Remember, there’s always going to be one particular niche that you know 10x better than anyone else. It could be Pianos, Golf Equipment or Trading Cards for a particular game. Use your knowledge in that realm to build a site so you can get a feel for the whole process.
You can see my results for last month with this site, almost no new ARCU’s which is a little disappointing. But then again there’s certain niches that perform better for signups (think impulse purchases, music equipment really isn’t an impulse purchase).
What you need for this technique
- Web Hosting - I recommend Hostican ($6.95 / month for 200GB & 2,500GB Bandwidth)
- A Domain Name - Quick Tip: Aged Domains kick ass with this technique. Clickmojo offer a 3 day free trial of their expired domain names service. Hostess do the cheapest .com.au domains for $25AU.
- Wordpress
- PhpBay Pro ($39)
- Endless supplies of Niches
It’s not vital that you have all of the above, but that’s exactly what I’m using. There are other free creative ways to come up with niches if you read some of my earlier posts. An expired domain isn’t necessary, however you will get quicker results. If you’re a bit on the lazier side & don’t want to worry about the whole Wordpress setup that i’m showing you then you can check out BANS (Build a Niche Store), it does something similar, quicker. But it’s less customisable (and costs $97).
What advantage does my technique have over BANS? well for a start each product has it’s own unique page, whereas bans works more on categories. We’re also forking out $58 less (which you can use for hosting).
Getting Started
Firstly you’ll need to install Wordpress on the domain name you’ve picked. If you’ve chosen Hostican they’ll give you your first domain free, they also have Fantistico which allows for an easy 1 click install of Wordpress. If not, you’re on your own with the installation I’m afraid.
Plugins you’ll need (these are all uploaded to the wp-content/plugins/ folder):
PhpBay Pro (commercial): This plugin is the brains of the whole site, it pulls products from the eBay Category RSS feed & parses them onto your page within Wordpress. It’s updated constantly so the page content is always fresh. You can choose products by name, category & you can also set negative keywords to filter out.
SEO Title Tag (free): This plugin allows us to set unique page titles for each post that we make.
Top Level Categories (free): This awesome plugin removes the annoying /category/ part from the Wordpress permalinks.
Sort Categories by Title (free): Wordpress normally sorts things in categories by Date, this allows you to sort everything alphabetically which works much better for a shop type layout.
Different Posts per Page (free): You can set the number of posts to display per page with this plugin, I normally set it at around 25-50 on the homepage & set it at unlimited for categories (that way your products are never further than 2 levels from the homepage).
Recent Posts (free): This plugin allows you to list your most recently added products.
Choosing your Niche
Analysing what’s selling well on eBay is a great way to find a niche. Check out the best selling artists & the pulse for awesome ideas.
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