Post on 08-Sep-2014
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What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You’ve decided to start an eCommerce store. Great!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You’re in the right place for that.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But first things first.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You must choose a product to sell!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Figuring out what to sell online isn’t just a part of the
process.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
This is the MOST important step!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
I cannot stress that enough!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You need to identify a niche that has real value.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
One with true potential.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
One that solves a problem or fills a need.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You can’t just sell anything.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
And you definitely don’t want to sell a random mix of everything.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Amazon already does that better than you’ll ever be able to.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Niche product selection should be your focus.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
So let’s focus on choosing a specific niche! Better yet, a micro niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
More on that in a moment.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
By focusing on a specific niche, you can actually do things better than Amazon will ever be able to do.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
So there it is. Determining what to sell online is the same as niche
product selection.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You’re trying to figure out a specific type of product to sell on your
eCommerce website.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
What’s a niche anyway?
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Well, in terms of products and eCommerce, a niche is simply a
sub-set of a larger group of products.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But I bet you already knew that. If not, here’s a good example:
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
‘Doll houses’ would be a niche within the girls’ toys market.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Fisher Price Doll Houses would be a more focused niche within the
Doll Houses niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Niches are like categories and sub-categories.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Why should I choose a focused niche over a broad category?
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Great question.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
There are a couple of very important reasons why I
recommend focusing on a niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
1. Your path to becoming an authority, getting noticed, and building an audience is much
easier if you’re focused on one specific niche.
It’s exceedingly more difficult to focus on a broad category in a
large market, with lots of different categories and product types.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Start small, then grow bigger if/when it makes sense. But
honestly, don’t even worry about getting bigger right now.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
2. Better conversions! That’s right. If your site is specifically tailored to
a particular niche, people will be more likely to purchase from you.
If you seem to specialize in just what they happen to be looking for, you instantly gain a level of authority and expertise in their
eyes.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
People would much prefer to order from an expert over a super-store,
all other things being equal.
(And if you provide real value, they’ll even pay more to buy it
from you! …true story)
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
When you’re just starting out, you want to give yourself the best
possible chance for success, with the least amount of personal and
monetary investment.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Focusing on a niche allows you to do that.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Okay, so hopefully I’ve convinced you about the importance of
choosing a niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
I want to take it a step further now, and urge you to get really focused,
and seek out a ‘micro niche’.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
A micro niche is just as you suspect. An niche of a niche. A
very specific product sub-category, in other words.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
So in our example of the Doll House niche, ‘miniature doll house
beds’ would be a micro niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
I know… it seems awfully specific.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But remember, you want the least path of resistance when starting a
business; the lowest barrier to entry; the best possibility for
success (that is, sales).
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
A micro niche, if chosen properly, will give you these things.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Some Proof, Please!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Okay, okay. You don’t just have to take my word for it.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Building niche-based websites has long been a proven model for
success in the online marketing world.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
There are countless examples of people who have made a killing
with affiliate product promotion or adsense, by focusing on very
specific niches.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
This is no different for eCommerce sites that sell physical products.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
One great example, from noted ecommerce expert Lisa Suttora, details how a man went from a “variety store” model (selling a
little bit of everything) on eBay, to deciding to focus on specific niche
ecommerce sites.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
He now owns many niche ecommerce sites and has been
listed as one of Australia’s 30 under 30 entrepreneurs.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Focusing on one niche at a time gave him greater SEO and online
marketing leverage, intimate market knowledge, clearly focused
brands, etc.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
There are also lots of real-world examples that demonstrate how
reduced choice can lead to improved conversions for online
stores.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
One awesome example, from eCommerceFuel
(http://www.ecommercefuel.com/inside-relaunch-online-store/), details how a
trolling motor (those small fishing boat motors) site increased conversions by over
48%...
…and average order value by over 32%, by reducing the number of products they sold
and focusing on a specific type (a micro niche) of trolling motors.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
And by the way, Andrew’s site is a killer resource for starting and running an eCommerce store.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Another example, from Visual Website Optimizer, shows how they were able to increase site
engagement by 27% after removing a product filter from one
of their product categories.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
This is a good example of how fewer choices can mean better
results. Something like a product filter would seemingly be a benefit
to the user.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But A/B split testing showed that it actually just distracted visitors.
