Making Money Online Requires a Profitable Niche

Finding a Profitable Niche Market is the first step towards making money online. There is no point going through all the steps to create an online business if you have no idea whether people are interested in buying your product/s. If you want to make money on line you absolutely must put all your marketing efforts into a profitable niche.

A niche is just a word that describes a small section of a larger market. For example, a niche within the weight loss market could be hypnosis tapes to lose weight. When you're making a business on the internet you want to choose a niche that is profitable enough to reward you for your work. Here are some steps on how to find a profitable niche:

1. Go to Amazon's website and look to see if there are more than 20 reviews for any products in your market
2. If there are, you're onto something good! Amazon reckons that only 1 in 1,000 buyers leave a review for a product bought on their site. So any product with 20 reviews means about 20,000 buyers! A very good sign that this product is in a profitable niche.
3. Look for more products in that niche
4. If other similar products have more than 20 reviews go to ClickBank's website and search for products in that niche that have a 'gravity' of 30+ (gravity roughly means the number of affiliates, that have made a sale in the last week).
5. Go to the 'store' part of the Dummies website (bottom right hand corner - ish of the homepage). Look at the left hand column for markets. Choose the market most relevant to your niche. If they have a book on this subject / market / niche you're getting very warm!
6. Head over to forums and search for hot topics within each category... topics that appear time and time again and evoke discussions.  
7. eBay is a great place to find what people are looking for. The pulse sections at eBay will give you a general idea of what people are looking for and what the hot trends are. You should also take a look at the "Want It Now" section. Users can post items they are looking for and having a hard trouble finding. Affiliate marketers have been using eBay to find niches for awhile. You can get some ideas for products to sell or create and find out what people are looking for. If you want to know how to find a profitable niche market eBay is a good start. 
8. Go to the magazine rack of your local bookstore or supermarket and pick out three or four magazines. Start with magazines that you are interested in. Pay attention to the headlines on the cover. What are they saying to grab your attention? Go to those articles and skim through them. Look at the ads. What products or services are those big companies paying thousands of dollars to advertise for? Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars researching what people want and who will buy their product. They already know who is going to respond to their ads way before they spend a penny on the actual ad. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, just see what wheels people have already invented and repeat it. For example you may see see ads for shoes, cell phones, satellite tv, HD radio, insurance, cars, computers, watches, diets, natural supplements, clothes, credit cards, golf clubs, etc. Make a list of every product, service or industry that you see. There are affiliate programs for every single one.
9. Go to Google's keyword tool and check that people really are searching for products in that niche, and find keywords that have high search rates and low competition. 

Here's a few of the more popular affiliate marketplaces you might want to search for products on...
http://www.clixgalore.com/
http://www.clickbank.com/
http://www.amazon.com/