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).