If you still can’t decide what niche you’ll start with, take time off from your computer and head towards your favorite shopping mall.

Go straight to the bookstore and dash to the magazine racks. This could be your best place to look for a profitable market.

You know what? The most profitable markets have their own niche magazines. Look, health magazines, golf magazines, personal improvement, etc.

If you like the health niche, go get that magazine. If possible get the back issues for the past six months.

Scan the magazines and look for possible opportunities. You’ll be shocked as your brain starts kicking into the dozens of ideas popping.

Go through the magazine’s classified ads. What are they offering? Were they advertising in that same magazine six months before? Chances are, it is a profitable niche.

You may read my post on how to find what people want.

Putting the market first almost always guarantee you to make money online. I made 3 articles on this subject:

1. How to find what people want
   
2. Use this keyword tool to find profitable markets
   
3. How to find a profitable market

YOU want more! Right?

Well, Terry Dean shared this interview with a coaching client who has profited from 17 different markets. Repeat, 17 different markets. If you don’t know Terry, he’s a former $8 an hour pizza delivery driver who went to earning a high six figure online income without any employees. He went full-time on the internet way way back in 1996.

Terry is one of the guys I admire together with Jimmy Brown and Ryan Healy. They don’t hide their religious convictions. And among the few that can be trusted online.

The interview is about a virtually foolproof method in choosing slam dunk markets. If you’re into basketball, you know what is slam dunking, an almost impossible to block shot.

Here’s what I lifted from the salesletter:

• 7 Ways to Find products that are ALREADY selling in the marketplace…know before you start if there is money there.

• Exactly where to look for FREE to find out just how much online interest is in that subject.

• Whether to choose a tiny little niche or a mass market product (Here’s a little hint: Contrary to what many marketing gurus may tell you, he is currently involved in both!).

• A simple method of finding mass market best selling items just waiting to be shared with the online world.

• How to become a marketing mindreader where you know in detail what your prospects want to buy even before they do.

• How to launch a product profitably from day one, because you have the heartbeat of the entire market.

• The exact numbers to look for to determine a profitable market for YOU (Yes, that’s right – what you want may not be right for me).

• How to Not get faked out by the competition – Like any good poker player, they might not be showing you their whole hand.

The good thing about this MP3 interview and transcript is that it’s only 7 dollars. A trip to the pizza shop would cost more and even add more transfat to your body.

You can even sell this product and get 100% commission. (Was it Jonathan Leger who invented the $7 script that made this 100% commission much easier?)

Click here to start finding the slam dunk profitable markets

Now, these websites provide us a view of people’s wants, needs, and desires. This is unprecedented in human history wherein we can peek into what people really want. Surveys and polls may provide us with answers but we know that the response of people to surveys is quite different from what’s really playing in their minds.

Some of these sites may not be new to you but who knows if you have really dug dip into these sites. So here they are quickly:
1. 43 Things

I start with this site simply because it’s my favorite. Members answer the question “What do you want to do with your life?” As of this writing 1,261,552 people in 13,804 cities responded and wrote down what they want to do.

Tons and tons of ideas of what people want to do. “learn to cook” “write a book” “exercise more” “learn to make layouts” “visit Italy” are some of the things that appears. Just keep on refreshing the page to generate new ideas.

2. Amazon Magazines & Newspapers

I would say the world’s biggest online bookstore is also the world’ biggest newspaper and magazine store. Checkout what’s hot in the magazines.

Also, you can browse amazon’s most wished gifts.

3. ASK Top Searches

Formerly AskJeeves. ASK is still hot with its list of top searches.

4. AOL Hot Searches

This old online giant would not be left behind.

5. Dummies

The series of dummies book publishes popular subjects.

6. Barnes & Noble

The Amazon competitor. A list of top 10 books on every subject imaginable.

7. Ebay Hot Page

The biggest auction site has a list of what people are buying. Also, the site publishes a report of what products are on hot demand. Please download at
http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf

8. Ehow

The site has a tremendous amount of information on how-to topics. You can browse what particular topics people are interested in.

9. Hobbies List

The things that people love. Popular hobbies are listed in alphabetical order. Among them: amateur radio, American football, body art piercing tattoos, die cast toys, paragliding, flower arranging, rock climbing, UFO, embroidery, etc.

10. Indeed Job Trends

Haven’t heard of this site? Indeed. Well, the site indexes over 50 million jobs a year from the thousands of websites that it keeps track. You can search the archive to see the trend of the particular job you are looking.

11. Lycos 50

Poker, golf, naruto, fashion, spyware, Halloween are listed as among the movers and shakers. Check the site.

12. Meetup

Whatever your interest. Wherever you are. The site tells you precisely what topics are hot and what topics are growing. I didn’t know that the 60’s music is in the top list of growing topics followed by adult swimming. Great info here.

13. Shopping.com

What else? Are you still surprised? The site starts with a question: What are you shopping for? Popular topics include shoes, computers, electronics, home and garden, health and kids.

