

Level four: need I say that this is one category deeper in to level three? Level four niches tend to get into brand names. Mac laptops, Nike golf clubs, AIG life insurance

Level five niches are specific models of a brand name: Macbook Pro laptops, Nike drivers, AIG term term life insurance.

Level six niches are even more specific: Pink macbook pro laptops, nike 3 wood driver, AIG 20 year term life insurance.

And it keeps getting deeper and deeper. (AIG 20 year term insurance for smokers, for example).

You can save yourself lots of time quickly drilling into level four our five. Anything above that tends to be very competitive. Anything past level 5 tends to have too little search volume. I just gave 3 examples of niches that took me less than 5 minutes to come up with. Here is a linear look at each drilled niche. The red niches are what I would do more research on.

Technology > computers > latops > Mac laptops > Macbook Pro laptops > pink Macbook Pro laptops

Sports > golf > golf clubs > Nike golf clubs > Nike drivers > Nike 3 wood drivers

Financial services > insurance > life insurance > AIG life insurance > AIG term life insurance > AIG 20 year term life insurance

Remember, just because I pick a level 4, 5, or 6 niche doesn’t mean I will make a site out of it. I just use Niche Drilling to find ideas of niches that may have potential.

Niche Drilling can go any direction
Keep in mind that you can go any direction at any level of Niche Drilling to find hundreds of more niches.

For example, we could drill the niche “sporting” in tons of different ways. Here are a few examples of other ways we could have drilled sporting.

Sports > golf > golf clubs > Nike golf clubs > Nike irons > Nike 9 irons. In this example we change directions at level five (Nike irons).

Sports > golf > golf clubs > Callaway golf clubs > callaway drivers > callaway 3 wood > in this example we changed directions at level four (Callaway golf clubs).

Sports > golf > golf balls > titleist golf balls > titleist Pro v1 > Titleist used Pro v1. In this example we changed direction at lever three (golf balls).

You could drill in different directions to come up with hundreds of different niches. I tend to find a main category and explore different drilling directions at level three and level four.

Niche Drilling has exceptions
Keep in mind that there are exceptions to Niche Drilling. I would not try and make a site for mac laptops or even a macbook pro laptop even though they are level four and five niches. Some products are just oversaturated even when you drill down. It takes a little common sense and instinct.

What to do after you have a bunch of niches?
After you have a big list of niches, it’s time to check the potential they have to make you money on ebay. Read this post to learn how to check which niches have the most potential for traffic.

There are a few things to consider when choosing a niche for making money on ebay.

How popular is your niche?
You definitely want to choose a niche that people are searching for. The problem is that when lots of people search for something it tends to be because the product/service being searched is in high demand and the more competition you will likely have when it comes to SEO.

The trick is to find a balance of a product or service that is in demand, but not too competitive.

I like to look nichea that have at least 100-200 estimated searches a day (more is even better). This tells me that a nich is being searched enough that I can get some decent traffic if i place high in the search results. A great free tool to estimate search volume is the Seo Book Keyword Tool. This tool tends to estimate keyword search volume slightly on the low side. Keep that in mind.

As a test I looked up “Nike Golf Clubs” and SEO Book estimates 159 daily searches. That’s a good start, but we need to check the competition.

How much competition does your niche have?
After you find a niche or keyword with at least 100-200 searches a day, you will need to look at how much competition there is. To check your niche competition, do a phrase search in google for your keyword.

Let’s say your niche is Nike Golf Clubs, do a phrase search by searching “Nike Golf Clubs” in goolge (with the quotations) and then look at the total number of pages on google for that phrase. That would be the bold number in the blue bar above the search results and below the search box.

“Nike Golf Clubs” reads “Personalized Results 1 – 10 of about 96,300 for “Nike Golf Clubs”. (0.25 seconds)”

The only number I care about is the “96,300” as that is how many pages contain the phrase “Nike Golf Clubs”

You want to target a niche with less than 1 million results, but the fewer the better. Less than 500 thousand is good. Less than 100 thousand is really good.

So far so good. We have a niche that gets over 150 searches a day and has less than 100 thousand pages containing that phrase.

How targeted are the top 5 results?
Now we need to look at the top five results for the phrase “Nike Golf Clubs” so we can see what we’re really up against.

Result #1 is Nike.com. That’s no surprise. The next few results are golf related sites.

What I’m really looking for is to see if there is an entire site devoted to Nike Golf Clubs. My thought is that if I have an entire site dedicated to Nike Golf Clubs, and the sites in the top results only have a few pages, than I should be able to outrank them relatively easy.

So if I see general golf sites, I’m not so worried. If I see golf club sites, I’m a little worried, but not really.

Since I just see general golf sites, this seems like a niche worth pursuing to try and make money on ebay.

Other considerations when looking for niches
Many people also like to consider the cost of the item they are promoting. Since you make money on ebay through commission, the higher the item price, the more you make.

While I agree with this philosophy, don’t let a low priced niche turn you off. Here’s why:

First, people tend to be less worried about buying cheaper items online. So while your commissions may not be as big per item, you are likely to sell more items, so you can make good money on ebay as your commissions add up.

Second, eBay has a great cookie system. When users click an ebay link on your site, you will get commission on anything they buy on ebay in the next 7 days, whether it was the same item they clicked on your site or not. So if you can conquer a low priced niche and get lots of clicks on your ebay links, you will still get commission on other itmes people buy.

This month I got made $115 on ebay in one day from my site discount golf balls. How did I make so much selling golf balls? Well, a visitor clicked on one of my links, but then ended up buying a $4,250 fridge. I got the commission on it. So don’t let low priced niches deter you.

I hope this article helped you decide what niches will make you money on ebay.

Soon I’ll post about how to optimize your site for your niche and some other niche finding exercises. Cheers!