How To Make Online Money

I’ve been working recently with some folks who are beginning their venture into Internet Marketing.  One thing that they consistently wonder is, “How do you come up with niche ideas?”

I’m one of those “go-with-what-you-know” guys.  Start with something you feel passionate about, because that is something that you will most easily stick with, and you’ll probably have an easier time finding and building out content for your websites, ebooks, etc.

Still, we can all use some help when it comes to this kind of brainstorming, so here are some questions I like to ask to get the thoughts going:

• What are your hobbies?
• What problem have you solved recently?
• What information have you searched for on the internet recently?
• Go to Yahoo Answers, and plug in a keyword related to a niche you think you like.  Browse through to find out what questions people are asking about that topic.  Can you answer any of them?  (Don’t do it yet…wait until you have a site to link to.  But if you can answer them, that means you have content in your head that people are looking for!)
• What forums to you frequently read?  What forums are related to your potential niche?  (hint: google the word ‘forum’ with your niche keyword)  What questions are people asking on the forums?  What are the hot topics about on those forums?
• If someone offered to buy you lunch if you would present on a subject, and speak for 30 minutes, what would you talk about?
• What have you and your friends been talking about on Facebook, MySpace, etc.?
• What was the last exciting thing that happened to you?  Could you talk about that for 30 minutes?

With these questions in mind, you can usually narrow down from a broad niche to a specific subset.  The next question you need to ask is extremely important:  “How do I monetize it?”  That’s what it’s all about, right?

To figure out ways to monetize the niche, try some more Google searches (replacing niche with your specific one), like:

• affiliate niche
• review niche
• niche accessories

Then try searching Commission Junction, eBay (if you’re lucky enough to be an affiliate of theirs), ClickBank, PayDotCom, $7 Offers, etc., for related products to market.

Hopefully those questions will give you a place to start.  For me, once I pick a niche topic, it’s then pretty easy to drill down into the different aspects of that topic by visiting a site like Yahoo Answers.  That site is worth its weight in gold for determining what information people are looking for.