Let’s expand on Step 1 – Finding Profitable Markets and Niches. There are quick and easy ways to find your profitable niche. We’ll look into the use of some keyword tools.

There are dozens of keyword tools available in the market. I use some of the free tools below:

1. Wordtracker
2. Keyword Discovery
3. Google Suggest
4. Google Keyword External

What I’m using right now is also an excellent one:

Keyword Research Tool  (sorry, the outgoing link is no longer working)

This tool allows you to see how many searches were done for a particular keyword and the number of competing sites. Remember that to be profitable, the market or demand should be big enough and not many competitors.

Let’s try to look for profitable niches. Let’s have “golf” as our main subject. Since people who are looking for information in the internet almost always go to search engines to start their search, it is very important then that you would take note of the keywords that they type into the search box.

Here’s the result when I typed the keyword “golf” in the keyword research tool (sorry, the outgoing link is no longer working) 

Gosh! 346 million competing pages for the word golf which has 78,000 monthly search. I would surely shy away from this keyword. How about “golf cart accessory”? Wow! With 80,969 monthly search and only 68,300 competing pages, I’ll surely put this on my short-list.

“sporting goods golf club” has only 744 competing pages and 40,00 searches! Amazing. You also have “golf driving range” with 507,00 competing pages and 30,297 searches. See how useful this keyword tool is? You could go on further down the list but be sure also to check the volume of searches as the niche might not be profitable if the demand is very low.

The results were based on Google. If you’ll try this tool, just make sure you put the ” ” in the keywords you will type. The results are based on optimized and exact keywords. That is, “golf cart” is different from “cart golf”

Knowing the demand and competition is your first step to make money online.