In this post, you will learn how to use eBay® to find your own profitable niche.

eBay is my favorite place to start when I need a fresh idea. I have seen niche marketing courses mentioning this method, but none of them outlined it deep enough. Usually these courses tell you to go to eBay Pulse and look around. That’s not how it’s done. I’m going to show you how I personally use eBay Pulse to locate a highly profitable niche market in no time. You will be required to login to your eBay account for this tutorial.

Step 1 - Getting into eBay

If you don’t have an eBay account for some reason, please go sign-up for an eBay account here.

After getting an account, please log-in using your account name. - This step required for advanced search you will use later

Please go to http://pulse.ebay.com

Step 2 - eBay Pulse Overview

The eBay Pulse is a little that eBay lets us use for free. How neat. It dynamically creates a list of popular searches, stores, and products. Not only you are able to see the most popular searched terms from the entire eBay market, but you can also refine the result by categories and their sub-categories.

There are more tools you shouldn’t miss: largest stores, and most watched items. To learn more about them, please refer to eBay’s help page.

Step 3 - Browsing for a Niche Market

When I search for a niche market, I try to find one where an average transaction in the market is $100 minimum. If you want to earn money from a niche market, you need to find one where money is being spent already. You don’t want to go to a market and try to educate them to open their pockets. It’s just not efficient. Have that in mind, let’s do our initial search.

The first page you will see is eBay’s most popular searches. Here is a screenshot on the right.

Right now, ps3 is very hot. But I’m not really interested in the most popular search terms. I want a less known niche market with stable demand. This is my personal preference and it works for me. So I skip this window, and go to the very bottom of the page and find “See more eBay Pulse Categories…” link.

Now, you need to use your sense (yeah, no magic formulas here) and go through some categories on the left column. This is where your marketing experience really count. You need to spend some time and repeat the process which I’m going to teach you in a bit. You can follow your passion or interest testing a topic here.

For example, my previous researches show that there are lots of money exchanged in telescope market. There are people wanting to upgrade every couple of years. This creates enormous market for both sellers and buyers.

So I’m going to click on “Cameras & Photo” from the left column, which brings me even more categories on the right side. From this point, I’m going to choose “Binoculars & Telescopes” as my initial search term.

Step 4 - Going Deep

At this point, you can try to click its sub-categories, but I’m going to see what people want in the binocular & telescope markets. When I click on the link, it shows top 10 searched terms in this particular market (screen shot on the left). Number 1 is binoculars, which is too broad. But from number 2 to 10, I can use them. They are brand specific, which is very helpful to me. I now know which brands are popular in this category. I don’t recognize the brands listed here except two of them. These are new to me. Now that I’m equipped with my selections, I’m going to dig even deeper.

Step 5 - Going Even Deeper

Knowing that there are demands for certain brands in the binocular & telescope market, I’m going to find which models & accessories are in demand. In order to accomplish this, I’m going to use eBay’s advanced search tool. But first of all, I’m going to click on “orion” which will bring up items related to this term on the right.

The next step is VERY important. So please read carefully. Click on the “Advanced Search” link (screen shot on the left) and on the next page, find a little square check box on the second line. (screen shot on the bottom)

Then press “Search”. You will see filtered search result.

Please sort by “Price: highest first”

At the time of writing this, the top completed auction is at $660 (telescope) and the lowest is at $6.50 (moon filter). And some accessories are sold at $300 - $350, which is a green signal to me.

Step 6 - Ready for Testing

Now, I have some healthy data in my hand, let’s review.

• Cameras & Photo
  • Binocular & telescope market
    • Orion
      • 80mm Orion ED Apochromatic Refractor sold at $660

When you dig 3 levels deep, you usually end up with pretty narrow niche. In this case, I can broaden-up and select telescopes as my main niche topic, but if I am to go in this market to make money fast, I’m going to specialize in 1-3 top brands only. With this information, I can do bunch of things. I can create a mini-site, product review site, or start a blog.

Since the purpose of this post is to teach you how to use eBay pulse the right way for researching a niche market, I’m not going to explain how to monetize your niche market at this point.

Bonus

Before I end this post, I want to tell you some ways to make money today in this particular niche. Ready?

The following terms returned no results from Adwords. (yeah, even broad search)

• 80mm Orion ED Apochromatic Refractor - Zero
• Orion ED Apochromatic Refractor - Zero
• Orion Apochromatic Refractor - shows two, but doesn’t matter
• Orion Apochromatic - one ad from a smart Amazon affiliate
• Orion Reflector - again, one ad from Amazon affiliate
• Orion - four non-related ads.

And if you head over to the Orion’s website, you will find even more products with much higher price and repeat the process. There are thousands of products / markets you can find using the eBay method. Some of these products are selling for over $50,000. My favorite categories to explore are the construction category and machinery parts area.

Final Words…

With these terms, you can sell this exact product through Amazon’s or eBay’s affiliate program. You can use Google Adwords, or other PPC programs like Yahoo Publisher Network, or MSN AdCenter to advertise this product and collect the commission. Easy enough? I just gave you away a niche topic. Will it be profitable or not? only the testing can tell you.

But if you’ve followed the steps here, I’m pretty sure you will find your own niche market very soon. I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Comments are welcomed.

The Fast Track

I want to show you a great piece of software that I personally use to do the eBay method. This software helps you do the exact steps outlined above in the tutorial much faster. (Plus it helps you get more valuable data)

Hot Item Finder can help you..

• Find all the hot items on eBay from current and completed auctions
• Analyze EVERY eBay category for hot items
• Generate the TOP 100 popular search terms from each main category
• Find the hit counts for all the hot selling items
• Search eBay’s online keyword database for the best words to put in your auction titles and descriptions

Find screen shots and learn what else can be done with Hot Item Finder

Post Information

February 16th, 2007
Written by Bo Bang

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