How to Find Profitable Niches that Attract Hungry Buyers

Not all niches are created the same. If you have multiple websites already, you've probably noticed how the earnings for each of your sites vary. I personally have one affiliate site that makes as much money in affiliate sales as my Adsense account - and my Adsense account is spread across all 13 of my sites combined.

Some niches can be about as good as a dead stick in the water. Other niches can be literal internet goldmines.

The best advice I can give you, is choose wisely.

You won't really be able to get a good idea for how profitable your niche is until you drive a good amount of traffic to it, which takes time and effort.

Find Trends with EBay Pulse

Ebay Pulse is one of my favorite places to find new niches for websites. This little site from Ebay gives you the most popular items that are selling on ebay. You can track trends and keywords so it should give you some good ideas for new sites. If you're going to be apart of the Ebay Affiliate Program (which I highly recommend), give this website a good search.

If you're looking to market internationally, Ebay Pulse UK has results for Ebay UK, as well as all their other international Ebay sites.

Back Engineering Profits with Google Adwords Traffic Estimator

In order to see a ballpark range for what advertisers are spending on certain keywords, I use the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator. The more advertisers are willing to spend on keywords, then it's a safe bet that the more profitable that niche is.

To use this tool just enter in your selected keywords and then Add "All Countries and Territories" then click "Continue". Don't bother choosing a budget, leave it blank.

On the next page it will display the average cost per click that it will cost an advertiser to market via Adwords with these keywords.

Check out the results I get for these keywords:

California Lawyer: $10.18 - $15.27
Iphone: $2.00 - $2.51
Murad: $5.08 - $6.36
Myspace: $.30 - $.42
Webkinz: $.15 - $.23

This tells me that having an acne site about the Murad acne solution might be a good idea. Upon further research I find they also have a solid affiliate program which I can send visitors to, along with Murad Ebay listings and also a healthy click value for Adsense.

This tool is also a good gauge for what kind of earnings you can expect with Google adsense. Don't expect to receive these amounts per click, but the higher the number the better.

Good Ol' Keyword Research

Of course finding the demand for websurfers is also a good way to judge popularity. The free keyword research tool at SEO Book works nicely for the top 100 most popular keywords in your niche. If you want to go further than that I recommend Wordtracker.

More Google Tools - Google Trends and Google Sets

If you want to find out if your niche is on the upswing or quickly losing popularity, check out Google Trends. Notice the trends for popular products during the Christmas season - if you're making your sites around that time it might be a good idea to really push your promotion for extra sales.

If you want to find related keywords within your niche check out Google Sets. This might help you find keywords and/or products worth promoting you never would have thought about before.

The Top 5 Poorest Niches You Can Make A Website On

While I can't give you the best niches, I can give you the absolute worst.

Proxy - Way oversaturated, advertising is completely untargeted and you won't see much earnings unless you actively promote on other Proxy sites... I never really understood this niche.

Making Money Online - Unless you're a real expert on making money online then I would advoid this niche. Far too often I see webmasters opening sites trying to make money online by teaching other people how to make money online - does this make sense to anyone?

Arcades - A fun website to run but unprofitable, oversaturated.

Image Hosting - Although these kinds of sites have a functional purpose, don't expect to earn too much money from them. They will also suck up your bandwidth.

Warez - I wouldn't touch this theme with a ten foot pole.

The Top 3 Benefits For Choosing a Niche for Your Store - Market Smart, Not Hard

While internet spending continues to make leaps and bounds, the competition for these dollars also increases.

The internet is no longer a barren playing field. Many highly profitable segments of the market like insurance and home mortgages are full of competition - some of them very experienced marketers.

However, there is a way you can even the competition by choosing a targeted niche. Here are some of the best reasons you should choose a targeted niche for your store, and stick with it.

1. Less Competition, Easier to Dominate

One of the biggest newbie mistakes I have seen niche store websites make is they target very broad niches. Broad niches are ultra competitive and it would take a while before your website started seeing revenue if you went this route.

It's much better if you choose a specific niche.

For instance, if you want to open a niche store that sells cellphones, consider targeting a certain brand or type of cellphone. Trying to dominate cellphone sales as a whole is already difficult, as there are many online stores selling all kinds of cellphones already and they have plenty of marketing dollars to throw into advertising.