14. Wikipedia List of Hobbies

The site that dominates the Google search results. The enemy of SEO experts. Wikipedia. Hundreds and hundreds of hobbies are listed. Dare to know what is herpetoculture? How about falconry? Or GPS drawing? Try this site.

15. Yahoo Buzz

Can I forget Alexa’s number 1? Yahoo buzz lists the site’s top overall searches. It also has a list of leaders and Movers.

16. Google Trends

Hey if there’s Yahoo, Google is also there. Hot trends is formerly Zeitgeist.

17. Blogpulse Trends

Talking about trends. BlogPulse is asking what’s the buzz? The site identifies the subjects, topics and issues that are extremely hot in the blogs.

18. 43 Things Zeitgeist

A good site deserves a second mention. But this a different page. This time the site is giving away the number of people with every popular goals.

Discover How To Be First in Google.

Clogged drains. I wonder how he (William Farrell?) thought of this extremely targeted niche. Was it because of his wife’s incessant nagging to fix the messy drain? Eureka! I found it! Maybe those were the words that raced out of his lips.

What can we get out of this? That there are still niches out there waiting for you to catch them. And this guy is pretty quick in snatching the domain of the keyword phrase, “fix clogged drains”.

He simply noticed a need, (Didn’t I tell somewhere that the foundation of a successful business is finding a need then filling it? Or finding a problem then offer a solution?) then checked his keyword tool (maybe), registered the domain name, slapped some contents, placed some Google ads, drove traffic, and bingo! The site earns about $20 per month (got this info from one of the forums).

$20 may not be big money for you but it’s a good start, and it shows that you can really make money online. How about repeating the process and making tons of websites? 10 sites would fetch $200 per month. 30 sites have a potential to make $600 per month. Got it?

In adsense, it is easier to make $20 per site per month than making $600 per month on one site. That’s in my experience, I don’t know about you. But of course there are some exceptions like Markus Frind with his site http://www.plentyoffish.com which reportedly makes $10,000 a day, repeat A DAY! in 2006. $20,000 this year? Maybe.

I don’t like his niche, (and I won’t give it my precious link) and I would not go into that niche of matching people, but the point is, he discovered a niche, he found a need and filled it.

Steve Pavlina gets $1,000 per day with his personal development blog. There are many other individual blogs which rake in thousands of dollars per month.

How about you? If you’re trying to copy the fix clogged drain guy, there are still hundreds of how to fix clogged things available. Clogged canals, clogged noses? :>) Oh, by the way, he already got “how to fix a clogged toilet” Yucky! “how to fix a clogged bathtub”, “how to prevent another clogged drain” – a subniche?

You can try using the keyword tool and type in “how to fix”. I tried this and here are the results:

Fix credit – 8213
fix registry – 5362
Fix your credit report – 3453
Fix my computer – 3243
Fix bad credit – 2894
Fix credit score – 1650
Fix ipod – 1452
Fix a toilet – 1220
Fix slow computer – 910
Fix a leaky faucet – 813
Fix a playstation 2 – 785

Dozens more.

The numbers after each keyword is the number of searchers per month.

Got it now?

Find a need, find a problem, then offer a solution.

Some of my internet marketing friends who have been doing make money at home businesses are doing this by conducting surveys, asking subscribers, going to forums and browsing article directories.

Well, if you find those things overwhelming, relax as there’s a lot of help coming.

Let’s start with http://www.43things.com This is a site where members answer the question, “What do you want with your life?” It’s a nice site.

As I wrote this there were 1,172.472 people in 13,408 cities revealing what they want to do. Some of the “wants” I discovered were: get out of debt, save money, lose 20 pounds, create computer game, quit smoking, write a book, and much much more. Amazing!

To get new selections, just click the refresh button of your firefox or internet explorer and new selections will be highlighted.

You can then jot down these selections and keep them for further probing later by using our keyword selector tool.

The exercise using “43things” is tremendously effective especially when you’re just starting out, when you are at a loss of what is it you are going to start.

The other ways which I also recommend in how to find a profitable market are also great places to start. They include ehow, amazon, meet-up, hobbies list, Wikipedia and mygoals.

You can also try magazines.com and browse for smaller and specialized publications. There’s a bulky selection of craft magazines. People simply love their hobbies and crafts make a big part of it.

Now, how about ebay.com? One of the internet originals. It’s the site where millions of people are searching, looking for things that they want. A large part of the things being searched at ebay are physical products.

But do you know that Ebay publishes a report of what products are in high demand? Check out http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf. These are the products that are receiving a ton of bids. This is an exceptionally useful list. Download it!

Have you tried going to Shopping.com? You’ll be stunned as you will discover not only the products that are hotly searched but also the keywords! Unbelievable.

Here’s how to be first in Google

If you’ve been online for six months, you have probably accumulated tons of ebooks and dozens of software sitting in your computer. Stop chasing the newest strategy, seminar or the latest technique. Start Now!

Don’t collect more information. What you got from this site is even enough. How many newsletters do you read everyday urging you to buy this and that? Unsubscribe from them. Start to make money online now!

