Supertargeting Amazon Affiliate Marketing - How to Find a Niche Market by Ryan Stevenson - HTML preview

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How To Find a Niche Market

A Guide To Finding New

Amazon Product Niche Markets

Create High Converting Wordpress Affiliate Ads: http://www.amzps.com/

More Niche Affiliate Tips & Tricks: http://www.supertargeting.com/

By Ryan Stevenson

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How to Find a Niche Market

Table of Contents

1. Introduction...........................................................3

2. Product Selection...................................................5

3. Keyword Selection.................................................9

4. Domain Name Registration................................14

5. Ad Usage..............................................................20

6. Search Engine Indexing......................................22

7. Resources.............................................................26

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How to Find a Niche Market

1

Introduction

My name is Ryan Stevenson and I have been making websites for nearly 15 years. Some of these websites have been made for myself to run and others I have made as a freelancer. I have a lot of skil s when it comes to making websites. I can cover every aspect of a website like design, graphics, programming, HTML, database, content writing, search engine optimization, link building, marketing, sales and more. I have had many horrible failures and also quite a few successful websites over the years. I have built complete websites from scratch that go on to gross over $15,000 monthly. I have taken my 15 years of experience and compiled my knowledge to write this book that details the best way to find a new Amazon Product Niche Market.

In this book, I am going to guide you step-by-step through the entire process to find your own Amazon niche market. Although my book wil not actually teach you how to build your websites, my method wil put you on a quick path to success.

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How to Find a Niche Market

How exactly is learning how to research a niche market going to put you on a quick path to success? My niche research strategy involves finding an available .com domain name that is an exact phrase match for a search keyword phrase that receives decent monthly traffic on Google. It can be hard to find these domain names available if you do not know how to properly look for them.

Once you are able to find one of these domain names that can target a particular Amazon product niche, you are ready to start building your website.

By using a domain name like this, it wil be so much easier to get your site ranked in the top of the search engines for your primary keyword phrase. You wil also be able to target a wide variety of other relational keyword phrases within other pages on your site. The result is a website that wil generate regular sales referrals and also requires very little maintenance. You can easily build an army of Amazon websites just like I have done over the past few years and end up with a very nice monthly revenue source that requires very little time to manage.

Even though this is a free ebook guide, I have loaded it with extremely good information that wil provide you with the proper groundwork to be able to find new Amazon niche markets on your own.

If you would like some additional training on how to build and market Amazon websites, I do offer a training program where I wil personally teach you how to do absolutely everything and be successful.

I also produced a really nice Wordpress plugin that you can use to show stylish Amazon ads just like the ones I use on my own websites. These ads get great conversion rates. Take a look at the 'Resources' chapter for details.

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How to Find a Niche Market

2 Product Selection

I always begin my search with product selection. You have to figure out what products you are going to be promoting before you can proceed to keyword and domain name selection. I use a number of different websites to find products. Ebay Pulse is a good website to see what people are looking to buy, although some of these products may not work wel for this type of website.

Even more so, some of these products may not even be available for sale on Amazon.

Everyone has their own method of finding products, but I personally prefer to find them on Amazon itself if I am going to be making a website that promotes Amazon products. This saves me a lot of time in the long run because I never find a product that ends up not being available for promotion.

I mainly use the tools that are available to the general public on Amazon.

Just go to their main page and select a department. You can then further refine the department until you get down to specific types of products. Any of these are potential niche ideas, although more research wil be needed to find out if it's a niche that you wil be successful with. Start by simply making a list of some possible niche markets.

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How to Find a Niche Market

When you are searching within a particular category on Amazon, you can sort your results by 'Bestsel ing', 'Avg. Customer Review' and even by price. I like using these features to find some of the popular items or to target higher priced items. It does help sales a lot for a product you are promoting to have customer reviews.

You can also find out what people want to buy on Amazon.com by checking out Gift Central. Gift Central shows you some of the most wished for items in various categories or for different kinds of people (grandpa's, for example). This is a superb way to find out about popular niche products that you would ordinarily not even think about.

A lot of people wil only select products with a price of $150 or higher, but I don't always agree with that policy. You wil get lower commissions but better conversion rates with lower priced products and the opposite with higher priced products. This means that you wil need more traffic to convert a single sale when you have a site promoting higher priced products. I really like it when I can find a niche that offers a bit of a variety of product prices so I have some cheaper items to promote that wil get frequent sales and more expensive items that sel every now and again but bring great commissions.

