What do you do when you want to expand your offering on eBay? It certainly must be a good idea; customers will come back if they liked dealing with you and you've got something else they want. New customers will be drawn to you if you can offer a good selection of related products.

Niche, niche, niche. Every marketing "guru" tells you that without a niche you're destined to float in the realms of obscurity. There is no such thing as a successful Wal-Mart-style-we've-got-everything store on eBay. eBay is already the WalMart, your store is just an isle . . . or maybe even a shelf. If it's not clear what you're selling, people will try another isle.

But how can you expand without scratching your niche? I'm glad you asked.

Overture has a useful tool that tells you how many times a particular word was searched on Yahoo in the last month. That's nice, but what's really useful is that it gives a list of <em>related</em> words that were also searched.

For example, if you sell polo shirts you can enter those keywords in this Keyword Selector Tool and find out exactly which polo shirts were searched for. With that knowledge, you can expand your inventory with products you already know have buyers!

In this case, I see that Lacoste polo shirts were searched almost three times as often as the next brand on the list, Ralph Loren. Tommy Bahama and Burberry also made a showing much lower on the list. Now if you can just find an authorized supplier for these shirts, add them to your listings and you're in business!

In a second example, although Christopher Radko (who makes great retro glass Christmas ornaments) got over 700 searches, his competitor Abigail Pfeffer had zero searches. So I may not want to invest much in adding her line if I'm already selling Radko.

Utilizing this Keyword Selector Tool also tells me what words I should put in the title of my listing. Doesn't it just make sense that I use words I already know people are looking for?

I even used the tool to select the title for this article! The keywords "things to sell on eBay" were near the top of the list.

Here's a link to the tool at Overture: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

If you found this information useful, please vote below.

Have fun!