I have identified the top 4 ways of making money in the internet. The easiest and fastest to set-up is adsense. However, affiliate marketing will bring in more money than adsense. And if you’ve picked some programs with recurring affiliate payments, the better for you.

To summarize the 6 steps to affiliate marketing success:

1. Pick a profitable market
2. Look for affiliate programs with the hottest products in that market.
3. Make a series of follow messages and load them into the autoresponder.
4. Create a special report in PDF format.
5. Build you site, blog or squeeze page.
   
6. Drive traffic to that site.

Now that you have these six steps, break them down into smaller activities and put schedules.

If you’re a morning person, one whose burst of energy is during daytime, then your first activity of the day should be to work on the steps above.

Don’t check you emails, AdSense and stats. Don’t start browsing, reading your favorite news, sites, etc. unless you have completed the job for the day. OK?

Start NOW!

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

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

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.

Step 2: Look for affiliate programs with the hottest products in that market you have chosen.

To make money easily, don’t reinvent the wheel, so they say. To find hot products that sell online, we need to recognize what people already want to buy or are already buying. At Clickbank (you’ll see later in this post), we can easily see which products are hot and are selling fast.

But what if the product is brand new? Well, one thing you will have to observe is the sales letter. The sales letter should be convincing enough to get people to buy the product. If you were the customer, ask yourself if you would buy the product after reading the sales letter. The sales letter should also have testimonials to be more convincing.

Also, you should look if the sales letter has a money-back guarantee for the product being sold. If the website doesn’t offer this, then think again.

A vital factor is to have the contact information in the website like the physical address and the phone number, this will add more credibility to the site and thus increase the sales.

Now let’s try looking for affiliate programs with hot products.

The most popular place to look for affiliate programs with the hottest products to sell is the Clickbank Marketplace. There is also Commission Junction and Allan Gardyne’s Associate Programs.

If you don’t find the product related to the lucrative market you have chosen, go to Google and type the product plus the phrase “Affiliate Programs”. For example if you are looking for golf bags, then type: golf bags “affiliate programs”.

Now let’s try Clickbank and look for a hot product.

Let’s say you’ve chosen Golf as your market and you will be looking for hot products at Clickbank to promote.

1. Choose Sports & Recreation in the dropdown menu of the Category.
2. Chose the Subcategory: Golf
3. Keywords: Golf
4. The sort by: High Gravity

The ebook product that came in first in your search is “The Simple Golf Swing”. It has the following information:

$/sale: $30.06 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 53.0% | grav: 60.87

You should look for products with a high grav and a high %refd. The grav: stands for how popular the product has been lately, the higher the grav the better. The %refd stands for how many sales were referred from affiliates, so the higher this figure is the better.

The commission you’ll get for every sale of this product is a whooping 75% which would translate to more than $30 per sale.

Looking from these figures, you can easily determine if the product you will be promoting will be profitable for you.

Step 1: Start With a lucrative Market.

A lot of people say that you start with what you love, with what you are passionate about. Well, that would be great if what you are passionate about is also profitable. An example would be Steve Pavlina who is into personal development. He is passionate about it and he writes pretty well on that particular subject. And personal development is one of the never dying markets. Since the beginning of time man has been relentlessly pursuing personal improvement.

When I started my internet business, I simply would jump for a topic which I thought would be profitable. Not doing the necessary research, it would simply end in frustration as the expected hundreds of dollars pouring in would not come.

Oh, if you are new, there is also the tendency to focus on and spending hours and hours on the non essentials and less significant things like websites, technology, email & other marketing techno-jargon we are fed with daily from the Gurus who are selling their latest wares. I’m not saying that they are not important, what I’m saying is work first on finding what your lucrative market is.

So we should start with a lucrative market. Now what is a lucrative market? We can say that it is lucrative if it meets the following:

1. High Demand – the more people searching for information on that particular area you are entering, the better for you.

2. Low Competition – as much as possible select topics or areas where there is not much competition. The battle would be quite fierce if there are more competitors especially if they are well entrenched and large.

3. People are Bidding on the keywords – The more people are willing to pay, the more profitable is the market. You can check out with Google if there are advertisers. Just look at the right side of the Google search results when you are searching for something.

Now how do we find these profitable markets? I have identified below some good places to start with:

1. Bookstores. Go to your favorite bookstores and observe what people are reading at the magazine section. Boating, Cars, Scrap booking, Chicken Recipes, Cell Phones, etc. are just some of them.

2. Amazon. Go to Amazon Magazines & Newspapers. This page of Amazon gives you information on popular newspapers and magazines.

3. Ehow. You can try Ehow. How-to topics are among the most popular and profitable. Ehow will be a massive source of information.

4. Meet-up. This is an excellent source of profitable topics. The website is telling you exactly what topics are hot and what are going to be hot.

5. Hobbies List. A list of popular hobbies.

6. Wikipedia. This online giant has almost everything you want when it comes to information.

7. MyGoals. People are always looking for something to improve themselves.

These are just some of the places where you can start looking for profitable markets. In my succeeding posts, I’ll show you exactly how to drill down and find lucrative niches by using some of the free keyword tools.