Having fewer choices allows your customers to get right to what
they’re looking for, without being confused or distracted with
anything else.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Not Just Any Niche
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Alright. You’re still reading so I hope we can agree that choosing a
niche or micro-niche is a wise approach.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Awesome. I knew you were a wise one!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But what’s next?
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You can’t just throw a dart and pick the first niche it lands on. If you select the wrong niche you’ll either be competing
with Goliath (Amazon), not competing at all…
…because nobody wants what you’re selling, or worse yet, competing on price
because you’re selling a commoditized product that folks can get at
the corner store.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You need a practical, data-backed method for choosing just the right
niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s simple really, in theory.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
At the very minimum, you want to identify a niche that is searched-for frequently, and is at the same time
undeserved by existing eCommerce merchants.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
So a niche that a lot of people are interested in, but for which very few online stores are offering a
viable choice.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Easy! Only, it’s not all that easy.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It can actually be pretty darn difficult to find such a niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
And that, my friends, is something a lot of eCommerce ‘experts’ won’t
tell you.
They’ll make it seem like it’s as easy as brainstorming 20 ideas, narrowing down your list, and
doing a few Google searches to find the perfect one.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
No! That’s not how this works.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s more complicated than that. But thankfully, it’s not rocket
science.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You just need a plan and the right tools, along with some basic
guidelines.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Maybe a step-by-step plan of attack? Okay, here you go.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Step 1 – Mindset
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s not about what YOU are interested in.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s about what potential customers are interested in.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
To be clear – I do not recommend that you “follow your passion” or
“choose something you’re passionate about”.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
If, after all of your research, you happen to have found a niche that
meets your criteria and you’re passionate about it, then great.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
That’s certainly not a bad thing.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But your passion alone should not be the driving force behind this
selection process.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
For example, let’s say you’re like me and you’re passionate about
golf. Despite not being very good at it, I do love golf.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
And frankly, I’d love to own a golf equipment eCommerce store.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But that would be a horrible niche to enter. It is saturated,
completely.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
There are so many online options for purchasing golf equipment. It
would be extremely difficult to ever get noticed in this crowded
space.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Even in a micro-niche like a specific type of club, the competition is
very strong.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
I’d be trying to compete with giant online and offline retailers, large content producers (Golf Digest),
etc.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It would be difficult and expensive to get onto the first page of
Google’s search results…not to mention it would take forever…if it
ever even happened.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Make it easier on yourself. Don’t focus on a passion.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Change your mindset and focus on a business approach.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Focus on an approach that seeks to validate demand and profit
potential of your niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Here are a few other niches I wouldn’t touch, simply because
the competition is already so strong:
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
* Insurance* Debt Consolidation* Mortgages & Loans
* Real Estate* Computers and related equipment
* Stocks* Travel
* Making Money Online* Weight Loss
* Dating
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Step 2 – Generating Ideas
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Once you’ve established the proper mindset of commercial viability over passion, you can move into the idea generation
process.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
This is the phase in which you develop a list of potential niches
for your eCommerce site.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You just want to come up with a group of potential niches that you
can further refine based on the criteria we’re outlining elsewhere
in this plan.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
First off, avoid the highly competitive niches listed above.
Again, those are typically too competitive to waste your time
on.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Think small, undeserved, focused, micro niche. Develop a list within
those constraints.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
If you’re in idea generation mode, try to always be aware of that fact and try to pay attention to things you read or hear, and how they
may spark ideas for product niches.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Be aware of your surroundings as well, as you may come across a
product in the store, or a situation in every day life, that sparks the
idea creativity.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
There are also some tools and resources you can use to help.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Popular lists like Twitter Trends, Google Trends, or Amazon best
sellers. Tons of ideas there.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Twitter and Google will give you ideas about things that are
trending, topical and popular right now.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Many of these topics may not be product oriented, but they can spark ideas of related product
niches.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
And the Amazon best sellers will give you an idea of the best selling products on the web right now.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
If you can find a niche variation of one of those, then you’re on your
way!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Spend a couple of hours over the course of 2 or 3 days just thinking
about niche ideas, looking at these resources and jotting down what you come up with. You’ll have a
great starting point.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Step 3 – Profitability
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Just because people are looking for something, doesn’t mean it has
profit potential.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You’ve got to choose a niche in which people are actively looking to buy a product, and a product
already exists.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
For example, I know lots of people are afraid of spiders. And if you do
a Google search for ‘afraid of spiders’, you’ll find over 7 million
results.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s definitely something people are interested in and searching on.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But what you’ll also find is a glaring lack of products being sold. None.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
There are zero Adsense ads, and no eCommerce stores come up. That doesn’t mean this is a great,
un-tapped opportunity.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
That means that people searching in this niche aren’t looking to
purchase products. They’re just looking for information.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Now, you could instead focus on the spider killing niche if you’re the
murderous type.
