This is the most important first step and requires thorough research. Once you have identified your market you will have a basis for choosing a domain name and a focus for your website.

First put together a list of your interests: hobbies, sports, what books you read. What talents and abilities do you have? What types of jobs have you worked at? What do people come to you for advice about? What would you like to learn more about? Make a point of noticing what people are interested in? Look at what is selling on e-Bay and what the magazine articles are about. Keep this list handy and add to it whenever another topic or market idea comes to you.

Now take your list and research the market for each of these topics. You want to know:

Is this a large market?

Are people purchasing products in this market?

Is there competition which indicates there is money to be made?

Are there up-scale products to promote as back-end offers?

Are the members of this market passionate about their interest?

First you want to know if there is enough interest out there among the internet surfers about this market. Go to:

1.Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing)

http://inventory-overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in your proposed markets keyword or keyword phrase; the one you think people are typing in to search for information. Overture will then tell you how many searches were done in a month for that particular keyword. It will also list related keywords and give the number of searches for each of those.

You will want to have at least 10,000 searches shown for your main keyword and have several related keywords with high numbers. Another program to use is Wordtracker.

This information will enable you to pick several market areas to proceed with further research. Now you need to know the top prices that are being bid by advertisers for these keywords. Go to:

2. Overtures Bid Tool

http://uv.bidtool.overture/d/search/tools/bidtool

Unfortunately Overture is currently going through an overhaul and is not always available. Hopefully the new software will be an improvement. Another tool is Googles keyword tool:

http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

While this does not give you the degree of information that Overtures bid tool does, it does give an indication of the amount advertisers are spending on the various keywords. It can also gives you an indication of the volume of searches performed but only in a graph format. No real numbers.

Now go to Google and type in your main keyword phrase. A three word phrase is more specific. At the top of the page Google gives the number of pages that pertain to this keyword phrase. On the right-hand side of the page you will see ads that businesses have paid for through the adwords program. This is your competition. Check out your competitions ads, their product, their sales page, the price and the page rank. For the page rank you need a Google toolbar which is free and easy to download. Just go to Google.com and ask for it.

On the left-hand side of the page, the information and internet addresses that come up are called the organic returns. Those businesses do not pay to be placed there. Google has chosen them by its criteria, the main one being relevancy to the words typed in by the searcher. These are your strong competitors. If their page rank is 5 they have their webpage well optimized for the search engine. On their webpage you can check their list of keywords by clicking on view and then source. This brings up the html code of their page and under the meta names you can usually see keywords.

This market research is vitally important and does take time. Much of this research can be done quickly with the Keyword Elite software program. With this program you can quickly identify markets that look to be profitable and eliminate those that do not seem to have much interest. By doing your research you minimize the risk of spending time and money on a non-profitable market.

Author: the Administrator Hilary Stewardson, has spent several years compiling information about doing business on the internet and now is writing and presenting articles to clarify and simplify the information overload experienced by many newcomers.

http://www.internetbusinesssite.org