Online Marketing Today

Being the largest retailer online, Amazon.com is an absolute gold mine for researching niche markets & product ideas.

The best thing is that we know these are markets that have products in them that are actually selling online right now. Amazon.com gives us that data freely. We just need to know what to look for and how to apply that information properly.

So here’s a very simple method of finding new niche market ideas and hot selling products, using Amazon. You might want to open up Amazon.com in a new window and go through the motions as I describe them below to get a feel for this.

Go visit Amazon.com and enter a * (star character) into the search box.

This is a wildcard search which essentially tells Amazon that you want to see everything they sell in their database. As I write this it returns 86,339,764 Results.

Now that’s one hell of a store ;-0

You’ll want to ignore the results it returns on the main page.

Instead turn your attention to the top left-hand section of the navigational area called “Departments”. Here you will see a list of around 7 of the more popular “Departments” – think of Departments as categorized groups of products…

You’ll also see a clickable link at the end like this…

+ See All 31 Departments

…click that to show the entire category structure of products. You’ll notice that there are numbers in brackets next to each category. That’s the total number of products in each one. In the books category there are over 29 million titles alone.

From here we want to drill down into the specific category type (think broader niche) that we’re interested in investigating.

If you’re leaning towards selling information products, the books category is the place to start. If you’re looking to sell physical products, let’s say you’re interested in “sports equipment”, then you’ll want to click on that department.

For this example, let’s assume you’re keen on getting into the information product business so we’ll run with books – however all of the following steps are applicable to both product types.

So we click on the “Books” department.

This will return all books for sale, and by default, Amazon displays them by Relevance (so the results you see now on this first page are hardly relevant considering every book is relevant to being a book ;-0).

If you’re interested to see what the best selling books are on Amazon, overall, then use the “Sort By” feature now, and change “Relevance” to “Best Selling”…

You should always sort by “Best Selling” to see what’s actually selling (rather than a list of products most relevant to your search).

Now we’re starting to get somewhere, although, we’re still a long way off really pin pointing potential hot niche markets & products. All of the “fiction” books and novels are cluttering our research so we need to drill down further.

You’ll notice that the Books Department has many sub-departments.

We need to select one that is going to provide more technical / reference / training / how to related books, as these all make ideal potential niche markets to move into the information business.

There is a “Professional & Technical” category; however there are also more specific categories that might prove more appropriate – “Home & Garden” for example if that’s your thing.

If you click on this now (and make sure the “Sort By” feature is still showing “Best Selling”) you’ll see all of the best selling books, and their respective topics, in the Home & Garden section…

As I look at this list I see 2 dog training books (one related to puppies, another related to common dog problems). I see a book about activities Fathers can do with their sons. I see a book about design. A few lifestyle & gardening related books and so forth.

This should start to get the creative ideas flowing however we’re still not specific enough for our market research. We want to drill down further.

You’ll notice that there are also sub-departments in the Home & Garden category.

So right now we’re looking at…

Books > Home & Garden.

Click on the “How To & Home Improvements” category – “How To” being a good indication as to containing books related to solving people’s problems or showing them how to do stuff they’re interested in (although such products are not exclusively limited to this category).

Here you can look at the best selling products in this category, or you can drill down even further into more sub-categories. Remember that the more you drill down, the more you’re narrowing niche markets and the more tightly themed and focused the products are. That’s what we want…

However, let’s just take a look at what the best selling products are in the…

Books > Home & Garden > How To & Home Improvements

…category. As I write this (results change often as sales data is processed on Amazon), here’s what I can see on the front page results…

• An organizational book – “Organize Now! A Week-by-Week Guide to Simplify Your Space and Your Life”.
• A gardening / lifestyle book – “The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!”
• A parenting book – “Parenting From the Inside Out”.
• A bicycling book – “The Bicycling Guide to Complete Bicycle Maintenance and Repair: For Road and Mountain Bikes”.
• A home design book – “Downtown Chic: Designing Your Dream Home: From Wreck to Ravishing”.
• A lifestyle / survivalist book – “When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency”.
• Another lifestyle / gardening book – “The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City”.
• Another organizational book – “Organizing from the Inside Out, Second Edition: The Foolproof System For Organizing Your Home, Your Office and Your Life”.
• Yet another organizational book – “Living Organized: Proven Steps for a Clutter-Free and Beautiful Home”.

…and a few others. Again, this should get the ideas flowing. Here’s a breakdown (of the more generalized) niche markets that have hot selling products right now when looking at the above results…

• Getting Organized.
• Gardening & Lifestyle.
• Parenting.
• Bicycling.
• Home Design.

…and it seems the getting organized niche is very hot, having 3 best selling products of this type in the first page of results. Lifestyle stuff also seems popular.

Of course, don’t just limit yourself to the first page of results.

You should troll through the top 30-100 for limitless ideas. And of course, you want to drill down to as specific a category as possible to get a more narrow range of products i.e. we could go from here to the “Home Repair” subcategory.

The idea here is to go through the top 30-100 results and start grouping the book topics into categories like I’ve done above. When we do this we end up with a very clear picture as to what the very in demand information broader niche markets are.

In addition to drilling down like this and sorting via sales popularity, we can also add another filter, and that is customer average review / rating.

If you look down the left hand navigational structure, you’ll eventually come across an “Avg. Customer Review” filter. Here you can additionally select to display only products with 1+, 2+, 3+, or 4+ average customer ratings out of a total of 5…

If you select “4 & Up” you’ll get a list of products in this category that are both the best selling and highest rated products. Products that customers really like.

The results can be similar, but often times you’ll find a few variations in there.

This additional filter is more useful if you actually plan on selling products as an affiliate of Amazon.com (it would pay to sell products with high customer satisfaction to reduce refund rates) although it is very insightful data none the less.

Once you’ve gone through these motions you’ll start to get a good feel for the more popular markets.

For example, the highest percentage of books for sale out of the top 100 results (in the How To & Home Improvements category)  might be loosely lumped into the “Getting Organized” category.

If that’s something you want to investigate further, you’ll then also want to take note of the specific topics these books focus on as well.

They might be related to…

• Organizing your home.
• Organizing a home office.
• Organizing a garden shed.
• Organizing your child’s day.
• Organizing a home schooling session.

…and so forth.

Now these are very specific markets that we want to investigate further.

Again, we can do this for any category and/or product type in Amazon. There are literally thousands.

Once we have some nicely defined niche market ideas like the above, we can then move onto the keyword research & competition phrase and start to look at the specific keyword terms people are using in the search engines to find these types of products & information. That however is a topic for another day.

Side Note…

I’ll just mention here, that if you are inclined to operate as an affiliate of Amazon & sell physical products, this is an excellent way to see what brands are selling better for specific product types. For example, if we drill all the way down to…

…as I write this…

• 17 out of the 24 best selling TV’s are Samsung.
• 19 are LCD TV’s rather than Plasma.
• Most have 50 inch sized screens or higher.
• Etc etc.

…this is excellent information to know when it comes to selecting the products you’re going to promote. And of course you can work out the averages for the top 100 best selling products of a specific type to get even more accurate data.

All very cool stuff.

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