How To Make Online Money

Ok…to get started creating your virtual real estate, you need to settle on a ‘niche’…a specific topic.

This is a frequently-asked question: “What’s the best, most profitable niche?”

This reminds me of the question asked to the really good fisherman: “Which of your lures catch the most fish?” The answer: “The one I use the most.” In other words, whichever lure he picks, if he uses it the most, becomes comfortable with how to work it, and it’s the lure that spends the most time in the water…THAT lure will catch the most fish.

Likewise, the niche you put the most effort into will be the one that is most profitable for you.

With that in mind, the common advice is choose the ‘niche that you know’.

If you are going to be creating content for a site, the more interested and knowledgeable you are about the subject matter the more you are going to stick with it, and like everything else in life, the work you put into it is going to drive the benefits coming out.

Here’s a question that I like to use to help people figure out what niche they might use:

“What do you know that someone might be willing to take you to lunch to discuss?”

Even if it’s a cheap lunch…if one person is willing to treat you, others will be, too. And chances are that if you know enough about a topic to actually talk to someone non-stop for an hour over lunch, you know enough to create online content that is marketable.

Here are some other questions to help you get started:

• What are your hobbies, that you spend lots of time thinking about?
• What message forums do you browse/read or even post to alot?
• Do you have any special training, either from school or through work?
• What do you spend your discretionary money on?
• About what do your friends consider you the ‘expert’?

(Stay tuned – I’ll have another post about how to refine the niches and keywords to figure out the right way to monetize the niche.)