Try to avoid the most mainstream high-priced items that are already over-promoted: TV, computers, etc. Although I do not have any specific places to recommend to find these specific products, new types of products that become available to the public are often the best niches to make a website for and they wil usually have available domain names. Once you have a general product category, try to find new products made in that category within the past year or even products that wil be coming out next year.

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How to Find a Niche Market

For these types of websites, I only promote Amazon products (I do use other Amazon country sites for certain websites). I run other types of websites that use CJ, Clickbank, Adwords, etc.. but my Amazon sites make more money than any of my other websites.

The commission is low compared with other affiliate programs, but I try not to think about it that way. Most other affiliate programs are for services or digital products where you have a lot less cost involved compared with a physical product. The truth is that most services and digital products are marked up by 100% just to cover the affiliate payments.

I find that you have to talk people into buying services and digital products, but there are already tons of people searching everybody looking to buy physical products. All you have to do is put yourself in their path, provide them with some useful information and then pass them along to complete the sale.

Amazon.com starts you off at 4%, but some of the other Amazon countries start you off with more (I think Amazon.co.uk starts at 5%). They all have different rules for moving up in the commission scale, but Amazon.com only requires 7 monthly sales to get bumped to 6%. I found that it was rather easy to move up to that pay scale with just 1 or 2 semi-successful Amazon product sites. At 6%, the commissions are pretty decent if you are promoting products that are $80 or higher (around $5 for a $85 sale).

Consider how hands-off these websites are to run, I don't mind the low commissions. Sure, it would be nice to be the person sel ing those products, but

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How to Find a Niche Market

you're talking a lot of extra work to be the one providing customer service, payment processing, refunds, shipping, etc. In reality, the people that do all of that to sel physical products probably don't end up making more than 6-10% on the sale themselves, especial y once you factor your expenses.

I do usually take a look at other affiliate programs when I make these sites to see if there is anything worth promoting. I know some people have made sites for CJ.com products. At least for the websites that I've made, CJ.com really didn't have anything good to offer. There were products available but I found that the prices were too high (with a slightly better commission than Amazon's standard – up to 8%) or the commission was too low and the prices were stil too high.

I usually find CJ.com sites to sel their products for the price that is slashed out on Amazon.com. Even if CJ can give a better commission, I want to sel the lower priced product because that's something that the customer wil actually buy more often. I would much rather sel a $40 product for a 6%+

commission than the same product for $60 with an 8% commission. I get a 8%

commission from Amazon.com currently, although electronics are a set 4% (not really a bad thing, because they are usually high priced - I have a site promoting multi thousand dollar electronics products that gets great commissions).

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How to Find a Niche Market

3 Keyword Selection

When I am trying to find a new niche market, I wil only choose a primary keyword phrase that has the exact phrase available to register as a

.COM domain name. This is one of the most important aspects of my entire campaign besides actual product selection. Without it, getting search engine rankings wil take more work, time and effort. I prefer spending my time researching and making new websites - not marketing and maintaining!

Obviously, almost everyone wil know about keyword resources from Google: Google Insights and Google Keyword Tool.

Google Insights is great to find out whether a product is on the rise or decline. You don't want to get on board with a product that people won't want to buy a few years from now and on the other end of the spectrum, you'l make a ton of money down the road if you get in on a product that is just starting and gains popularity over time.

Insights wil also give you suggestions of other relating search terms that are popular in addition to breakout searches featured on the right hand side of the page. An important point that I want to stress about Insights is to NEVER

rely on these keywords to decide on a primary keyword phrase or domain name.

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How to Find a Niche Market

Use this information as a guideline only to have an idea of the popularity of your products and whether they have seasonal tendencies.

Google Keyword Tool is used to actually select a keyword phrase for your product(s). You want to find a keyword phrase that has a good monthly search count. Although you wil not see this option when you first make a search on the keyword tool, after your results are displayed you wil be able to mark check boxes for "Broad, Exact and Phrase". You can check each of these boxes to give you an idea of the power for your keyword phrase in various areas. I've provided a brief explanation of each of these settings below.

Broad

This number shouldn't be taken too literally because you wil likely never receive all of this traffic. This figure is a general traffic stat that wil tel you how much traffic that subject receives, although the actual searches can be very different from your keyword phrase. If you end up creating an authority site that essentially covers every single topic for a subject, you could possibly see a portion of this search traffic.

