Finding niches with potential for phpBay sites
If you want to make money on ebay with phpBay Pro you’ll need to be smart when it comes to choosing your niches. But the niche choosing strategy that will be discussed here can be applied to any site you want to get good SERP rankings for.
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!
Subscribe
Subscribe
May 25th, 2008 at 8:29 am
How did you find out that the person purchased the fridge costing $4,250 by going through your golf balls website?
I am unable to find such information from my Ebay Partner Network account. Am I missing something?
May 25th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Hey Irene,
First, congrats! you’re the first comment ever on this bog!
About your question. That’s a great idea for a post. I’ll write a post about how to find out the specific item people buy. look out for it today or tomorrow
May 30th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
“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.”
That’s not how ranking works at all….
Finding a keyword with 100,000 results in quotes is not that good at all. It is still highly competitive for SEO.
May 31st, 2008 at 12:57 am
Kara,
I would argue that a keyphrase with less than a million results doesn’t have tons of competition. Less than 100,000 for sure does not have a lot of competition.
If a phrase is mentioned less than 100 thousand times on the entire internet, but gets more than 150 searches a day, then it will be relatively easy to rank for. I know this from experience.
out of those 100 thousand results 998 thousand of them are likely just one word mentions of some sort….
May 31st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
What I try to go for are niches with 100+ searches per day and with practically no competition, that way with great onpage SEO and some link building you rank on top, then you just create about 10 that all rank highly.
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
[...] that you know how to Drill for Niches and see if those niches have potential, and you know how to find a good theme for a phpBay store and you added the essential wordpress [...]
June 10th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
hey, when u look for a niche
u’ll also need to find a keyword that also recieve high searches for “used bla bla”
so it’ll be wiser to go like this:
search for keyword on the seobook, and take stuff that brings u also high volume on keywords like “second hand, used” and whatever..
June 16th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Instead of doing a simple phrase search you can normally get a better idea of your “real” competition by using Googles “intitle” advanced search option.
The theory is that the guys who know something about SEO will have used all three of those keywords in the title of their page. Its those guys pages that you have to beat.
The search query to use is - intitle:nike intitle:golf intitle:clubs
This will tell you how many pages on Google have all 3 of those keywords in their title, and give you a better idea of your real competition.
Google also has an advanced option for a search query like - allintitle:nike golf clubs - but I have found it to be a little inaccurate sometimes and prefer to seperate the words for a more accurate result.
June 16th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Great tip Alan. Thanks for sharing!!