A search for ‘spider killing’ does reveal one eCommerce result for a
spider killing spray on sale at walmart.com.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But this violates our guidelines in that it’s a commoditized product, is for sale at the corner store, and is being sold at an online giant like
Wal-Mart.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
No thanks. I’ll pass.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
So what identifies a niche as potentially profitable?
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
* There are some (but not too many) commercial listings in your
search results.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
That is, when you search for, say ‘heated dog house’ you’ll notice
several ecommerce sites show up in the organic search results.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Additionally, there are Google promotional ads (Adsense) along
the top and right side of the organic results.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
For heated dog house, the competition is pretty stiff, so I’d
probably stay away from it.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But, perhaps there’s a more obscure micro niche within the heated dog house category that has some, but less, commercial
competition.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
That’s the kind of thing we’re looking for here.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
* Do your target customers have the money and ability to buy what
you’re selling?
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
For example, you might not want to market luxury dining tables to
recent college grads.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s out of their affordable price range…not to mention extremely
difficult and expensive to ship.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
* Is it something people want year round? Seasonal niches can work, but again, why make it harder than
it has to be.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Give yourself the best chance at success by selecting something
that people want any time of the year.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Ensure that your niche has profit potential before moving into the
next step.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Step 4 – Prove Demand
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
So far we’ve developed a mindset that favors a business approach,
we’ve generated a list of ideas, and we’ve filtered down that list to
leave only the potentially profitable niches.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Now here’s where it gets interesting…dare I say, exciting!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
We can actually ensure that there is sufficient demand for our niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
There are no certainties in this game, but being able to tell
approximately how many people are searching for your niche every month certainly stacks the deck in
your favor.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
And you can very easily determine this key metric.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
First, you need a keyword tool.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You can go premium, with and excellent tool like Long Tail Pro that really does a
deep dive into keyword research.
It provides you with extensive keyword analysis and suggestions,
competitor analysis, Google rankings, etc. I’ve used it and
highly recommend it for niching down to a profitable, and in-
demand micro niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
However, if FREE is your thing, then Google’s Keyword Planner tool will do the
job just fine.
Either way, these tools provide you with data on how many people, per month, are searching for a specific term, along with many
suggested related terms for you to research.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Regardless of the tool you choose to do keyword research, here’s
what you want to look for to prove demand for a niche:
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Take each remaining niche from your list and do the following:
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
1. Enter it into your keyword tool of choice, and be sure to select
‘exact’ match search results, and make sure you’re only looking locally (as in the United States
only).
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
2. Run your query
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
3. Here’s what to look for, for each keyword phrase:
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
1. At least 3000 local monthly searches – this ensures that a
significant number of people are searching for your niche…demand!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
2. Make sure there are lots of variations of your keyword. 10 or
more is a good target. These would be ‘long tail’ variations.
Ex – if your niche keyword is “ant farms”, some long tail keyword
variations might be “glass enclosed ant farm” and “ant farm with
queen”
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
So, not only do you want to ensure that a significant number of people are looking for what you’re selling,
but you also want to make sure that there are lots of long tail variations of your niche being
searched for.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
This is because, in reality, most ecommerce sites only get about
20% of their traffic from their primary keyword.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
All the rest of the traffic is coming in from those long tail variations.
So you want your niche to have lots of these variations that you can target with great products
and / or content.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selectionwww.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
There must be demand for your niche, before moving on to the
final step!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Step 5 – Assess the competition
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Even if you’ve done everything right up to this point, you still may not have a viable product niche to
pursue.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
That’s because there may be too much competition.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But Ryan, didn’t we already think about competition in the first step?
