Hey guys. I know I’ve talked a bit about the Niche Analysis feature of SHD. It’s really cool to be able to do a reverse search of your product against over 370k Zazzle searches. But we also offer a related tool that’s more meant for exploring those searches in greater depth. Here’s what the Niche Explorer looks like at first:
Note that this is a Premium feature. There’s a limited version for Basic agencies.
What’s going on here? You are searching the vast list of “niches”. These are really just searches done by Zazzle’s customers and repackaged by Zazzle to help Google find lots of the products that sell decently well.
The “Matches” column is a count of how many products can be found on Zazzle when performing that search there. We get this count using a programming interface that Zazzle makes available. We gradually run the search over time using all 370k+ niches. So the match counts are reasonably fresh but not perfectly valid in real time. Sadly, they also don’t always match the counts found when you use the human-friendly search page on Zazzle. But that’s a technical detail. For the most part the Matches column is meant to give you a good sense of how much competition there is to satisfy a given niche.
You can click on the text of any of these niches to open a separate browser tab showing Zazzle search results.
The “Nicheness” score is something we compute. It’s not a hard number like Matches is. We use our own combination of factors, including matches, to come up with the nicheness score. It has a range from 0 - 100% where higher is better. We essentially sort the results by how niche they are to encourage you to favor those ideas that are more likely niche over ones that appear to be less so.
We do add some randomness to the sort though. You can control just how random the results are:
Ignore the “nonrandom” case. That’s only for system admins like me. The purpose of the randomness is really to encourage you to seek out something unique and not just copy what everyone else might be doing. When you opt for more random (eg “All over the map”), you’re going to see niche ideas with lower nicheness scores mixed in with ones with higher scores. But you’re far more likely to come across some interesting things that other people won’t just because of the high degree of randomness. That said, in the above example there are only 8 results. So it’ll just be the same 8 items sorted more randomly.
Okay. So what’s the point of this? Well. You can get some new ideas. Not everyone needs inspiration from outside. Some of us have our own endless muses. But others seek out ideas for new designs. This is one great way to get ideas.
One other big point of this is that it’s a way to see how real Zazzle customers are searching for things. What do they want? When they search for something specific, what sort of searches do they do? Are you interested in stuff related to Lebanon? Try doing a search like this:
Right away you get an idea of what people have been searching for. And how many products are already out there to cater to them. That’s powerful.
Things get interesting when you check “Reverse”. You get a bigger text box. Now what you’re doing is essentially creating a piece of text and asking for all the niches that might match that text. It’s like a web page and you’re doing search engine optimization (SEO) in real time on it. Consider this example:
You can see there’s a whole lot of shabby matches like “his and hers invitations”. But there’s a few gems like “lebanese invitations” and “arabic invitations”. You know what this tells me though? That this is a very underserved niche. Are there many customers looking for Lebanese related wedding stuff? I don’t know. But I know they don’t have a lot of options to choose from. So maybe you could consider making designs to serve them.
Another way of thinking about this mode is it’s giving you a chance to try out your product name and tags to see what Zazzle searches might match your hypothetical product.
So that’s what the Niche Explorer is about. I’d love to see what you search for and what ideas you try out. I’m also curious. What do you use right now to get inspiration for your design process? Do you use any tools? Do you look at other Zazzlers’ designs? What works best for you?