Finding Your Market Niche With Empire Flippers Marketplace

I think you'll agree with me when I say:

When you’re just starting out with a new Amazon niche website, the first thing you have to do is identify your market.

Well, it turns out there are a few tricks you can use to dramatically increase your odds of finding an actual profitable niche to build your Amazon niche website around.

In today's post, I want to show you one particular method that I've used that I really think is quite clever.

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Identifying Profitable Markets

To understand what I mean by a profitable market, let’s take a look at an example.

We’ll use Spencer’s famous survival knife case study. Spencer ended up landing on “best survival knife” as his main keyword, but that's not the market. It's just one particular type of product in an overall product-category. So what is the actual market?

For lack of a better term, his market was “survival gear.”

If you’re in the survival gear market, there are several different products you could promote, not just survival knives, as you can see above. You've got backpacks, flashlights, tents, rifles, and a lot more.

Want to see an example of an actual site in the survival gear market, the site from that screenshot above? Click here.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s see how we can implement some real life, actionable tactics that actually identify profitable markets. We want to see actual examples of Amazon niche sites that have made good monthly revenue.

And it all starts with Empire Flippers.

How to Find Profitable Markets Using Empire Flippers

Most of you are already familiar with Empire Flippers, but for those that aren't, they’re a website brokerage firm where they serve as the middleman between people looking to buy and sell (mostly niche) websites. I have heard nothing but positive experiences from everyone who's used them.

They do a great deal of due diligence on the websites ahead of time to make sure they’re legitimate, and then post them for sale on their marketplace, typically for a sales price of 20x  your last three monthly earnings.

So if you have a niche site that’s earning $500 per month over the past 90 days, Empire Flippers would typically list it for $10,000.

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How does this help you? Well, think about it:

If you’re looking to start a niche site in a profitable market, what better way to find that market than to look at sites that have already proven to be profitable?

Because that’s what this all about, right?

These days, it can take anywhere between 4-6 MONTHS to even begin ranking a niche site in Google, and this assumes you’re doing everything right. And then there’s the additional time after that before you start earning commissions.

And in order to get your site set up properly with good content, a premium theme, and some well-written reviews, you’re also probably looking at a couple of hundred dollars in start-up costs.

So you’re spending valuable time and money getting your site off the ground to rank. But what good is it to rank a site that isn’t actually profitable? Remember, ranking a site is only half the battle: you have to choose a good market first. Don't waste your precious time and money trying to rank unprofitable niches.

And what makes a good market is one that has the potential to actually make money. I realize this sounds incredibly obvious, but you’d be surprised at the number of people who rush into a market without making sure first that they can actually make money off the products in the niche. Some markets are profitable (see image above), and some aren't.

So wouldn’t it be nice if you could identify PROVEN profitable niche markets before you launched your site?

In this post, I’m going to show you how I use Empire Flippers to zero in on markets with product-categories that have already proven to be profitable.

Note: this should go without saying,  but the point of this exercise is to find examples of profitable niches to use as inspiration for your own sites, NOT to copy other sites, or even worse, try to negative-SEO someone's site. Alright?

The first thing we’re going to do is head on over to the Empire Flippers website and click on the Marketplace tab.

Scroll a bit down the page and you will begin to see the current listings: these are sites that have been listed, but haven't sold yet.

As I'm writing this post, there are currently 14 sites available for sale. You can click on the links all the way to the left to view the details of each site. Now, 14 sites isn't a terrible sample size if we're trying to find a profitable site to model our market after, but it's not a huge amount to work with either.

Checking for Completed Listings

But if you keep scrolling down the page, you'll see a section of site listings that are grayed out a bit, because they have already been sold. But Empire Flippers allows you to still see the details for each of these as well.

Now we have a much larger sample size to analyze. Scroll down the page even further, until you get to the "show entries" drop-down.

Change the number from 25 to 100, and then scroll back up the page to the top of the listings. This is where we can sort the listings by monetization method. For this post, as you could have guessed, we are interested in listings that are monetized by Amazon.

Now that we're sorted by monetization method, we can easily see all the sites that have been sold as Amazon affiliate niche sites, how much revenue they were earning each month, and how much each site ended up selling for. Yes, that first listing you see is an Amazon niche site that sold for more than $200,000.

There are several listings here — from just this screenshot alone we have nine listings that were earning between $1,400 and $10,200 per month — but I want to zero in on a couple in particular so that we can establish an overarching product-category theme across a few successful sites.

Finding a Common Theme

For obvious reasons, Empire Flippers does not reveal the URL or name for most of the sites for sale in their marketplace. And that's fine, we don't need the actual site in order to brainstorm the specific product-categories that we can potentially use to build a niche site around.

Let's take a look at this completed listing here. 

We can glean a few things from the posting: it's in the "health and fitness" niche, which is somewhat helpful information, but more specifically we can see that it primarily deals with "exercise equipment reviews".  

And most importantly, it was an extremely profitable product-category: the site sold for nearly $80,000, and was doing on average almost $4,000 per month in revenue. Keep this in mind as we move forward.

Let's have a look at another completed listing, here.

Again, we have a listing that's in the "health and fitness" niche, and what do you know, this site also deals with fitness equipment.

This site was also very profitable: it sold for nearly $60,000 after doing more than $3,000 per month in revenue.

Let's keep going and check out another completed listing, here.

This site was doing more than $900 per month in revenue before being sold for more than $18,000.

As you can see, we have another "health and fitness" niche that covers exercise equipment. And you can be sure that content is centered around exercise equipment reviews.

Alright, I'm pretty sure you get my point by now, but let's look at one last example, here.

We have yet another site in the "health and fitness" niche that's built around exercise equipment.

This site was doing more than $500 per month and eventually sold for close to $11,000.

What Can I Do With This Information?

So this analysis tells us a couple of important things.

This is actionable information that you can use to your advantage.

The best advice I can give you is to simply go into the Empire Flippers marketplace and start looking around on your own.

Look for common themes among the higher-earning sites. This should at least give you a couple of good examples to start moving forward with.

What This Information Doesn't Tell Us

What we have up until this point is a terrific start. Instead of blindly and randomly trying to brainstorm which market to enter, we now have real-life examples of sites in specific product-categories that have done extremely well. Sites that have generated actual, substantial revenue.

That said, we still have some work to do. Here's what we still don't know:​

This is a great first step, but we do still need to know the information above before we can start building out our site. 

So stay tuned for my next post, where we tackle Amazon product-categories, product-types, and individual products that you can target specifically, and how I use the AmaSuite4 software to simplify and expedite the entire process.

And then, after that, I’ll run through how I use Long Tail Pro to do my keyword research.

Stay tuned.