Part 2 of What To Do With Low-Paying CPC Keywords

In my last post, I showed you how you could breathe new life into low-paying CPC keywords, but also had low search competition. In that post, I had suggested building an eBay store on a domain that you own. But there was something else that I wanted to show you that could help maximize your profits with such a store.

Let’s say you’re looking for men’s watches in Google’s Keyword Tool. The CPCs are pretty low, at least, they’re too low for me if I were thinking of creating a site for the sole purpose of generating Adsense income. But the search levels look pretty good (see image below; click to enlarge). You’ll notice the one I highlighted in yellow.

Now copy and paste that keyword phrase, “breitling mens watches”, into the search form on eBay and do it under “All Categories”. You get a lot of results, don’t you? Let’s narrow that down a bit.

You’ll need an eBay account to do the following (it’s free).

• Click the “Completed Listings” in the left sidebar.
• Next, click on one of the selections in the Location section of the left sidebar. For our purposes, click on “US Only”.

What exactly are we looking for?

Okay, that narrows it down a bit, but it’s still a lot to go through. Plus, and more importantly, it’s not showing us what we’re hunting for, which is the prices in green off to the right. Green means the product has been sold; red means it wasn’t. In short, the more green we see on the screen, the more green we get in our pocket when making a sale on our blog. Follow me so far? Good.

Just for grins, click on the “Luxury” link in the “Type” section of the left sidebar. As of this writing, it shows that there are 173 products within that subcategory.

Ahhh, that’s better! See those green price tags? And they’re quite hefty, wouldn’t you say? The bigger the final sale, the bigger our commission, so let’s scroll down some more to get a feel for things.

Okay, so there are definitely more items that have not sold (noted by the red), than ones that have (the green ones). But I wouldn’t get too discouraged by this because of the final sales figures. At those prices, you could make a decent commission on just a few sales per week.

As you go through the completed listings, take note of the titles of the products that have been sold. Are there any name brands that you can spot? Maybe you can tell which brands are selling more than others. Or perhaps there’s another descriptor there that you can detect pattern in. Those are the things you want to pick up on. Why? Because that’s how you’re going to refine the products you put on your eBay store.

I should make it clear that I’m NOT talking about creating a store on eBay. Instead, this is about you creating your very own eBay store on your very own domain name using the products I suggested in my previous post (BANS or phpBay Pro). These tools give you the ability to filter out products you don’t want and end up with a narrowly defined product line — the kind that sells! And how do we know they sell? Because we just narrowed our search on eBay as described above.

We’re not through doing our research though, so go back and filter on other subcategories. Instead of filtering on “Luxury”, try something else like “Quartz”. How does the green on the screen look for that one? Do you see any patterns that would indicate a profitable niche?

When you build your store

Regardless of which product you use to build your store, you’ll want to structure it in such a way to that makes it intuitive to the user. So just like we narrowed our search in the example above, build your categories from the top down — large to small.

So if you noted during your research that sales are high in the “luxury” subcategory, maybe go one step further and break that down by brand names or prices. Then start again with another subcategory and work your way down from there. Not all subcategories need to be broken down. Just use your common sense and think of how a user might shop.

The key is to make it easy for them to find what they want. Giving them the same information in more ways than one could help solve that.