Internet Marketing is a very deep topic which you can spend your entire life talking about. The basics of this kind of marketing are known by almost all the people who deal with online businesses:
From Wikipedia – Internet Marketing, also referred to as web marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet. Basically, internet marketers affiliate with networks in order to promote their products and earn money.
That sounds quite simple, but for mysterious reasons you may feel that you don’t know anything about it, no matter how much you read about the topic. Which is the secret formula used by gurus? First of all, I need to clarify that I’m not a guru in this topic but however I have learned many tricks with the passing of time, committing mistakes, testing and testing again!.
I know what internet marketing is but I don’t know how to get involved – Help me!
That’s not a crime so don’t worry! In this topic I’m going to teach you a couple of tricks in order to help you getting started. Great! So let’s take it easy and think about the very first thing you need in order to start digging into this goldmine… Skipping either a domain or an affiliate network, the very first thing you need to have is a Niche Market.
From Wikipedia – A niche market is a focused targetable portion of a market. A distinct niche market usually evolves when a potential demand for a product or service is not met by any supply, or when a new demand arises due to changes in society, technology, or the general environment.
Once you understood what a niche market is, how do you get one? There are many websites which provide this kind of information, so what I’m going to do now is to review and study a couple of them:
Google Zeigeist
“Zeitgeist” means “the spirit of the times”, and Google reveals this spirit through the aggregation of millions of search queries they receive every day. Zeigeist is not a Google tool at all, it is more a place where you can find the Google tools that make the dirty job, and among them we have four, but just mainly 2: Google Trends and Insights for Search.
By combining both tools you can get very accurate data about what people is looking for. Personally I really love Google Insights because you can see the evolution of a term with the passing of time since the service was launched – 2004 I think.
Yahoo! Buzz
Yahoo! Buzz is a great service launched the last year which you can see the most active topics on Internet. In addition, top searches are broken down into actors, movies, sports, etc., with constantly updated short articles to the right of the top search chart. This is a great place to get information about the most popular searches in relatively real-time.
AOL Hot Searches
AOL Hot Searches is something similar to Buzz when we talk about diversification, because there you will find the top 10 searches by categories. I read it updates every 12 seconds, so I guess it should be very accurate. By checking the sidebar you could see the Year’s Top Searches – 2008 in this case. With this another section you can see what was hot throughout the last year!.
Amazon BestSellers
Being Amazon a big place where everybody buys, its Bestsellers section is perfect to know what the people is interested on, and what they are buying. You can take advantage by knowing what kind of products are making great sales.
Lycos 50
Lycos is one of the most classic websites since the internet started. At Lycos 50, you can find the most 50 active searches during a week. Perfect to get new and fresh ideas.
Ask Top Searches
As you may know, Ask.com’s innovative search technologies deliver fast and relevant information for millions of people every day. Ask makes cuts of the searches, displaying the top searches for the week ending a date.
Bloglines
Bloglines is a feed reader, but besides that it offers a section with the most popular blog feeds. This is a great resource to know what bloggers/networkers are talking about!.
Technorati
Technorati is a blog search engine and may be the most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, indexing more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content. By looking at the popular searches you can know the hottest things about what bloggers are talking about.
DogPile
Dog what? Dogpile is on a mission to help rescue pets. They call it our Search & Rescue program. When you search the Web on Dogpile, a portion of revenue generated will be donated to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA®). However, it shows in real-time what the world is searching for.
Ok I know where to find niches, then what?
Once you find a niche market, then you need to search affiliates in order to have something to promote. Finding a niche was only the first step and then after finding affiliates, you need to find good keywords, establish the affiliate campagin model among other many aspects, which I will dealing with in the next days. 
What about you? Where do you find niche markets?
Hey! my name is Javier but you can call me Javo, everybody does.
Good post, so what do you think about 2009, what kind of products is going to be trend this year, what do you think about digital information products ? i’ll be waiting for your next post
revenues last blog post..Payoneer Prepaid MasterCard
Hey that could be a good niche, I will think about it and make my analysis because is not that simple… It is important to know if someone is already in that niche and if it works, otherwise you can lose much money…
You need to study the behavior of the people, I will talk more about it then, this topic was just “where to find them” and not how to choose them
Great post.
I find most of my niches via brainstorming. Your mind is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it. I have brainstormed 80% of my niches, 10 % are the niches where I know something or do something myself (for ex. outdoor sports), and the rest 10% I find on TV, Magazines, etc. You will be amazed how many great niches you can find reading a magazine while standing in a line at the grocery shop.
Cheers,
The Moneyac
The Moneyacs last blog post..16 Interesting Internet Facts You Should Know About
Without our minds we are nothing, that’s a fact. Everything starts there, even the idea to promote *something*.
By the way, I will try to experiment with the magazines, they seems to be a great source of ideas… Asides I buy like 5 a month, I will look more closely to the most popular ones.
You should really try it out, it works.
Oh and by the way. The date which shows when the post has been written under the post’s title it says “February 2st”. I am just pointing to it maybe if you have missed that one.
Cheers.
The Moneyacs last blog post..16 Interesting Internet Facts You Should Know About
ohh! thank you very much…it was a kind of error in the wordpress php code…
I would add that when researching niches, you should also examine any seasonal trends within them. Watch the rise of keyword searches for “super bowl” as an obvious example in the lead up to yesterday.
The key then is to be sure to have a decent site or post up on the topic at least 2 weeks in advance (more if possible) so you have time to get crawled by google.
Cheers
Patrick
Excellent advice Patrick! Looking forwards more of your comments here at my blog
You can also go to your affiliate program and choose a product that you can write different topics about.
Damiliks last blog post..GoDaddy Commercial Ads At Super Bowl
I will deal with that topic in other post, which is picking an affiliate product… This one was about were to find niches, but your comment is totally valid!
I invite you to stay tunned to share your experiences in this matter…
You have given us a lot of places to research the next big niche of 2009… now its time to put this post into action.
Good Read
Jason
That’s right! In the next days I will write more about Internet Marketing
These are great methods for getting search engine traffic, which also happens to be the traffic that is most likely to click on ads.
Gennaros last blog post..Things To Do In NYC (For Free)
Thanks for sharing this little guide. This one can help the interested business owner get his advantage online.