Most Profitable Niches

Here is one method that helps you find most profitable niches.
Som of my favorite niches to build blogs around are “physical product” niches.
And if you’re into setting up sites on physical products, then you’ve probably heard the typical “Go to Amazon Best Sellers list” or “Go to eBay Pulse”

Most people are missing is a crucial component that can make or break the profitability of your new site, especially when monetizing with Amazon, EPN (eBay Affiliate Program) or other similar programs where you want to convert the visitor into a sale.

So, I’ll try to show you how you can ensure that you will earn money from virtually every site that you set up with Amazon and/or eBay affiliate program.

Step 1 – Product Discovery

I prefer to use eBay Pulse for most of my product discovery, but you can also use Amazon’s best-sellers list for this (then follow the steps I show you in step 2).

When looking for products I tend to look deep within categories.
Step One: Choose a category

For this exercise, we’ll choose “Musical Instruments”…
Once you click through, you will be presented with a TOP 10 list of the most popular items in the music instruments category. From here, you would want to pick a sub-category:

We’ll pick the “Guitar” sub-category. Once selected, you will be presented with yet another Top 10 list of products in the “Muscial Instruments -> Guitar” category.

While this gives you a pretty useful list, you may want to go to a “Sub Sub-Category”… so you select from the new drop down list again:

Once I select the “Bass” category, it will pull up yet another Top 10 list (this is as deep as eBay Pulse will allow me to go in the Musical Instruments category).

So, let’s take a look at what the Top 10 looks like for the bass category:

Once you dig into a category like this, you want to take a look at some of the items that are being listed on this page. So, I’ll pick “Fender Jazz Bass” as the product I want to dig into.

Once you click on this link, it will take you to the regular eBay auctions.

Step 2 – Product Viability

 

When selecting a product it’s VERY important that people are actually purchasing the product (this is how you’ll know whether the product niche is commercially viable)… so in this step you want to make absolutely sure that people are willing to spend money for this product.

You can do this a couple of different ways, and I’ll share one of the methods here.

So, you dug into a category and you’ve clicked on the link (which in our case was “Fender Jazz Bass”)… it will take you to the regular eBay page for this keyword phrase.

From here, you want to make sure you pick “Auctions Only”, the look for two things:

1. there are multiple items for sale; and
2. people are bidding on them (more bids the better)

Take note of the results (set it to display AUCTIONS ONLY - see below)

You can see that this product keyword has quite a few auction results (which is a good thing). You’ll also see that most of the auctions have bids (this is also a good thing… the more bids the better).

What you ideally want to be looking for here is at least 30% – 50% of the auctions have bids (on the first page).

Now we know that the product is commercially viable since people are bidding for the product.

Step 3 – Keyword Search Volume

 

People spend  far too much time worrying about “exact match search volume” in the Google External Keyword Tool (GEKT)… The popular notion is that it has to be over “x,000 searches a month” or what not. While it’s always nice to have a figure to shoot for, it actually doesn’t matter as much as you might think.

I have many sites in a multitude of niches (like golf, kitchen stuff, hunting, fishing, instruments and more) that show less than 400 searches per month for Exact Match Search Volume in GEKT that make over $50 – $100 per month.

So, once you’ve found a potential product you want to go to GEKT (login to your Google Adwords account) and start your search by entering the keyword phrase:

Make sure you leave “only show ideas closely related to my search terms OFF.

Then hit “Search”.

Once it fetches the results, set the match type to “EXACT” (this menu is on the left hand side of your screen AFTER you’ve ran the search).


This isn’t 100% necessary, but it’s easier to narrow down your choices with the Exact Match selected (I would at the very least select it to “Phrase” match – but personally I like to set it to Exact).
You’ll see that for this particular keyword phrase (fender jazz bass) brings back TONS of results (800 related keywords).

