Finding a good tiny niche is extremely important with the new Ebay pay-per-click model. Besides EPN, having a good tiny niche will benefit you with other affiliate programs. When you have a good tiny niche you can essentially “own” that market. And yes, “tiny niche” can also mean it is a tiny sliver of the market. But being able to dominate a tiny sliver can be much more successful than attempting to compete for the entire pie.
As in any successful venture, you first must start with research. When researching a tiny niche I suggest finding a happy medium between too much research and too little. You want to find something you can act on sooner than later. You don’t want to spend hours upon hours doing research for something that ends up being a flop.
First, I’ll explain to you how to do the boot-strap method. Otherwise known as “I have a lot more time than money and can’t afford to spend much to speed this process along” method. To research your tiny niche you can use a combination of Google searches, Ebay Pulse and Google’s Free Keyword Tool. Then I’ll tell you about the tool I use to really help speed up my research.
Come up with an idea for a tiny niche site. I have a whole notebook full of random niche site ideas that pop into my head. They may come from reading something in a magazine, personal experience with a good product or even perusing the isles at Wal-Mart! If you’re stuck for niche ideas, take a look at Ebay Pulse. Just go to Ebay, click on “site map” (I believe it’s on the top right of the page), and then find Ebay Pulse on the list and click on it. Here you’ll be able to see the most popular searches on Ebay for various products. Pick a category and keep on clicking down into it to get some ideas. If it is a popular searched for item on Ebay, it should also be a popular item that is searched for on the web.
Another good thing to do is to take a look at how many of the items are actually selling. To do this you’ll want to click on Advanced Search, put in your niche keywords and check off the “completed listings” box. This will return a list of the items that have sold and not sold. You’ll want to make sure you see more GREEN than red. If there is a lot more red you may want to forgo this particular niche and move on to the next possible one.
I decided to do a search on Ebay for “dog training collar” (completed listings). Now, about 20 of the 50 or so ended auctions on the first page are GREEN. That’s almost 50% that have sold. Yes, I’d like to see a lot more green – but I still think this could be a good tiny niche. And there have been 3,500 listings – definitely plenty of products to promote.
So now you have a few tiny niche ideas go and visit the Google Keywords Tool. You can just do a search in google for it and it’ll be your first search result. Put in your first niche idea and take a look at the results you get.
I put in the term “dog training collar” which returned a “global monthly serach volume” of 60,000 – not bad – but I wonder what my competition would be for this niche on google. I open google.com in another tab/window and do a search for “dog training collar” in quotes and it returns around 130,000 results. That’s not too bad. But then I take a look at my competition for the niche. I check out the Page Rank of the first page of results. I have SeoQuake installed on my browser to automatically bring up site stats in google results. Add up all the Page Ranks, divide by 3 and the average PR comes out to be 3.3. I’m taking a look at the Page Rank so I can see how easy/hard it will be for me to break into the niche. 3.3 is in the middle – I honestly would prefer to find something in the 0-2 range.
So, it’s back to the Google Adwords Keyword tool I go and take a look at the keywords list it gave me. Perusing the list I see that “small dog training collar” gets around 1,600 searches a month – yes, it is much less than the 60,000 for “dog training collar” but I believe this could be the “tiny slice” of the pie that I’m looking for. Remember, I’d rather be the king of a tiny slice, than another minion competing for the whole pie.
Popping over to Google.com again, I do a search for “small dog trianing collar” and go through the same process…Results=1,870, Average PR=1.3 
I am liking this one. Some may think that it is too tiny of a niche, I think it is just right. Low competition, somewhat popular search, items that sell on Ebay – works for me. And, when you take a look at the estimated average “cost per click” in the google keyword tool results, it is $2.24 cents! If you drive traffic to your sites using Adsense, that $2.24 might not be so fabulous – BUT – if you look at it from the perspective of earning money by having google adsense ads on your site – cha-ching!
In my opinion, a tiny niche like “small dog training collar” is one that can be very successfull with the new Quality Click Pricing model on Ebay. Unfortunately, SmallDogTrainingCollar.com is already taken (not by me). I find it interesting, that site does not show up on the first page of search results for it’s key term. After poking around the site for a bit I see that is because it has virtually NO original written content. It is nothing more than a site with ads on it for individual products. It doesn’t give the visitor any info about dog collars at all. With the addition of a few good articles and a paragraph or two of content on each product page, this site could be a real winner.
SmallDogTrainingCollar.info and .net ARE available. You could get each of them for under $5 (with FREE private registration) over at my favorite place to purchase domain names – 1and1. And, by the way, I know everyone says you should stick with .com domain names. But, honestly, I’m earning money with my .info and .net domains so I don’t see any problem with using them. PLUS – they are 1/2 the price or less than the cost of a .com. If you can find a way to work the “info” or “net” part into the title of the site that helps with people not automatically typing in a .com. for instance…. Small Dog Training Collar INFO.
And I promised to tell you about the tool I now use (almost daily) to research tiny niches. This tool saves me HOURS upon hours of time. It brings in all sorts of nifty information into one awesome screen. It brings in the google keyword tool info, comeptition info…etc. PLUS with one click you can look up affiliate products for the item, find articles to use to promote the items and much more. And…here is the ABSOLUTE BEST PART….there is this magic little link to press to get the “SOC” – Strenght of Competition. In just a few seconds the “SOC” will be either red, yellow or green. GREEN means you have found what could very well be an AWESOME Tiny Niche to dominate It’s also useful for finding long-tail keywords to use on your site. Honestly, this tool does so much that I’m sure I haven’t used it to it’s full capabilities yet. Another cool feature is that you can save your searches and save selected results as projects. That is very useful for me when I, on a whim, have a tiny niche idea. I just pop open this tool, do a few quick searches and save them and they’re ready for me when I’m ready to tackle that niche. When I first started to use it there were a collection of videos I watched that showed how different people use this tool to quickly and easily find good Tiny Niches. You can watch those same videos for free by going here. By the way, this fabulous tool is called the Micro Niche Finder.
So that’s all I have to say about that. I hope this post helped you a bit in your hunt for good tiny niches. If you have any questions, please let me know – post ‘em in the comments section and I’ll respond ASAP.
