Through trial and error over the years I have nailed down a little process for finding a good Amazon niche and building a site around it. I thought I would share it here and see what you think, hopefully it will be useful to some of you: 1) Find some products The first step is always just looking and finding a product niche you want to promote. You can get ideas from many places: - Amazon Best Sellers - Amazon Associates Emails (go to your settings in your associates account and sign up for the newsletters, they tell you about special offers etc. very useful!) - Randomly Browse Amazon (this has been succesful for me many times!) - Current trends (new products launched, newspaper articles, what are people talking about?) - Your own interests (look at your hobbies, your posessions) Try to find a specific niche e.g. "Tool Boxes" as apposed to a wide niche e.g. "Tools". There really is no rules to this - just get as many ideas as you can and write them all down somewhere. Now move on to the next step. 2) Check quality of Amazon products There is no point in going any further if the products on Amazon are not good enough. Firstly make sure there are enough products to create a decent size store from (some niches may only have a handful of products however, and this is fine). Make sure at least some of products have reviews, a few sellers and preferably sold by Amazon themselves. You don't want to build your site and then find that the products are discontinued. Also consider the price of the products and how likely people are to buy. An LCD television is expensive and will give you a lot of comission, but the conversions will be lower. Impulse purchases (DVDs, Books, Gadgets etc.) will have a higher conversion but lower commissions. Consider also the 24 hour cookie and how much research people need to do to make a purchase. For Amazon UK sites there is a £7 cap on commission for any single item, meaning that the ideal price for products you promote is about £100 (depending on how many products you sell in a month, as the commission rate increases). Therefore, don't promote expensive products in the UK as a rule. 3) Check traffic I use a tool like Market Samurai to check keywords (you can also use the Google Keyword Tools, tho it takes a bit longer). You can enter your main keyword (e.g. Tool Boxes) and see stats for all the related keywords. I won't go into much detail here but just make sure your niche has traffic potential (for SEO or PPC). Try and figure out the "buying potential" of these keywords. For example, someone searching for "Tom Yum Soup Recipe" is very unlikely to buy anything, whereas someone searching for "Thai Recipe Book" is likely to. Don't go looking for keywords with super amounts of traffic - remember you can target multiple keywords with different categories in your site. Get a list of keywords for each of the niches you found and move on to the next step. 4) Check competition For your keywords, get some idea of your competition. I typically do this using Market Samurai but I also just like to take a look at the google search results and figure out for myself. You can generally judge by the quality of the top 10 results, number of Google Ads, number of results etc. Try and filter down your keywords to those that are feasible to target (i.e. little competition). Of course, if you have a big budget for SEO or PPC then you can target what you like (just make sure the Amazon comissions are worth it!). 5) See domain availability Personally I think the domain is very important for SEO and always try to get a domain name that is bang on my keyword. If I am targetting "tool boxes" as my main keyword, then I want toolboxes.com. This is one reason I prefer smaller niches. For PPC this is not so important. 6) Check SEO potential Some niches might be a dream to promote due to a viral nature, many keen bloggers etc. Try and assess how hard it will be to get backlinks for each niche. For example, power tools are fairly boring and there are not many blogs about them. Gadgets, video games etc. are interesting and more people discuss them in forums, blogs etc. Again, not very important if your planning PPC promotion. 7) Buy Your Domain and Launch your site Once you are happy with your niche, go on and build a site! You can launch a blog reviewing the products, a general information website with articles on the products or an Amazon Store with articles, categories and product pages with unique content. Personally I have a lot of success with Amazon Stores - they convert better and don't need as much ongoing work as blogs tend to. Whichever method you use, my number 1 tip is (please pay attention... this is very important): Good Quality, Unique, Interesting and Informative Content! Don't try and cheat the search engines or your visitors. Make a brilliant website that you are proud of and you will make brilliant commissions. I hope you enjoyed reading, if you have any questions just ask!
Freshdevelopment, as always you've done a great job with these tips. If one follows all the steps from 1 to 7 there's no way they will go wrong. For me, I usually follow most of the tips here with the exception of point number 7 - registering a domain. I normally create sub-domains for each product and try to promote it as much as possible. I have a new product currently under research and think I will get a domain for it this time. Thanks for the tips and I believe others will find it quite useful as well. Helen
Wow, great post on Amazon. I have been looking to making sales with Amazon for months and had developed a way to but this post narrows it down. I have made 2 sales since I've been researching..I wish I would have found this post before then..
Nice post ! I like to add a little thing to this. After you find a product and when you are sure product.com/.net or the TLD is there better do a Google search for product. I check top 10 sites to see if I can beat them to reach rank 1 to 5.
Great post! I have a project where I'm trying to have some money with Amazon. And your tips will help me a lot. Thanks!
Yes I do, and other things to promote sites. I might do a post on promotion techniques, but essentially the idea is to offer something that is good value. Otherwise you are swimming upstream by buying links, blog commenting, forum spamming etc. If you create something people want to link to... that is how you get good SERP listings and good traffic.
I like topics where the top-ranking search results are all from places like Squidoo, eZinearticles, and Hubpages. It shows me that I can rank pretty high for a niche quickly due to the lack of competition from other niche sites.
Thanks so much, I am information gathering at the minute and it's good to learn from more experienced people like yourself.
I think people should also remember that they shouldn't pick topics they don't have much interest in. It's much easier to keep creating content over the long haul when you're into what you write about. It pays to balance this with what the numbers tell you.
More tips on how to narrow down to the products you would promote please? If I could know which would be a profitable product, I would promote the heck out of it. I find it difficult to register a domain each time, and like Helen, prefer to set up subdomain based wordpress blogs. Trouble is, they take ages to get indexed and don't rank well usually.
Take a look at things like existing sites, Google Ads for the products and competition to get an idea on the profitability of the products. If there is lots of competition, generally avoid. You could also do a test run with PPC to see what kind of response you get. Generally it is down to the niche and down to your judgement. Would you buy the product? Does it take a lot of thinking about? Is it a spontaneous buy? Is there a big target market? Is it recently launched and likely to take off? Is it dying down? Is it seasonal? In terms of domains, don't always try to find keyword rich domains. A well branded domain can be just as good in different ways - think of something catchy.