Exact

Most people only go by the exact monthly search traffic in their keyword research. While this is a good practice, I don't think the other numbers should be ignored. I have had many websites with low exact monthly search traffic that gets many times more traffic than sites with considerably higher exact monthly searches. That's where the other two factors come into play, because you wil usually target more than a single keyword phrase over an entire website.

Depending on the price of the product I want to sel , I usually look to get a bare minimum of 200 exact monthly searches for my primary keyword phrase.

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How to Find a Niche Market

Obviously, more wil be better but it's hard to find available .com domain names containing the exact phrase for keywords that receive more than 1000

exact monthly searches. Some people claim to only make new sites with that kind of keyword traffic, but I believe automated scripts have snatched up almost all of these domain names. Whether that is true or not is not important because you don't need that many searches to have a successful website that makes daily sales. You wil get traffic from other relational/similar keywords phrases that other pages of your site wil target.

Phrase

I like using this stat in combination with the 'Exact' stat to get an idea of the traffic that I can reasonably go after with a new niche market. I wil give you a brief example of how important this number really is. Let's say your exact keyword phrase is "niche markets" and it receives 200 exact monthly searches (all made up figures, by the way). Most people wil never consider this to be a good choice for a primary keyword phrase. However, if the 'Phrase' monthly traffic figure shows a reasonable amount of traffic then I would never pass up this choice as a primary keyword phrase. In fact, I want my 'Phrase' traffic to be considerably higher than my 'Exact' phrase traffic for my primary keyword.

This gives me something to build my website with because all of those other keyword phrases that contain your primary keyword phrase wil make for excel ent content pages on your site. You optimize the main page of your site for the primary keyword phrase and then have many other pages that are each optimized for a single long-tail phrase that contains your primary phrase (ie,

"new niche markets" or "product niche markets"). When you add up the traffic of all of these keyword phrases, you receive the 'Phrase' traffic number. I view this as the real potential for a website.

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How to Find a Niche Market

Another important thing to look at for your keyword phrase with Google Keyword Tool is the search volume trend shown in the bar graph for each keyword phrase. Unless you are targeting a seasonal product, you want to see a fairly steady bar graph or a bar graph that is on the rise. Never go for something that is really high to start and almost gone towards the end of the bar graph.

This means the keyword phrase is losing traffic.

You should also remember that the monthly traffic figures that Google provides are based on a 12 month average (an average of the months shown to you in those green bar graphs for each keyword). If you find a keyword that is quickly gaining popularity, it could show a low monthly search average but actually be receiving many more searches.

When I find some real prospects for a keyword phrase, I ALWAYS

download the CSV file from Google for the keyword results (there's a download button at the top of the results). Open that file with a spreadsheet program and take a look at the search volume counts. It wil show you a count from the previous month - this figure wil give you a real idea of it's current monthly search traffic. I believe this aspect is overlooked by automated programs and I have found keyword phrases with 500-800 average monthly searches that actually are receiving 1400 monthly searches as of last month. In almost all of these situations, I found the .COM domain name to be available for registration.

With a longer keyword phrase, you wil generally have less competition in the way of pages that use that exact phrase. There's stil a chance that a low traffic phrase could have high competition, especially in particular niche categories. If you look at some of the most popular IM niches, you wil find that

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How to Find a Niche Market

keyword phrases of 200 monthly searches can have very high competition. By contrast, in lower competition markets you can often find a phrase with 500-1000 monthly searches with low competition.

If you are looking for something in the "health" niche for example, then that is likely the reason for the high competition that you see across the board.

My best advice is to stay away from those if you think the competition is too high and start looking in different product categories. It's not impossible to make your way into a high competition niche, but it's just a lot easier to make your way into numerous low competition niches.

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4

Domain Name

Registration

My next point is domain name registration. ALWAYS get a .COM that is an exact match of your primary keyword phrase. An an example, if your keyword phrase is "niche market" then you want to be able to register

"nichemarket.com". Keep searching through keyword possibilities until you find one that has an available domain name. Unfortunately, after you make your way through all of these steps, this entire process can take numerous hours or even longer to find a good niche. You can even go all the way through the process only to never find a single available .com domain name. In this case, you just have to brush it off and search for another niche.

