I need suggestions for a new niche

Hi,

I am new here.

I have a site for baking tools and I think that maybe I need to change the niche since I dont have sales yet. I tried to put some advertisment on FB but until now I spend money with no results.

I need help for finding a new niche, do you have an advice for me? I don't want to be disapointed again.

Thank you

Hi Tamar and welcome to the forum,

I can't suggest any niche's to try, they aren't always easy to find by their nature of being niche and when people do find one that is generating money, then will never share because that only hurts themselves by inviting competition into the market against them. Can you post a link to one of your listings so I can take a look, I might be able to make some suggestions on improvements to increase your chances.

Thank you for your quick answer.

Here is my site:

Link hidden: Login to view

I don't want to say goodbye my site, but i need to sell, that's why we are here :)

Thank you again

Quick question, are you listing on eBay as well at all or only through your own web-store?

Also, do you have any website tracking numbers?

1.No, i am selling Only through my site.
2.what do you mean exactly by website trucking number?

I mean like some sort of analytics software to measure site traffic data. How many visitors per day, what are the most popular pages vied, how long visitors are spending on each page and so on.

For example Link hidden: Login to view

Here are the details for this week:

Sessions 119
Page views 291

Session Duration Sessions Pageviews
0-10 seconds 81 82
11-30 seconds n 4 7
31-60 seconds 4 9
61-180 seconds 5 20
181-600 seconds 9 45
601-1800 seconds 13 102
1801+ seconds 3 26

CountSessionsPageviews
1 80 128
2 8 15
3 2 11
4 3 4
5 3 6
6 2 23
sept-14 2 17
15-25 16 74
26-50 3 13

224 events
page views 291
the products the most popular its the products that i promoted this week
Cake slicer 36
pizza cutter 57
home page 83
checkout 5
croissant 9
exit 40.55%
bounce rate 67.23%
avg time page 00:02:25
avg time session duration 00:03:31

I have the impression that they leave fast without checking another items that i have...

Thank you

Hi Tamar,

OK, I've had a chance to go over your site and I have some suggestions that may help. Most I will just write here so other's may benefit, however there is one in particular that I will PM to you because it's quite sensitive to any of your competition that may be learking lol. I don't of course want my advice to have a negative impact on you, so I'll keep that bit of advice just between you and me so you have a chance to sort that out asap.

Looking at the numbers, you are at least getting traffic. How much of that is actually legit traffic and how much is spiders, I don't know. So I think a definite area of improvement to look at is marketing, that seems to be quite a week area at the moment.

Baking isn't a Niche market, it's actually a MASSIVE market and that's a good thing because it presents lots of marketing opportunities. I'm not sure if you bake personally, I have a sense from your website that you might at least have some basic knowledge, but it's not really a passion of yours. If you have any knowledge at all, you should be getting on to all sorts of baking blogs and getting yourself known there.

I think your also missing a trick by not using multi-seller sales platforms like eBay to be doing some funnel marketing for your site and you could also be making much more use of Social Media marketing opportunities as well.

So marketing is an area where you can easily make some massive improvements and improvements that cost you time, but not large lots of cash.

From a design perspective, it's a clean site, quite informative (which is key for me) It has a friendly enough feel about it, but it has a very cold feel about it as well. It's very cookie cutter in style and that makes it feel very sterile to me. I mean there is nothing that really grabs me when I land, nothing at all.

I think you'll find that bakers by nature are very creative people, baking is how they show their creativity. So in understanding your market, you have to understand the people you are selling to and selling to creative people without a creative website isn't the best plan for success i would suggest.

So some design issues that you can maybe consider some solutions for. The most obvious one for me to start with, the scale of your logo at the top of the page.

I see you have a few recipes, that's a good idea, but really needs to be bulked out with recipes. Only having a few listed makes it feel very unfinished and no serious baker is going to be captured by that I think you need to research blogs and list a section to promote those and make sure that you are an active participant on each one that you do promote.

Depending how much time and money you want to dedicate to it, you might even consider staring a small blog yourself or just a small forum to get some interaction going. That gives a reason to get people in and a reason for them to stay for a while.

I would suggest get a membership going, for example. Pay $29.99 and get 5% of all your purchases and go into the monthly draw to win great prizes. Those sorts of things can work well, certainly at least worth a try I would think.

I see you offer worldwide shipping, that's certainly a plus. Shipping times, not great, but of course you are retrained there by what your supplier's are offering.

Your prices seem to be on the extreme side, even those on special are more expensive that I was able to find from other suppliers at their regular price. So that is something I think you need to really look at closely.

In summary, when I look at the site in it's entirety, I see a site that is giving customers lots of reasons not to buy and no reason to actually spend their
Getting the money. So you kind of have the truck in reverse at the moment and you need to change gears and get the thing moving forward.
potential buyers to the site is one thing, but if you're going t go to that trouble, then you have to give customers reasons to buy once you do get them there and eliminate the reasons why they shouldn't buy to be successful.