Now you need to sift through the keywords and see what may be suitable.
I do this by looking for keywords in the 300 – 1500 keyword range.
So from the above snap shot, I would look at keywords like the one highlighted in yellow, “Fender Jazz Bass for Sale” as a potential primary keyword for my site.
I’d go look for a suitable domain name for this (this keyword has the .net and .org available at the time of this writing).
I generally don’t recommend that people buy domain names with trademarked names / brands in them… so I would probably go and look for a domain name without the brand name in it. So here I would look at “Jazz Bass For Sale”.

Will you make money with this keyword?

While I make no guarantees, the probability is very high that it will. I would definitely create a small micro niche blog around this product as the primary keyword phrase.

And with a broader domain name like “JazzBassforSale.com” you could add other products from that sub-category (from within eBay Pulse) as well

 If you choose to use Amazon Bestseller’s list for this, you can still follow all of the steps starting with STEP 2.

Find Hot Niches with Amazon

Here is a method I use to find Hot Niches with Amazon.

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.

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).

Outsourcing your Internet Marketing Work

Here’s a list of 17 things you should consider outsourcing at some point (in no particular order):

1. Content Creation – content for your niche sites, article directories (link building), press releases, video articles etc.
2. Content Submission – submitting articles, press releases, posting to your blog, submitting videos…
3. Blog creation – setting up WordPress, installing plug-ins, configuring premium themes etc. At the very least, think about getting a Backup / Cloning tool that can help you setup your blogs faster (so you’re not setting everything up from scratch all the time).
4. Link Building – get someone else to do the tedious task of building links to your site. Whether it’s a link building service (like 3-way links or a 1-way link network); or a person / service that is creating blog comments; social bookmarks; or maybe some .edu or .gov links for you…)
5. Account Creation – need accounts created on a host of social bookmarking sites or article directories? The best use of your time is to have someone do it for you. There are people on both the Warrior Forum and Fiverr that will do this sort of work for you.
6. Transcribing audio or video – do you want to create a PDF file out of your audio or video? Instead of spending hours trying to piece together your audio into a coherent PDF report, have someone with expertise do it for you (I’ve found a couple of good people on the Warrior Forum for this sort of work).
7. Audio / Video recording – need to record some video footage? Or maybe record a Skype call or a conference call? You can actually hire someone to do this sort of thing very easily. (I’ve hired free workers for video recording and editing before… read on for more on this)
8. Customer support – especially people that can handle refunds and basic customer questions. (it’s better for your health to just outsource the refunds and negative comments as well…)
9. Customer Acquisition – if you’re an offline marketer, you’d be better off handing the lead generation and sales to other people. Hire free sales people (people you don’t actually have to pay… at all… read on towards the bottom of this post for more on this).
10. Moderating Forums – do you own a forum (or other socially interactive sites?). Have someone else moderate it for you (many active members will do this for free if you ask them).
11. Technical stuff – if you’re technically challenged, it’s more efficient to get help from someone who knows what they’re doing (instead of wasting time). Stuff like auto-responder integration, shopping cart integration and other complex (and even easy tasks) can be done quickly and effectively through outsourcing. Installing Scripts or databases – don’t know how to install a mysql database? Or perhaps you need a new membership script installed. The learning curve on many scripts and plugins are pretty high, so it can save you a ton of time to just get the help of someone who knows.
12. Programming tasks – outsource the creation of your own software, wordpress plugin, a simple php script or maybe even an iPhone app… there’s no reason to learn to code on your own when there are tons of programmers waiting for you to reach out to them.
13. Product Creation – outsource the actual product creation to someone else. Hire an expert in a subject to create one for you (like at Guru.com).
14. Copywriting – need copy for your new product? It’s not a bad idea to learn how to write some basic copy, but if you need it done “right” maybe it’s best to hire a copywriter… the Warrior Forum is a decent place to hire an up and coming (and veteran) copywriters.
15. Graphic Creation – need a header image for your blog; a new logo, or perhaps an ebook cover for your new product? There are plenty of graphic artists that will do this for you on the cheap.
16. Affiliate Manager – if you’re launching a new product, it can be more effective to hire an affiliate manager who can help you uncover potential JV and affiliate partners.
17. Niche / Keyword research – if you’re having trouble digging up niches on your own, it may be faster to just outsource the niche and/or keyword research.

