Niche - The MOST important thing you need to know before starting an internet marketing business

The golden word in internet marketing is this-NICHE.

Just like a traditional brick and mortar business, an online business provides VALUE to its clients (I prefer the term 'clients' because of the long term connotation), it provides a solution to some of their problems, which is how businesses make profits.

Before you run off to write an e-book or sell a great product that you think everyone would want, you need to do a few things:

Firstly, you need to understand what people want to buy. It's a lot easier to sell them what they want, than to sell something and hoping the market wants it.

Secondly, you need to understand who's supplying those things (that people want to buy) in the market. In other words, you need to know how competitive is the market for the product that you want to sell.

Now, with a traditional business, you would do a feasibility study and you can do the same with the internet. First, write down a list of things you think might sell on the internet. Use specific words that average people would use. Then, with this list of words, we are going to use the internet to see if there are enough people out there doing searches on these words. A handy tool to research what people are looking for on the internet is a website by Overture:

http://pixelfast.com/overture

What this little tool does, is that it is able to tell you, for a particular key word that you've used, how many searches have been done on that key word in the previous month. That gives you an estimate of the mass that is finding information on what you're planning to offer. The general rule of thumb is that if you've got hundreds of thousands of people looking for your SPECIFIC keyword, it's an area worth pursuing.

Now you have to research your competition in the market place. So go to Google, and type in the same keyword and see how many returns you get. If there are more than two pages of sponsor links (the links on the right hand panel of the page), and if the search returns hundreds and thousands of sites, then, either one of two things have happened:

1. Your keyword is too general, it's not specific enough; or
2. There is too much competition in the market place

The key is to research the market properly for the areas that you're thinking of pursuing, and keep exploring product ideas until you find a good niche. Finding a good niche is like laying a good foundation for your business. The main reason a lot of internet marketing businesses don't make money is either the niche is too competitive or you haven't done enough to get traffic to your site (more on that later). So, before you start creating an ebook or finding a product to sell, do your research on what the market wants, because that is the most fundamental step in starting and internet business.

Till next time, to your success!