That is my feedback, I hope that I have at least given you some ideas on how you can improve things :)

Thank you so much for your answer.
I understand that i need to change my vision about my site and i'll try to.
But i just wondering if i choose the right niche, i mean
That i love baking and i do have knowledge about it. U love to kitchen on general and i am cooking every day...but its seems to me that this niche too large, to competitive and you can find my products everywhere....
Thats why i wrote at first, that im looking another niche but than...i say to myself that i can do the same mystakes again so i dont know what to do.
The only thing that im sure of, that i want to win.
I dont want to give up beacuse i know that sometime we need to fall at first, in order to stand up and become sucessful.
Do you suggest me also to find local supplier?
Do you think i need to change complitly my logo?
Do you think that i should put the blog or recipes at home page to attract people?
I really feel confuse...
Thank you again for your help. Need it.

Well you're right, cooking in general and baking as a genre is a massive market, so by definition it isn't a niche market. A niche market is a much smaller more specialized market. Should you change, well knowing that you have baking knowledge and are quite passionate about it, I would suggest NOT changing.

That would make no sense to me at all. If baking is your passion, then use that to your advantage. Looking at your site currently I would have no clue that you loved baking because there is nothing of yourself in that design. There is none of your personality, it's just a cold cookie cutter e-commerce site with no soul.

OK, that may sound harsh, but I say that because it's both true, but to highlight the potential of what it could be. If you're a passionate baker, then why not turn the site's focus into a blog site. Make it about you, not just about selling things. Create a profile about yourself and your passion for baking, each week get the ingredients and the camera out and start baking and blogging.

The trick not to miss here would be to use things that you are also selling so they can be highlighted in your recipes and that then encourages interested readers to look at your products and start making purchases.

One of the very first things you learn when working in sales is the importance of building relationships with customers. Finding something in common with your customer will build a bridge to a quick sale. So baking is key here, develop a blog and you are building that bridge between you and visitors to your blog because all bakers have that same passion in common, so that relationship already exists, you're just not using it at the moment.

So my best advice, change the focus of the site. Start thinking baking blog as the draw card and then think about the sales side as the related side.

I would also suggest using the multi-seller platforms like eBay as sales funnels for the e-commerce side. Put together some bundles, like 2 different cake molds together. You make your margin on one, then sell the other one at cost, This reduces the over all cost to the customer because they are saving on buying the second one.

What you then do in the listing is make it clear that you have plenty of others available, but people need to email you for details. Once you have those emails, you can send them directly to your website. So you can be pushing your e-commerce side through means like that and then pushing your blog side through other blogs and through Social Media.

That gives you a double edged marketing strategy

If you want to do something with your logo, I would suggest contacting Naveed on Link hidden: Login to view. Just say that Mark from Voodoogarage passed on the contact details for you.

I would suggest speaking to a site designer in regards to starting again with the focus more on the more personal blog side, with the cart. If you don't know of any, try the peopleperhour site, it's a freelance site and you'll find plenty of options there.

In regards to finding local suppliers, well that can't hurt of course, but I think you need to increase your range right across the board and again, look carefully at your pricing.

For me, it's a no brainner, blogging is the best way forward for you. You have the passion, the knowledge, start making it work for you :)

You are right and i must say that i already thought that before. The only problem is that...english not my mother langague and i dont want to make any mystakes while writing this blog or another..

That is certainly something you have to watch out for, but you can get very high quality translation software that can take care of that without any problems.

It's definitely a strength and one I think that you can play to your advantage if you do it right.

Maybe even see if you can get a video shot of the cooking, some creative editing and upload to YouTube for another marketing avenue. This type of visual marketing can bring loads of traffic to websites, so something else to consider.

Do you think it will be better to make it à blog for french kitchen recipe ? At lest i can be more specific. Like you said, its à massive market.

This just gets better for you all the time because French and baking go hand in hand.

Translation plug-ins are available to translate a site into any language now, your web developer will be able to sort that out for you without any problems at all. If you're French, then you should change the name of the site to reflect your heritage, that then gives you another marketing card to play.

If you start doing a range of classic, contemporary French recipes, throw in some with your own unique twist as well and you have a killer point of difference over a large majority of other baking bloggers out there. I don't mean you have to stick to only French recipes if you don't want to, but I think they should certainly be the core that you build everything around around because that gives you brand that people will be able to identify you with.

What's becoming very clear here is that you have a lot of strengths that you can put into practice, If I were you, I would be playing the French card as much as possible, even to the point of getting out with my camera and including some scenic shots of around the area. Take some of your food and do some outdoor shots as well,

That side may not appeal to a domestic French audience, but I'm sure it will to a mixed international audience.You can even take it a little further by writing about the history of the classic and contemporary French recipes as well to give the site even more depth. Really, there is so many different options available for you with this, it's an amazing opportunity for you I think.