Here are some of my favorite sources (in alphabetical order):

• Elance.com
• Fiverr.com (for simple tasks like article writing)
• Guru.com
• Odesk.com
• VWorker.com (formerly Rent-a-Coder)
• Warrior Forum – Warriors for Hire section

Once you have enough work, you may even want to hire your own Virtual Assistant… or hire someone locally… or even get someone to work for free

Finding Trends

Using trends to create new content for blogs can be a very effective method of getting traffic and generating some quick revenue.
There are many resources to dig up trends available out there, but what can separate you from the rest of the pack are by using additional resources and ideas outside of the “norm”.
Let’s have a look at some not-so well-known resources for spotting trends:

Alltop.com

According to Alltop, the purpose of the site is to tell you “what’s happening” within your favorite topic.
Alltop.com is a buzz / trend search engine of sorts that can be customized to display the information you are interested in (if you create an account). The cool thing about this site is that you can just take a look at their main page and get a quick snap shot of what the hot topics are on some of the more popular blogs…

BlogPulse.com

BlogPulse.com is a trend discovery platform / search engine specifically for blogs, and is brought to you by the Nielsen Company (the same peeps who do the TV ratings and such).
It offers several functions including a search engine, blog tracking, trend watching (real time trends and also a trend search) / buzz tracking, as well as tracking and statistics of blogs and conversion tracker (if you choose to use their site for this).

IceRocket Trend Tool

IceRocket.com is a “real time” search engine that has a very useful tool for spotting trends in your specific niche (this tool has some similarities to the trend search function of BlogPulse). The draw back to their tool is that it will only track data for the past 3 months…
Another useful function of this tool is that you can also see what the most popular blog posts, videos, movies etc. are at any given time (measured by links added within the last 24 – 48 hours to specific sites such as YouTube and IMDB) .

SpringWise

SpringWise.com is a little bit different type of a site and isn’t a “tool” you can manipulate… however, it can be a very useful resource to see what people (entrepreneurs) are currently talking about.
I’m subscribed to their daily newsletter, and they send out interesting business ideas every day.
This is really cool!

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal’s Most Popular list is an interesting resource to find the latest news / ideas (if you have business / tech / political blogs).
Here you’ll find the most viewed news on their site (also viewable by section), as well as the most ‘emailed’ news stories. These are searchable by the day, week and month, which can be helpful if you have a blog that is updated on a weekly basis (or perhaps only a few times per week).

These are just five of the resources I use to check for trends (and also get ideas for new blogs and content). In a future post I’ll share with you some additional resources you can use for “trend spotting”.

Guaranteed Profitable Niches

Step 1 – Discovery Phase

Go to Flippa.com… then click on the “Just Sold” tab:


The “Just Sold” area of Flippa is a GOLDMINE!
Here you can find hundreds (more often than not, thousands) of sites that have switched hands recently.
At this point, you can start going through the listings (by skimming the auction titles), OR you can sort and narrow your list down a bit using the “Refine” function, or more specifically the “Revenue” links under the Refine menu:


As you can see, there are several options… and the selection I use depends a bit on what type of sites I’m looking to build. For most micro niche sites, I look at sites that are in the $100 – $500 month range.
You could use the “Advanced” function to really narrow down your results, but most times you won’t need to.
Let’s click on the “Over $100″ to see what we find:


On the first page I found a site in the nutritional niche (at the time I’m writing this). If it’s something that intrigues me, I will click on the link and visit the site to see if it is a simple design that can be easily duplicated (in this case, it is):


So, let’s move on to the next step…

Step 2 – Deconstruction

Now that we’ve found a potentially suitable site, we want to “deconstruct” the site.
By simply looking at the site, you can see that this is a relatively “ordinary” MFA site (MFA = Made for Adsense) and that it is a pure HTML site (by looking at the page source… plus the author of this site states the site is “pure html” in the listing).
First thing you want to take a quick look at are the Flippa stats and the description of the auction listing. There you will find that:
This site had earned over $200 in August (of 2011), has 53 inbound links and  that the site is relatively young (built in July 2010).
It also sold for $2500 , so if you can build a similar site you can stand to earn that (or maybe more) if you choose to flip it.
The next thing I do is go to SEMRush.com, enter the URL of the site you found on Flippa, and hit “search”:

While SEMRush offers a paid service, we can use their free search to find most of what we need.