If you chose a specific brand it's going to be easier for you to rank for these keywords in Google because all of your backlinks will be related to this certain brand. So when someone searches for the brand your store is about, Google is going to happily refer to your site because you are an obvious source that sells or provides info on this brand of cellphones.

2. Focus to Build an Interested Audience and Diehard Fans

If there's a lot of interest in the niche you've selected and you have a fair amount of good information then it's going to be easier for you to build an audience for your website. This means more return visitors and more sales for you.

Consider opening a forum on your website to let your visitors interact with each other. Forums will make your website especially "sticky" and surfers will be more inclined to stick around and read posts.

3. Easier to Monotize and More Profits

Ads on general sites are hit and miss, the advertisements may or may not be relevant to what the visitor is looking for. Unless these general topic sites are getting a ton of traffic, it can sometimes be hard to find out what kind of ads they should serve their visitors.

On the other side of the coin you have niche sites which can be a real goldmine. The reasoning behind this is simple. You know pretty much exactly what your visitors are looking for when they come to your site, so its going to be a lot easier for you (and Google Adsense if you use this) to serve them relevant ads.

All of this translates into more revenue for you!

Building a Niche Store: The Importance of Niche Keyword Research

If you want to get targeted free traffic for your niche store, then there's no question about it - you're going to need to target specific, quality keywords.

I see many websites who just don't do this properly. Many times they target general keywords which are neither targeted and often times just too competitive to get a decent ranking in search engines.

The nice thing about working with the Ebay Partner Network is that you can take long tail keywords that would otherwise be impossible to monotenize with other affiliate programs (or at least not as easy as this), drive targeted buyers to our pages, and make sales.

Niche Keyword Research Explained

Let's give an example.

Say for instance I am building a niche store centered around the popular women's shoe brand Steve Madden.

Let's hop on over to the free keyword research tool at SEOTools and type in the keyword "Steve Madden".

At the top of the list is "Steve Madden" with 323 Google searches a day. It would be nice to rank decently for this search term because of the traffic, but chances are it will bring a handful of people looking for information about the football player named Steve Madden and these surfers would be pretty useless to me since they would not turn into buyers.

The next term is "Steve Madden Shoes" and this would be the ideal term to rank our new website with. 224 searchers per day looking for Steve Madden shoes so this would translate into a nice amount of sales per day depending on what kind of rankings we had with Google. With 549,000 results in Google it's definitely an obtainable term to rank for, but for newer sites I like to go deeper and find more targeted terms which aren't as competitive.

If we look further on the list we can find the term "Steve Madden Barnum Shoes" with 8 searchers per day. This is where things get really fun. Most sites do not try to rank for small terms like this - but don't make the same mistake and neglect these kinds of terms! Here's 8 people per day which are looking for a very specific product and if you can deliver it to them chances are they are going to buy. Match the right keyword with the right product, rank for the term so you can receive some traffic, and you will make sales.

Imagine if we captured #1 spots on 10 of these uncompetitive, yet highly targeted terms? You would see decent earnings each and every day.

But does Ebay have a consistent supply of this style of shoe? Doing a search on Ebay I find 3 auctions for these shoes, and 8 store listings. Awesome!

Quick Tip: If you use premium keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker they will organize keywords by KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) - these are the easiest terms you can rank for.

After You Have the Keyword

Utilizing PHPBay we can create a quality, unique article centered around "Steve Madden Barnum Shoes". Write as much or as you want - but I recommend at the bare minimum 200-300 words when it comes to your article length. Make your articles sound as personal as possible, don't sound like a fact spitting robot - people generally don't like reading these kinds of articles.

Naturally insert the keyword a couple times, but don't overdo it. Put it in the title, first paragraph, and sprinkled a couple times throughout the article depending on the length. If the keyword appears too much Google will recognize this and penalize it so it will be harder to get a decent rank for it.

Somewhere in the content insert your PHPBay code for "Steve Madden Barnum Shoes".

Next, we need to build links to this article so your potential customers can see it on the front page of Google. I will talk more about this soon.