In the past when talking about creating a Niche store (BANS), one of the things I have emphasized is the importance of finding a domain/niche that will be successful with BANS.   If I’m going to encourage people to give BANS a try, I need to help set them up for success, right?   Here are some things to think about when trying to find the right niche for a BANS site.

Once you’ve got the BANS software, it is time to find a couple niches to start using it.  If you were to target a niche to advertise furniture, cars, homes, or other large items you will have a much harder time finding success.  This is because people often won’t buy that kind of stuff from eBay due to the insane shipping charges or other complications that can arise.   Now, I realize they are sold there and people do buy them, but there is a very limited market for them and with BANS you are going to find more success by converting a lot of smaller sales rather than a few large sales to make your money. 

I’ve also found that trying to build a BANS store around a service will also make it more difficult to find success.   You can find eBooks and other things on eBay, but there probably aren’t a lot of people looking to buy that kind of stuff.   You’ll want to save these domains for your keyword sniping and other affiliate marketing niche sites that you will be creating (remember, we want to diversify, not put all our eggs in the BANS basket).   In my next post, I’ll go into more detail about affiliate marketing with services and how best to approach this. 

So, how do you find a good BANS niche?   Here are a few things to consider when doing your research:

• Scouting Niche Competition - When trying to find a niche to target, I use a tool called Micro Niche Finder.  It has a low cost associated with it, but it does a great job of helping me find those niches that aren’t being properly filled.  You simply enter a keyword and it gives you a variety of similar keywords.  You can then use it to check on how much search results there are for a keyword, how much competition there is, etc.    If you can find a niche that gets traffic but doesn’t have much competition, you’ll be in the top few search results right away.   This is a free way to get traffic to your BANS stores. 
• Keyword-Rich Domain Names – If you can get your niche’s keywords in the domain name, this will go a long way to help your domain get a good search engine ranking.  It also helps if the domain is 6 months to 1 year old before establishing a site.   This helps build trust from the search engines.   Please keep in mind that some keywords may have trademarks associated with them and could put you at legal risk, so you may want to do a trademark search first before registering.  
• eBay Search Results – We talked above about trying to find a niche that converts well with eBay.   How many of your item are being sold on eBay right now.  How many categories can you add to your website?  For example, for a toy site, you could add pages for clothing associated with the toys, trading cards, action figures comic books, or whatever else.   You may want to get more specific and target one of those areas, or try to get a good domain where you can try to sell all 3 areas. 

Those 3 should get you started.   Once you’ve got your niches researched and your domains registered, the BANS store can be completed in less than an hour.   Sometimes though, the research before hand can be a little time consuming.   Remember that you are planting a seed that should pay off in the long run, not a week or month from now, so research and find the right niches.   Finding success early will lead to finding success often, but finding failure early could lead to a missed out opportunity.