Remember, Save your work often! One of the reasons this blog has been neglected for a few days is I didn’t follow my own advice. I lost an almost completely written post with links, etc.

They used to say in sales "you need a gimick". In Internet Marketing, you need a "niche". A niche is something you specialize in, something like your own little corner of the world.

While you may be interested in "dogs" for example, that term is much to big, so you would want to narrow it down a little. Maybe you are interested in selling "dog collars" or "dog training". You need to do a little research to find an area where people are searching, but there isn’t a whole lot of information to serve those people. One of the places to do this is google’s own "keywood tool". It is a free tool that you really need to get familiar with anyhow, for when you put "keywords" into your website so people can find you. For now we are going to use it to research our "niche".

If you go to Google’s Keyword Tool, you put in the term for what you are planning on specializing in. Google will return a bunch of terms and a small graph for each one showing how full that particular niche is. It also gives you the number of searches for the last couple of months. Ideally what you are looking for is a bar graph that is about half full with a lot of people searching the term. An example may be the term for "dogs" is full, but the term "rhinestone dog collars" has a lot of searches, but the bar graph shows very little competition. So you may want to dedicate a site completely to "rhinestone dog collars from around the world" something like that. You need to narrow down your area of expertise when deciding what product to bring to market.

Other places to check out when wanting to see what people are searching for is Alexa.com, which will give you the top 100 searches and your own search engine. They all have a catagory for checking out what the top searches are from the people that use that particular search engine. I will let you know right up front that after the usuals, YouTube etc., a good portion of searches are either about celebrities or porn. You just need to wade through it.

Once you’ve found your "niche" and are deciding on what to name your website or blog, you may want to take the following into consideration.