A great many people succumb to the lure of internet marketing. They listen to all the guru's with their overflowing supply of ebooks that promise to make you rich, just by reading the $97 fountain of "secret" information. They all have the same basic sales pitch - "Give me $97 and I'll show you how you can become a millionaire by working less than 2 hours a week!"

Don't waste your money with these scam artists, because I'm going to tell you the "secret" right here, right now, for free. The secret is that there is no secret! Contrary to what the $97 ebook hucksters would have you believe, there is no magic button, that when pressed brings you enormous wealth.

Selling on the internet involves the same basic concepts of selling that have been practiced for thousands of years. Although modern technology does influence the entire process, you still need to put a desirable product in front of the right audience when they're ready and able to buy. That's it - pretty simple concept, don't you think? Simple, yes - but it works!

How to select a profitable niche -

This is where a lot of beginners and even experienced marketers go wrong. They find a product, then they try to develop a market for that product. In actuality, they have the process in reverse order. Instead, they should look for a hungry market that isn't being satisfied and present them with just what they're looking for. Find the eager market first, then go find a product!

How do you find niche ideas? Well, you just have to be alert. As you go thru your daily activities, be on the lookout for possible niche markets. For starters, I'm always aware of trends and current events in the real world. I read newspapers, many magazines, both general and niche-specific, I watch the news, I listen to the radio. Occasionally something that I hear or read will stick with me. I may record my thoughts on my portable voice recorder or jot down some notes, whatever happens to be convenient for me. Sometimes I'll call my office voice mail and leave myself a message.

But at some point I'll have several broad ideas to research. I want to look deeper and I want to make sure there's a good market for them before I even think about creating a product or promoting an affiliate product.

First steps in research -

Once you have a list of possible niche ideas, it's time to take a cursory look and see if any of them hold promise. This can be done online for free, using these sites -

google.com/trends/hottrends: This site will give you statistical charts about search trends. You'll be able to tell at a glance if interest in a particular niche is growing or declining. Obviously, you'd want to find a niche that's showing increasing interest.

buzz.yahoo.com: This site will show you the most popular search terms currently being entered. This is also a good place to build your list of more possible niche ideas.

pulse.ebay.com: This site will show you the most popular current product categories on Ebay. You can click on the categories shown and see sub-categories that will give you even more niche ideas. Ebay also provides a monthly report of their hot products at pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf

Finding the good niches -

Now that you've compiled a list of niche ideas, it's time to see which ones are worth pursuing. You can download a free tool from goodkeywords.com to see what the market looks like for these different niche ideas. This tool will take your product idea and show you the most common related terms people are searching for. It also shows how many searches were done for that term in the last month. What this does for you is to give you a very good indication of how big of a market exists in this niche. As a side benefit, you'll also see lots of closely related terms you can use for SEO on your website to get that much needed traffic.

The trick here is to find keywords that are closely related to your potential niche product and have a fair number of searches every month, but they don't have a lot of competition. This is easy to do - just go to google or your favorite search engine and search for each of your potential niche keyphrases. This will tell you how many webpages are competing for that particular term. You'll want to narrow your niche keyphrase list down to the ones that have a fair number of searches as shown in the GoodKeywords tool, but don't have a lot of competition as indicated by the search engines.

When you are able to isolate the niches that have a good quantity of searches, low competition and they're showing a trend of growth, you've found a very likely winner!

It's a tedious process, but it pays off. Let's say that you investigate an idea and it looks good. You put up a website, do a little promotion to generate traffic. That niche product might only make a profit of $1,000 a month, which may not seem like much. But consider this - you only need to do the research one time and then you'll be making your profit month after month. There's nothing to stop you from building upon 20 niche ideas. And even if they only make $1,000 each per month, that works out to $240,000 a year. Not too shabby!

Author Bio:
Carson Danfield is an "under the radar" internet marketer who's been quietly selling on the internet for the past 8 years, so he's definitely not a newcomer to doing business on the web. If you'd like to take a software shortcut to finding highly profitable niche markets, you need to check out his latest Niche Finder Software at http://Traffic-Trix.com/<(a>ANF/