I found a goldmine in camping products with over 180k per month is sales!

This business plan is for a small seasonal campground owner, but this approach to expanding your revenue applies to any small business in any small town.

This post is long. And at the end, there is no upsell to a course on how to ACTUALLY find these gold mines! I’m going to show you everything.

You don’t need a coaching program at the end to implement this. All the steps are here. All I ask in return — is your success story. Sometime in the months ahead, you’ll look back and you’ll feel SO GOOD about your results, that it will be natural and easy to come back and share how this worked for you.

You’ll need the free chrome extension for Helium 10.

This where I started out. I added the extension to my browser but I got distracted with something (on twitter…pfft).

Later in the day I searched amazon for ‘light bulbs with a motion detector,’ and WOW!

I’m sure this wasn’t there before.

I had to disable the plugin and refresh the page to see what the Amazon listings looked like before I installed the Helium 10 extension.

Well now, a light went on!

That’s a lot of information about the sales data on each of the listings — really important if I’m going to select the best item when I’m shopping.

I’m very grateful for Kristen Walters who shared her journey into writing books for Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Indeed, I certainly started out writing my first books on KDP about my experience and I did zero research into what people are actually buying.

So now I have the tool. With Helium 10, I started going deep.

And I was soon overwhelmed and super excited! I had to make a spreadsheet and a mindmap so I could keep track of all my discoveries and start collecting all the equipment I’ll need to start panning the gold out of these fertile rivers.

… and this work has so much less overhead. It’s not so messy. Not so noisy.

It’s So Good, I Had To Go Pro

The free browser extension does give you more insights into what’s selling on Amazon… but after reading more about the data, I bought the Starter subscription and was excited enough with all the amazing sales and keyword data, that I knew I had to upgrade — at least for a one month subscription.

A Cheaper Way To Find Gold

It’s a lot cheaper way to find gold with Helium 10 than by doing the work required to run a $15,000 mineral separator… and with a one month subscription to the Platinum level, I can extract myself a huge pile of the best keywords and top selling products and I will then have several months of ‘refining work’ to complete.

The Starter level revealed enough keyword data that I certainly was finding some fantastic inside sales numbers for hot products and for Amazon Kindle books, yet I knew I would save even time in my data collection and I could collect up LOADS more sales data with the export data features in the Platinum level.

Check this out:

I can use this research to find top selling products in any niche, then I can mention and review those products in my niche website.

More Revenue Opportunities

For example if I were a Fly-in Fishing Lodge or a Campground owner - my main gig is to provide holiday trips. It used to be too much trouble and cost to provide fishing gear options for your guests, but with links to Amazon, a lodge owner can now easily offer guests everything they might need for their vacation, and I’m no longer limited to earning money just from renting the campsite.

I can create a very handy trip planner that links to items on Amazon, from sleeping bags to fishing gear to batteries. This way, my little campground can sell a canoe, or maybe a complete tenting package to families who are not booking a campsite with us this year.

A campground owner may be more familiar with the business plan of $20k to build a new cabin, so you can rent another 24 weeks per year… and the investment in the new cabin will be paid in, say, five years? Longer? But it’s time to consider a different asset that isn’t quite as ‘knock on wood’ tangible… but every bit as much of a revenue stream.

You Know Numbers. So Let’s Get Into Some.

I asked ChatGPT: ‘What are ten groups of items a person or family might need when going on a camping trip?‘

ChatGPT produced such a nice list. There are so many great items that a camp ground owner could blog about and list in a free trip planner PDF that people could download.

Lets pick a few. This part of the research can be batched into a full day of gathering and organizing the keywords for each category of products. For the example in this post, I’ll just follow along the Camping Tent theme, but for my niche website, I would follow this same process over and over again for each product line so I can create small groupings of product reviews.

• Tent

• Sleeping Bag

• Campfire Grill Kit

• Phone Charger

• First Aid Kits

• Canoe

I’ll start with the most generic search, and I copy paste this list of keywords into a blank notepad text file. Later I’ll process the bunch through Google Ads Keywords Tool so I can sort and collect the keywords I’ll want to feature in my blog posts.

As I dig down into a specific Tent for Camping, and I pull up the Xray Sales Data, we can see this one brand of tent is selling over 760 units per month! (on the off-season)

That Camping Tent racks up to over $80,000 in sales per month.

So where are those sales coming in and how can we tap into a little part of this money stream? It’s all in the keywords that people are using to find these products. Once we know those phrases, we can include those high value phrases into our description as we share our experience with this tent.

As I opened the Cerebro Keyword Tool, the Platinum level now lets me include a range of competitors in order to scrape all their data for a wider net of keywords to review to find where the gold vein runs.

Gotta say I was expecting access to this blurred data with the Platinum plan.

Let’s see what the export function lets me do.