SEMRush will give you some pretty cool data that you can copy into your notepad or Excel worksheet (as you start building your keyword list). I’ve pointed out some of the areas you want to pay attention to from these search results:

As you can see, the keyword “how to become a nutritionist” is getting over 40% of the traffic for this site… so you “may” want to dig into that one during your keyword research to see how hard it would be to rank for (we already know that the site only has 53 inbound links, so it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to knock it off it’s perch).
Great, it gave us FIVE keywords… what about the rest?
Well, that’s actually very simple… just go to the Google External Keyword Tool and enter the site URL into the “Website” field (I recommend you login to your Google account, if not setup a free Google account if you haven’t already it’s worth it):

This screen may look different if you are not logged in to your Google Adwords account

Once you hit “search”, you will be presented with a nice list of keywords from this site:

Now that you have this data, compare it with your SEMRush results, organize the keywords into categories by looking at the category / article listing on the site: www.HowToBecomeANutritionist.org
Then you’re off to the next stage of research (if you choose to), which is the competition and ranking analysis. In other words, finding out who your competitors are in Google for your keywords and what it would take to bump them off the top spot(s) in Google.
For smaller niche sites, I do this only for my top 3 – 5 keywords (that I deem suitable as my primary keywords).
Then I move on to domain name selection and setting up the site.
This is my simple 2-step formula for finding “guaranteed” profitable niches. This should literally take 5 – 15 minutes, in which time you should be able to dig up a few (or several) potential candidates.

Top 10 Wordpress Plugins

1. An Advertising Plugin
There are several to choose from, and in the past used to use Max Banner Ads or Advertising Manger quite heavily. I still use Max Banner Ads on quite a few sites, however I use the paid version to get rid of the ‘attribution link’. I’m not sure what’s going on with the “Advertising Manager’ plugin, but their site is down…
So, I’ve started to use another plugin called AdRotate to display CPA and Adsense ads on my site(s).
On some sites I prefer to display a call to action message to visitors, in which case I use the What would Seth Godin do plugin (this plugin is very useful).

2. Google Sitemap Generator
I think everybody should have the Google XML Sitemaps or some kind of XML Sitemap plugin. It will help search engine spiders / robots index your site more efficiently (not only Google, but Bing / Yahoo, Ask.com and other search engines as well).

3. SEO Plug-in
I use the Platinum SEO Pack plugin for many of my sites. Not because it’s necessarily the best, but because it’s what I’m familiar with. There’s also All-in-One SEO plugin, which I hear is great as well.
Having said that, I generally use Premium Themes with built-in SEO functionality these days, which negates the need for an SEO plugin.

4. Exclude Pages
I use Exclude Pages plugin to remove pages I don’t want in my navigation bar (or in the sidebar widget), such as the “Privacy Policy”, “Disclaimer” and “Terms of Service” types of pages (which I generally put in the footer of the blog). This plugin isn’t necessary with many of the newer themes since they have the custom menu feature available, but for those that don’t this is very handy.

5. Secure WordPress
WordPress security is important! The Secure WordPress plugin helps improves security of your blog in many areas, which will make it a little more challenging for hackers to mess with your sites. I use this on nearly all of my blogs.

6. TinyMCE Advanced
TinyMCE Advanced improves upon your WYSIWYG editor (WYSIWYG = what you see is what you get). It also allows you to customize the menu layout of your post editor.

