If you have been reading about ‘how to find a good niche’ for your website, I’m sure you would have heard many gurus recommending Amazon as one of the tools. Those in niche marketing (niche blogging) have been using Amazon.com successfully to find popular/profitable products around which their micro niche sites are built.
Here’s a closer look at how to use Amazon to discover the right niche.
Step 1 – Check the Lists
One of the initial places that you should definitely checkout is their bestsellers section (click the link below):
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.
Sort Your List
From here you can dive into any category in the sidebar navigation and have full visibility of all of their products.
You can even sort the products in your chosen category by using the drop down menu at the top right of your search results:
I usually prefer to filter either by ‘Popularity’ or ‘Avg. Customer Review’.
Product Selection Criteria
To further narrow down this list, you should take a look at:
- The number of reviews for each of the products (more reviews means more people have purchased the item).
- 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.)
In general, more the reviews, better are the chances of conversions when it comes to selling those products from your website.
However, you may go for products with fewer reviews as well, if you want to build a ‘product review’ site.
For your niche, its better to consider products that have a rating of at least 4.5 stars and have at least 20 reviews, so that it becomes easier for potential buyers to make a judgment about the product.
Fewer reviews doesn’t provide enough information to potential buyers.
To Conclude: Discovery & Creation
In a nutshell here’s what you do to choose a hot/profitable niche using Amazon:
- Keyword discovery: find suitable keywords related to your product that you can build a site around.
- Find a domain name: Avoid using brand names or trademarked terms in the domain name to stay clear of potential legal troubles.
- Setup site and publish content: I use WordPress for this, but you may even use static HTML site.
- Monetize it: You could monetize using Amazon’s affiliate program or even AdSense
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