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?