How To Find A Niche To Really Make Money Online

Before I dig into the details about how to find money making niches let me clarify that a “money making” niche is not necessarily a “popular” niche. Just because a million people a day are searching for a term does not mean that you can make money from it. You might be able to using AdSense if there is enough traffic but for the purpose of this post let’s concentrate on niches that we can make money online with in multiple ways.

Finding a profitable niche is the first of seven steps referenced by this page How To Make Money Online. If you haven’t already, I recommend that you read it. It outlines all seven steps that most successful Internet marketers follow to build money making websites. So let’s get started.

Niche ideas can come from anywhere but I have a few main sources that I use for inspiration, one of them is the marketplace at Clickbank. http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm This is a good starting point because you can see what types of products are actually making affiliates money online and how many are being sold by affiliates. Once you’re on the marketplace page select any category and click on “GO”. A  list of products will appear with statistics. If you sort these by popularity they will be listed in order of number of affiliates promoting them. If you sort them by High Gravity, they will be listed by number of affiliates actually making money from the product. I love that part.

For the purposes of this trip we are just interested in getting money making niche ideas, not selecting individual products to promote. In another post I will review how to use this information to select products to make the most money online with.  Once you find a topic you might think you could promote you need to dig into the niche a little deeper. When we talk about finding a money making niche what we really are looking for as the end result is a small set of money making keyword phrases that we can use to build a website around.  Obviously if you try to compete with keywords like “How to play guitar” or “make money online“, you will be up against some stiff competition and in will be difficult to get to page one of Google for those terms. You can still make out in those niches but you need to define it to a more specific segment of that market or what’s now referred to as a “micro niche”.

That’s where our next tool comes into play. The famous Google Keyword tool. I do nothing without consulting the keyword tool from Google and I really make money online, I don’t just try and sell you products that tell you how to do it. If you do not have an AdWords account I recommend that you create one just so that you can use the member version of this tool. The non-member version is here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Here is how we use this tool. Let’s say we find a topic on Clickbank that we’d like to work with. The niche we’re interested in is Free Energy. We would type that phrase in the keyword tool and hit submit. Google will now give you a list of relevant keywords and some stats like number of searches, competition, and if you’re using the tool from inside your AdWords account, the average cost per click for an AdWords ad. Now even though this info is created for AdWords users and we are not making any PPC ads, it still tells us which keyword phrases are worth more money to us. The higher the cost per click, the more valuable the keyword usually is and the less competition the greater chance we have of getting on page one of the search results.

So what are we looking for here? We are looking for keywords that have lower competition and at least 1000 searches a month. If you find one that has a decent amount of searches, low competition and a high estimated CPC you’ve hit “Make Money Online Gold” because the few advertisers going after them are obviously in deep competition with each other so they must be moeny making keywords. The reason I use 1000 searches a month is the low competition. In the real world as you rank for your chosen keywords the search engines will be also sending you traffic for related keywords as they will appear in your web content, so your actual number of search engine visits could far exceed the numbers stated.

 I see a few phrases that might work: “free energy water”, “free energy magnet” and “surface free energy” are three good contenders. You would want to write them down. Then I would think of some other phrases to try like “solar energy” or  “wind power” and see what keywords you come up with with them. You also want to try and think like someone who might be searching for this information. What phrase would they type? I’m thinking they might type in “plans for free enegry” or “how to build a wind turbine”.  Getting the picture?

It’s not so much about finding the most popular keywords but about finding the keywords that might be used when someone is looking to buy something. The reason we don’t go after terms like “free energy” is that thousands of students will be typing that in looking for reference material, not to buy something. Which takes us to the next step. Once you compiled your list of keywords go to the regular Google search page. Type your keyword phrase in in quotes and look at the results. Note the number of pages listed. This is your actual keyword competition, not the results you see when you type your keyword phrase in without quotes.

You will also want to pay close attention to how many advertisers are showing ads for those keywords. The more ads, the more likely that the keyword phrase is a money maker. Bear in mind that a lot of new AdWords advertisers sign up every week who have no clue what they’re doing and may be spending ad money on keywords that will not produce sales. Which brings me to the next tool:

MSN’s Commercial Intent tool. http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/    While relatively new, this tool allows you to plug in keyword phrases and see whether or not someone searching with those terms is likely to be buying something. I believe as this tool gets refined it will be a valuable part of every webmasters toolkit and more than likely won’t be free anymore so take advantage of it while it is. This is just one more tool to help you decide what keyword phrase you want to concentrate on. Using all of these tools you should end up with one major keyword phrase you want to target and 2 or 3 minor ones.

A note about using Adsense on your site to make money. If you plan on using Adsense as an income generator on your website you need to know something about using these lower paying keyword phrases. The higher cost per click keyword phrases for Adwords users turn into the higher paying keywords for Adsense users. You might think that in that case you should build a site around the higher paying keywords. Not necessarily. As you write content for your website you will inevitably use a lot of those higher paying keywords  during the natural course of writing. The Adsense application will pick up on that and actually place ads on your site that will pay more because that’s what Adsense wants: it advertisers to pay the most for each click it can get from them. And while you might never get to page one on Google for those higher keywords, you can get there for the lower ones which results in many web visitors who will actually see ads for the higher paying keywords. Oh yeah, that’s the ticket!

Well that about covers how to find a profitable niche to work with. The more you do this the better at it you will become. Do not take this step lightly and do not rush through it. You may need 2 or 3 days to do this right or you may come up with gold in a few minutes, but it should never be rushed. It’s the single most important factor in making money online.

It’s also important to factor all items into your research. As a recap this is what you need to know:

*what money making keywords people are actually online searching for

*which of those are being used when people are online looking to buy

* how much competition do you have for those keywords

There is never really a right or wrong answer here, only ‘more right’ answers for picking keywords. Any keyword getting lots of traffic can generate some money for you, but obviously the more time you take to select them the better results you will get. Bear in mind also that you’re going to have to write 4 or 5 pages of 500-600 words each of content for the keywords you select. If you’re not going to be able to do that then don’t even consider those keywords.

Are you looking for a shortcut to finding a profitable niche? Then I’d like to recommend that you take a look at Micro Niche Finder. This is a top selling Clickbank product with a 60 day money back guarantee. Will cost you basically nothing to try if you don’t like it.  At the very least sign up for the free video series that will go into even more detail about how to find good niches.