Finding and marketing niche products on Amazon

Niche products can be fantastic earners on FBA if you select the right products. A good niche product has huge benefits;

•      you’ll have less competition,

•      with a more defined audience, marketing becomes easier,

•      marketing is cheaper because you can use long-tail keywords,

•      and you can build a strong brand identity fast.

Investor Warren Buffett loves what he calls ‘wide moat’ businesses, that is, companies that have an advantage their competitors find difficult to overcome. A good niche product range builds a ‘moat’ against the competition by serving a particular customer base or need.

One good approach to finding niche products is to think of a niche buyer, a particular buyer segment. For instance, you might look at cat owners, then narrow down further; pedigree cat owners? Cat dads? Multiple-cat families? Cat owners who are geeks? You can see how the coffee market already breaks down into buy-it-from-Walmart, quite-like-my-beans, and serious-coffee-geek, and that now applies to French presses and espresso machines targeted at the more serious geek, as well as to the coffee blends.

A niche market you might not have thought of addressing is that of people with hand problems, from arthritis to carpal tunnel syndrome. From pens to cutlery to keyboards, offer a stylish product that’s more comfortable to use, and you’ll have a loyal customer base. (For some reason, most currently available products for these users are hospital-issue-ugly.)

Or you can look at a top level product and narrow it down. For instance, start with soap or cosmetics; narrow that down to cruelty-free, natural ingredients, vegan, ayurvedic… Or you could start with dog toys, and focus on creating the most indestructible products for dogs with a serious chewing problem.

Searching online communities is a great way to find niches. For instance, if you look at reddit.com/r/fountainpens you’ll find fountain pen users’ big desires are flexible nibs for writing copperplate script, and ‘EDC’ (everyday carry) pens. Those might not be niches that make sense for you, but you’ll also find good pen storage is a big need for this group. Maybe pen-satchels, pen-friendly laptop cases, and so on could be a niche worth investigating.

Then get on to Google Keyword Planner and start entering relevant terms, to see what people are searching for. You might be surprised at the directions this can take. Keep digging. It’s a rabbit hole you could fall down and keep googling for days!

Once you’ve got your ideas, it’s time to qualify them. Is this a niche that’s already dominated by another supplier, for instance? If so, strike a line through it. Is the product regulated? Is the product within your budget to source? (If you’re short on funds, don’t try to compete in a $100-per-unit space.)

Look at the total sales volumes of similar products on Amazon; for instance, if you want to focus on cat dads, look at different generic cat-related products as your guide. If those sales aren’t enough to justify the investment, strike that idea too. On the other hand if you see there’s a general market several times bigger than your niche target, you might be in the money.

If you find the right niche products you already have a good idea of how to market them, and which customers to market to. Your marketing is going to be cheaper than marketing a mass-market product, because you can focus on long tail keywords, which the big brands typically don’t bid for. Instead of “soap” you have “vegan cruelty-free soap” (or “indestructible dog toy”, or “RSI-friendly cutlery”, whatever).

You’ll also know which specific influencers you need to engage. For instance, if I was setting up a fountain pen storage business, I’d be able to identify the leading bloggers and Youtubers in from the Reddit community, and they would get samples before I launched.

But it’s important that you search for niche products the right way. It’s always a two-stage process. First, you’ll want to find as many interesting niches as you can; and then you’ll need to look at each one and see whether it works out. If you try to short-circuit that process, you run the risk of picking a niche that doesn’t really exist, or that’s just too small to make you money.

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