When you find an available .com domain name for your keyword phrase, you need to do one more bit of research on Google before you make a final decision.

Go to Google and search for your keyword phrase. You need to look for a few things when you do this search:

•

Paid Advertising (Look at top and on right)

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How to Find a Niche Market

•

Authority Sites in the Top Ten (About, Wiki, Amazon or other major sites in your niche)

•

Websites in the Top Ten with ALL/ANY of your keywords in the domain name

•

Websites in the Top Ten with the exact keyword phrase in the title and/or description

•

Websites in the Top Ten with more than one listing for the keyword phrase

It is OK to see some of the above things when you search for your keyword phrase, but if you see all of these things then you may want to consider another phrase. This should simply tel you how hard it is going to be to get ranked in the Top Ten with a quick look. If you would like to look at the competition a bit more, do the following on Google:

•

Search for the keyword phrase contained within quotes (ie: "niche market"). If you see more than 30,000 websites in those search results, you wil need to put more effort into marketing, on-site optimization and content building. If you can find a keyword phrase with less than 10,000

results in this search, you should have a fairly easy time getting into the top ten if you follow the other guidelines I've talked about.

•

Search for the keyword phrase contained within quotes with "allintitle:" in front of it (ie, allintitle:"niche market"). If you see more than 10,000

websites, you wil need more effort as stated above. In an ideal situation, I like this number below 1,000 or even below 500.

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How to Find a Niche Market

•

Go through each site in the Top Ten and perform a search to find out how many pages that particular website has (ie, site:example-domain-name.com). I don't have a set number I'm looking for here, but I like to mostly see websites that have a lower page count. When you find sites that have hundreds or even thousands of pages, this wil let you know that you may need some extra effort to top these websites. The more pages a website contains, the more weight they wil have in the search results in general (this helps to translate into a higher page rank for a site, which is why sites with mil ions of pages like wikipedia have high PR).

•

Just like before, go through the sites in the top ten and look to see how many backlinks Google shows for the website (ie, link:example-domain-name.com). Unfortunately, you can't take these exact numbers literally because new links wil usually not show up in these results even if Google is already considering their weight. If a page other than the main page of a website is the ranking page in the top ten, check out the backlink count of that specific page as wel as the entire domain name. This also helps you to determine the overall power of a website that you wil compete with. Some people say to try and get as many backlinks as all of the pages in the top ten have combined to get a #1 ranking, but this isn't needed in most cases unless you are in a high competition niche. You can be #1 with zero backlinks while the other sites below you have many backlinks - it's just one of the many factors in the ranking equation.

Ultimately, you want a keyword phrase with decent exact and phrase monthly traffic that has relating Amazon products, an available .exact phrase

.com domain name and fairly low competition in the search engine rankings. It is a lot of things that all need to come into alignment just right in order to be

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successful, but I hope you wil be able to find these with more confidence after reading this guide.

Many people ask me whether it is OK to register .net or .org domain names. It's not that I think the other TLD's are bad, but I don't think they receive as much natural strength as .com domains. I think Google just gives a

.com more weight. I used to mess around with some .net domains, but I found myself always coming 2nd to the .com variant unless I put in a lot of work marketing. If the person running the .com is an experienced marketer, it ends up being a never ending battle that the .net is usually on the losing side of.

I also feel like I get more return traffic with .com's from people remembering my domain name. I tend to see far less of this with a .net site.

Since I go for somewhat lower traffic phrases than most people, I can usually always find a .com domain if I look around enough. Sure, the .net domains are readily available for phrases that have more traffic, but I'm just not looking for a competition battle. I like going after the niches that don't really know anything about SEO. I always wonder what the competition thinks as my brand new sites fly past them in the rankings.

I don't ever register domains with hyphens to use for this type of website, although I can't say that I would never consider it. Similar to the way .net and

.org domain names don't have quite as much strength as a .com, the .com name with a hyphen wil have less strength compared to the same .com without the hyphen.

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How to Find a Niche Market

It's not that I think hyphen names, .net or .org are bad, it's just that I find they require more work to get the same rankings with the premium domain choice.

I would consider registering a hyphen name in certain situations, although I rarely ever come across these. If I really, really want to go after a certain niche or keyword phrase and it's simply not available, I may consider it if a few things are true.

If the premium domain is being sold for an absurd amount of money instead of being used, I'l think about it because I won't have to compete with that site (most likely, or a