Amazon Category Exploration

Many Amazon affiliates will begin their search by hunting for a main keyword phrase or domain name, but I actually like to use a strategy that is a bit backwards: I hunt for Amazon products first.

Exact match domain names can give you a slight edge in search engine rankings (where the domain name is the same as your main keyword phrase). However, the strength of these domains has diminished over time. As a result, the domain name should not be the deciding factor of whether you target a niche or not - the niche and the products in the niche should decide that. If you can get an exact match domain for a good niche, then that is an added bonus.

Amazon Shop By Department

To get started, simply visit the home page of Amazon. I'll be using Amazon.com throughout this tutorial, but feel free to use one of the other Amazon sites if you will be trying to build a site to target consumers that are more likely to buy from those sites (ie, someone in the UK would be much more likely to buy from Amazon.co.uk - some products niche may be unique to those areas, so they would make excellent choices for a site using that Amazon locale).

In the top-left of their website, you'll see their logo and the words Shop by Department below it. Under it are many of the main categories on the Amazon website. This is pictured below.

Simply hover your mouse over one of these categories to show even more related categories. I'm going to hover over the Home, Garden & Tools category (pictured below).

If you do not know what product niche you want to target with the site you are going to build, this simple interface can help to give you some initial ideas to explore.

The most common dilemma that people have at this point is whether to build a site revolves around a product or niche that is already familiar to them. Unfortunately, there is not a simple answer to provide for you here because it will heavily depend on the type of product knowledge you already possess.

In general, if you want to build a site about products you already know, you will want to target something that is highly specialized in some way.

For example, basically everyone in the USA might feel like they are fairly knowledgeable about modern televisions. However, that would actually be a bad niche choice because of the vast amount of products in the niche and the high competition because of the common nature of the product.

By comparison, if you have some advance knowledge about a specific type of television that is brand new on the market, this might be more realistic because of the age of the product (less competition initially) and it's specialty (not everyone will know about these new products yet, so they will be looking for information about them).

The key is to get as specific as you possibly can while still leaving yourself enough room to build a website around the idea and teach people something useful about the products and/or the niche.

For this tutorial, I am going to look in the Bedding & Bath category found under the Home, Garden & Tools department.

Even more categories can be found from the Full Store Directory link at the bottom of that list. This page actually provides a full list of the main categories on the site.

This link takes you directly to the Full Store Directory on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/site-directory/

On the Bedding & Bath category page, there are a number of things worth pointing out. On the main part of the page, you have a listing of featured categories: 

There are even more listings of bestselling brands along with numerous product types listed for each.

Towards the bottom of the page, there listings of Bedding & Bath Markdown items, for people looking to drive sales with bargains/discounts.

There is also a listing of various Bedding types from Pinzon by Amazon.com. This is Amazon's bedding brand that is exclusive to their website.

Whenever you can find these products in a niche that seems like it should have decent demand but not an excessive amount of competition, they can be worth looking into more.

Amazon will often have these products manufactured by some of the leading makers of the same products for other brands, except Amazon will sell the products for less because their operating costs are lower than traditional retailers. They are also good quality products because Amazon pays attention to fine details and has their products manufactured by top companies that already have experience making those products.

I am actually going to go into the Down Bedding category under Pinzon for this tutorial, but I want to discuss one more thing before I proceed with that.

On the left-hand side of the page, you'll find a long list of menus that are excellent to use to help you find the products you are looking to find. At the top (pictured below), there is a list of subcategories that are available.

If you continue to scroll down the page, you'll also find ways that you can browse products based on a variety of options (they vary depending on what category you are viewing), brands, price points, average review ratings, and more.

One of my favorite here is the New Arrivals section (pictured below). Go here to find products that may be brand new to Amazon, which could present an excellent targeting opportunity because of low competition.

The categories and other options available to you here will change as you navigate through categories. With the above example, there are nearly 200,000 products that have been released in this category in the last 90 days. You could try browsing through some of them, but it would be really hard to find something specific here. However, you can drill-down into subcategories to lower the product numbers to a more realistic number that you could browse.

Also take note of the Sort By drop-down box in the top-right of search results. Use this to change how Amazon sorts products to help you find what you want. I commonly use this to look at low and/or high priced products in the niche and to find the highest rated/most popular/newest items.