When it all comes down to it, making money online starts and ends with the market you decide to enter.

These days, all you hear is about “finding your niche” or you need to “find a profitable niche“. Well, I happen to agree as do all other successful internet marketers.

But how exactly do you find a niche to get started in?

First of all, let’s clarify what a niche is. A niche is like a sub section of a broad market. For example, a broad market might be dating, but the niche you might discover would be Over 40’s Dating in North America.

Do you see the difference? Clearly, the niche is targeted to a certain type of people within a wider market (which is Dating in this example).

So, your job is to find a specific set of people who are looking for information, products and services or that generally have a burning interest in that subject. Here’s your checklist before you go out and start looking for a profitable niche to get started with:

1.  Make sure they are buyers.

There’s no point targeting people who aren’t interested in buying anything related to that niche.

2. Make sure they are active online.

There needs to be forums, groups and other communities that congregate online so that you can target these people and get to know them properly.

The next thing to do is actually start your research. You can go to BloggingReview and start looking around at categories listed there. Drill down to find small topics that you’d never think about. Then once you’ve found something of interest, go to eBay and Amazon and see if there are books/products/services that are selling which are related to this topic.

Then take some keywords that you think are related to the topic and do a search for related forums and groups. You can do that with a search like this:

“your keyword” + groups
“your keyword” + forums

Just replace “your keyword” with the actual keyword you have in mind, and then hit search in your favorite search engine.

Once you’ve established that there are products that are selling and people gathering actively online in forums and groups, you know that you are onto a winner.

The next steps are to find out what information people want and to start creating some simple articles on your own new domain which relates to this topic.

Then you can focus on monetizing the website and of course, the most important part is getting some good traffic to your site, which is the make or break part of the entire internet marketing process.

It’s also far too much to go into detail in this article, so make sure you check out this website to find out how to drive a lot of traffic to your site, plus more ideas on how to find even more wildly profitable niches and ways to shortcut your way to online success…