Thalasar Ventures

In the first two parts of this series I showed you the tools that I used create Best Buys Zone UK and how you can create a similar site your self. This post covers something pretty important in making this work, namely your niche, monetizing your site and a bit on marketing said site.

In the first two parts of this series I showed you the tools that I used create Best Buys Zone UK and how you can create a similar site your self. This post covers something pretty important in making this work, namely your niche, monetizing your site and a bit on marketing said site.

Remember my post on Pagerank? Associate-O-Matic offers you tools for a wide variety of stores and your tempation would be cover as many markets as possible right? Best Buys Zone UK is a broad shopping category and was designed as such. It also has opening Pagerank of 6 so it should get indexed in short order (at least it should). For your shopping site you should plan to focus on something specific. There are some very broad niches I would avoid. For example, given Amazon’s domainance I would completely avoid books, music and DVDs. I am seriously thinking about pulling DVDs off the current site. I have already pulled books. There is no way a small web site publisher can compete on those broad categories. If you chose to do these make sure you travel well down the hierachy and chose a specific subcategory and I mean specific. Your category shouldn’t have more than 1,000 products in it. This should help with targeting, marketing and more specifically it will help do better in the organic search results. For example instead of a toy store, do a Webkinz plush toy store (Just to name something incredibly popular with people over at Early Miser.

So focus on your niche like a laser. Here’s just a few ideas. I am putting these since they also have a great presence on Ebay. Ebay is one of the primary sources of revenue in this comparison shopping engine.

• Consumables – Face it modern office equipment has a bunch of consumables.
• Cables – People lose cables all the time – especially cell phone cables. Just mark sure you stick to specific type – cell phone, printer etc.
• Coffee makers – Hmm delicious coffee.
• Headphones – Lost your IPOD headphone? Broke them? Try these Sennheiser ear buds

I hope it’s clearer how to find a niche. I like finding ones that are frequently replaced mainly because people search for replacements and they are often looking for them online at a good price.

Your monetization paths with this application are clear. Amazon, Ebay, Adsense and Shopping.com provide clear monetization possibilities. You can also add Auction Ads. Here is the code for using Auction Ads and Associate-O-Matic.

For those of you wondering
Good Luck and if you have questions, please contact me.

Posts in this series.
How to build an cool shopping application. No programming required. Part One.
How to build an cool shopping application. No programming required. Part Two.