7. Yet Another Related Posts
The Yet Another Related Posts plugin allows you to bring up related posts after your blog entries (and in your RSS feeds). This is great for larger blogs and can reduce the bounce rates of your blogs as well.

8. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a super simple way to add a contact form to your blog. Simply enable the plugin, add a little token to your page and voila you have a contact form for your site. (I recommend you ALWAYS add a contact form on all of your blogs).

9. Google Analytics for WordPress
I recommend you always have some type of a statistics / analytics plugin for your site. This is especially important in the event you plan on flipping your sites since people will want to see traffic stats when buying a site. I personally use Google Analytics for WordPress on most of my sites, but if you’re “anti-Google”, you can also use other services such as StatPress, StatCounter or GetClicky (they all have WordPress plugins that integrate easily).
Note: you need to setup a Google analytics account to use this plugin (the account is free).

10. Akismet
You need comment spam protection on your site. I use Akismet on all of my sites. I also use WP-Captcha Free on many of my blogs which helps prevent automated comment spam. Akismet is automatically installed when you install WordPress.
Note: you’ll need to get a wordpress.com account (which is free) to get your Akismet API key

Simple Micro Product Creation

So in the last article on “Micro Product Creation”, you learned to brainstorm ideas for your new micro product.

One of the problems you might encounter (as you try to create a product) is that even though you know the “market” you want to enter and a general idea for your product, creating the outline for your product can be very challenging.

In this article, I’ll show you how you can use a very simple idea to create an outline for your product. I call this method the…


“The Dummy Method”
This is a continuation of an idea I gave you in the last article, where you use the dummy guide books to come up with market ideas. For this method to work, you simply either go to the bookstore and pick up a “dummy guide” OR go here:

http://www.dummies.com/



Once there, you’d want to go to the “bookstore” section of the site by clicking here:

When you’ve arrived inside their bookstore, you want to pick the proper category:

Once there, pick your topic…

Let’s say for the sake of argument that you are in the numismatic / coin collecting niche (it’s pretty popular at the moment), which is in the “Crafts and Hobbies” category:

Click on the product name and you will get to the “product details” page.

Here you have two options:

1) The clickable “Table of Contents” tab (which is below the picture of the book), or

2) To download the “Table of Contents” Excerpt PDF file (in the “Read an Excerpt” box to the right of the screen)

Personally I recommend you download the “Table of Contents” Excerpt PDF file, simply because it’s much more detailed than the information you get from clicking the “tab”.

Here’s an example of what the information under the “Table of Contents Tab” looks like:

If you choose to download the PDF file, you will not only get a basic listing of chapters etc. of the book (like you see above), but you will also get more details about every single chapter:

As you can see there’s a lot more details, including chapter topics and sub-topics!



JACKPOT!


As you can see in the picture, the “table of contents PDF” has been broken down into “Parts” (Part I, Part II, Part III etc.) and “Chapters”. Some of the sub-topics are not too descriptive (so you can simply throw those out), but it gives you a pretty good idea for how you can structure the content of your own product.



“Great! But How Do I Use This Info?”
It’s simple.
Depending on the scope of your product, you could create a something out of either one chapter in the book OR one “Part” of the book.

Either way, the dummies guide gives you a breakdown of how to structure your content to finalize your product, and a list of ‘bullets’ for your sales letter (you can use later on in your sales letter).

So, to give you a more concrete example, you could either write a micro report on “How to buy Coins Safe Way” (which is a “Part” of the book), then use the chapter headings as your bullet points.

Note: Just make sure you change the wording of the title of your report AND the chapter heading (your bullet points).

Here’s what the table of contents will “give” you:

You could also create a micro product on “How to not get scammed by Fake Coin Artists” (or whatever).

This would be a report built around only Chapter 15 of the book. Then use the chapter topics and sub-topics from within the chapter for your bullet points / chapters for your own product:

Super Simple Tip: By the way, if you’re a niche blogger, this is a super simple way to come up with blog post topics!.