Niche engine

What is a niche engine?

This is a new term I coined for a different type of niche website that uses links to affiliate products and services.  It is different from typical sites as it does not require 2000+ word pillar posts.  A programmer or engineer that is skilled in building on the server side would be the ideal person who could build a niche engine.

 

What are the benefits of a niche engine over traditional niche websites?

Niche engine sites do not require lots of content, so if you do not like to write, then this may be the method for you.  This type of affiliate site offers visitors of the site a different type of value.  Instead of reading a review on a product, it allows them to compare and contrast the attributes of the products in that niche using a set of form elements.  You can also display the real prices for the items unlike other sites if you properly interface with the api of say Amazon.  Most sites do not display the price because they are required to show a price that is no older than 24 hours due to the Amazon TOS.

Just being able to compare and contract on these micro attributes is a huge value add for the visitor, so they generally are more willing to share your sites url on and offline with their friends and associates.

 

How do you build a niche engine?

You typically would not build a niche engine using WordPress.  You could make it work, but it would require a lot more programming than rolling your own system.   Since every set of products in your niche have a very specific set of attributes, it would be hard to generalize a niche engine.   I say hard, but not impossible.

 

Why do I not see many niche engines?

Affiliate marketers generally need to hustle to get decent returns.  Engineers and programmers generally get caught up in the details of coding.  You very rarely find people that are interested in both who could pull off building a niche engine.

I have seen one true niche engine in all my searching online.  The developer that built it did not disclose his site,  he was very vague about it because he knew other smart developers would copy his site and even his niche.   He did make the mistake of using the same username on a different forum, so I was able to track down the site.   But I respect his privacy, so I am not going to disclose his site on this post.

 

How is a niche engine different from Amazon or Walmart?

Pick any product you like on Amazon, now try to search on something other than price or reviews.  Lets say you want to search for cell phone covers.  Are you given an option to search for metal covers?  How about an option to only display covers for the Iphone 5S ?  These are super specific attributes of these products that do not fit well into the framework of a large e-commerce site.

 

What software is best suited for building niche engines?

Programming languages are always a personal choice.  If you want my opinion, I think Go is one of the

first languages that would let you build a niche engine site.  I say this because of the built in support it provides for building web services.  It also is compiled, so you get decent performance on a low cost VPS.

 

Are you going to build a niche engine?

Yes,  I have been working on one specifically for food, but I do plan to build one in the future

targeted specifically at products sold on Amazon.  I am in the middle of a redesign on my food site, so it may be sometime before I get everything finished.  I have a number of geo location based micro-services that drive the site, so there is a bit of complexity to it.

 

How can I build a niche engine?

First thing you would want to do is identify a decent sized set of products in your niche.  Then you would have to determine what are all the various attributes people would want to search, sort, filter, compare, and contract on.   Once you have identified a set of attributes or properties, you would have to develop a database of key value store that could properly store these values.   Then you would have to construct an api that does the various functions of filtering on these attributes to return a result set that meets some criteria the user entered.  Finally, you would have to tie this back end service into a front end interface.