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Indeed we did. But that was in a much more broad sense than is
required now.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
At that point we were just thinking logically, and being prudent so as to not waist our time researching
saturated niches.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But now, you have a much narrower list that’s been fine-
tuned and filtered down to the best possible opportunities.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s now time to complete your final due diligence for each of the
remaining niches.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s time to analyze the competition to make sure you have some kind of chance to get your site noticed,
ranked, and into the fold.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
We want to identify a couple of targets in your niche. By targets, I mean sites that are vulnerable, not up to the standards of the others, low quality, forgotten, abandoned,
etc.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
We can feel pretty confident that we can eventually out rank these
targets!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
To do this you really just need to look at three metrics, for each of the top ten sites that come up in Google for your niche keyword
search.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
The three things you need to look at are Inbound Links, Domain
Authority, and Website Quality.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Inbound Links – These are links pointing to a website from other
websites.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Also known as incoming links, they represent one of, if not THE most
important SEO factors.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Google places a large importance on the number of inbound links a site has, when determining search
position.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
So you want to evaluate the number of inbound links that each of the top 10 sites have in Google’s
results.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You can fairly easily achieve this with a tool like Open Site Explorer.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Simply enter up to 5 URLs at a time and run the search. What you
really want to pay attention to is the “Linking Root Domains”
number. This is the number of unique websites that are linking to
it.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Depending on the niche the numbers could be in the 10s, 100s,
or 1000s.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You want to look for opportunities here. So if every site has 1000s of
uniques, you want to avoid this niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But, if every site has numbers in the low 100s, I wouldn’t be too
worried.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
The goal here is to find one or two (or more) sites in the top 10 results that have much less than all of the
others.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Those are your targets, and that tells you there is room to work
your way in to the search results in this niche!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Domain Authority – This is a metric developed by Moz.com one of the leading SEO communities, and is
widely used as an indicator of Authority in the SEO industry.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
It’s essentially an algorithm that predicts a website’s ranking
potential based on a bunch of factors.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Luckily, Open Site Explorer can also be used for gathering this metric. So you’ll be killing two birds with
one stone here.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You will quickly notice the Domain Authority metric for each site you evaluate. It’ll be in the top left of
the results.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Domain Authority Metric in Open Site Explorer
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Again, we’re looking for opportunities here. 70 and up is considered very strong Domain
Authority. So if all 10 results were above 70, I’d avoid that niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
If a few are really low…like under 30, that’s a big opportunity and I’d
pursue that niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Basically, just look for a couple that are much lower than the rest and
target these.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Website Quality – This is a less precise evaluation and won’t rely
on some tool or number.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
This is your reality check, your hands-on diagnosis of the
competition.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
You want to visit each of the top ten sites and determine their level
of quality.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
This isn’t anything specific.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
We know quality when we see it, don’t we?
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Look for things like professional design, great navigation and
usability, great added-value for the customer (things like product
guides, helpful tutorials, videos, etc…great content).
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
If every site knocks it out of the park in the quality department, I’d
avoid the niche.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
But what we’re looking for here is…say it with me…an opportunity!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Are any of the sites poorly designed, hard to navigate, offering
no additional value to the customer? If so, here again, these
are your targets.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
What to Sell Online – The Selection
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Have you’ve been following along? Have you performed each of the
steps outline here in succession?
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
If so, you should have arrived at this point with probably one or two
excellent niches! They’ve passed all of the tests and cleared the
hurdles.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
We can be fairly confident that these niches would be profitable.
You’ve given yourself the best chance of success!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
If you have one or two niches, all you have to do now is pick one. You can feel confident that it is a
smart way to go.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Next, you’ve got to put a plan in place to source products, develop a website, and promote it. All of
which can be done rather painlessly.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Especially if you have a little help. And that’s why I’m here.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
We’ll get to product sourcing next!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Next Steps
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
If you liked this tutorial, or hated it for that matter, I’d love to get your feedback. Leave a comment below
and let’s begin the conversation!
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
I highly encourage you to follow this step by step process if you’re interested in choosing a niche a
new ecommerce site.
What to Sell Online: Niche Product Selection www.shoppingsignals.com
Take action, and let me know how it goes!