And… yes indeed! This is the where the gold is. From here I can sort and select the very hottest and best volume keywords.

The Platinum level permits me to limit and sort the keywords, then I can export them. I use Google docs to further sort and qualify the list of phrases. And soon I’ll put them to work.

And The BEST NEWS?

Best news is, I don’t have to figure out how to write these fantastic keywords into a good product description on my campground website. We’ll get ChatGPT and Writesonic to do that for us. It’s a total game changer and I’m glad you are reading along!

Keyword Frankenstein

Here’s a cool bonus tool for cleaning up the new keyword list. I like that I can import my own keyword lists and have them quickly cleaned up - great for adding tags to YouTube Videos I think!

What Are The Best Sellers?

Now I have a mitt full of keywords that I know are where the top search volume and I will use these phrases in my own blog post about the best selling tents… now to narrow down the individual tents that I would feature on my campground website.

There are several different style of tent that all could listed as options for any campground owners website. And the AI Tools today make the process so easy and so unique to your business, that you just gotta plan some time for developing this over the winter when your campground is closed.

Let’s dig into the data here.

Over 5400 units sold last month for $169,865 in monthly sales.  

There is only one listing selling this kind of product. (You might want to Brand one of these things and find a supplier who can create something similar.)

If nothing else, you can be very confident that your campground customers might be very grateful if you were to recommend one of these units!

So now we have our top performing keywords, and we have a list of several top selling tents that our campground customers… and other camping enthusiasts are very likely to purchase.

Do The Work Once - Then It Works For You

1. Create a blog post.

2. Add a link to a ‘What to Bring Camping PDF’

3. Add it to your email newsletter.

4. Done.

Now you have a new micro-revenue stream for your business that will keep working for you for years to come.

Once you get this process down, you can add a new product to your website and PDF in about 30 minutes. That means you can have 80 HOT SELLING camping products on your Campground Website in about a 40 hours of work.

You can do it yourself, or you can do all this research and then find a 5 Star Blogger on Fiverr who will complete the final leg of content production.

Benefits To Measure

• The camping product content will bring more of the kind of traffic you want for your website.

• More traffic will help you grow your social following and your email subscribers - bringing more people into the first stage of your sales funnel.

• The camping product content will help your existing customers have a better trip experience - and they are more likely to rebook for next year.

• New camping product content on your website is an excuse to rekindle your relationship with former guests who haven’t been camping in a few years.

Generative AI Tools Make It So Easy!

We can use ChatGPT with custom instructions to craft a new and original product description in the voice of our Lodge or Campground, while incorporating our list of top traffic keywords to ensure the content will be search engine friendly.

This is what we used to pay costly web marketing companies to do for us.

Now, with Helium 10 giving us the sales numbers and keywords, and with Writesonic, ChatGPT and other ai writing tools helping us, we can create outstanding content ourselves in minutes.

Step One

Update ChatGPT custom instructions top panel with the ‘about us’ details from your campground website, and update the bottom panel with the keyword grouping from my research that best matches this product.

Step Two

Copy the raw text from the product sales page on Amazon. (I like to past it into a notepad text editor first to be sure I clear out any formatting details.)

Step Three

ChatGPT Prompt: ‘please rewrite the following product description in a first person narrative as though our campground is reviewing and talking about this product. Incorporate the keywords from the bottom panel in the custom instructions and replace semantically related phrases with these preferred phrases:’

Paste in the raw text from the notepad editor, and let the generative AI do the hard work of mashing all that together!

Edit The Output An Post!

From the research to the raw post we’ve just created - can take as little as ten minutes for each product. This is because we just use the tools to find the top sales and the top sales keywords, and then use the AI tools to mash it into a new and useful product review.

The next ten to thirty minutes are dedicated to editing the ai generated writing, capturing product images and formatting the post content so it fits nicely on the webpage.

How Do You Get Paid from Amazon?

Join Amazon as an affiliate. Then Amazon will give you a place to create your own custom links. Amazon tracks sales generated by traffic that clicked through your custom links.

There you have it.

• How to find the top selling camping products on Amazon and how to extract the best keywords that are driving those sales.

• We covered how to reprocess the product description with the personal voice of your campground or fishing lodge, while building in the best keywords!

• Finally we completed the asset by publishing a new blog post, by including a link to this product from within our ‘What To Bring Camping’ PDF that is available for free on the website, and by adding these new links into our email newsletter follow-up sequence.

We have expanded our little remote campground business with a top-selling product line that will take no inventory and no further staff time to manage, while at the same time we have added a new level of service for our guests!

No matter what you small town business is, no doubt you have customers who are ordering from Amazon rather than coming down to your shop to pick up the same item. Could be your competitor from a completely different small town is getting a cut of that sale instead of you - simply because they recommended it on their website.

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