Okay… I think we would all agree there would be a greater opportunity to make money with a niche that involves baby products that one that sells something to people who collect information on old stamps. There are more people in the baby market than in the stamp market.

Oh sure… great piece of advice right? The master of the obvious here… but don’t run off. If you want to make money online, just about any niche can.

First, there are a whole bunch more people doing searches for baby related items, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money with stamps because you can. Competition For Making Money Online. The absolute perfect niche would have a lot of interest with very little competition in it.

Now, having said that… if you find one like this keep it to yourself and work like hell to get after it.

But, keep in mind, with competition comes interest. What this means is that if you discover a niche these days that has very little competition then you’ve probably just discovered a niche with very little interest and very little potential to make money online with it. So, a certain level of competition can be a very good sign. The key is to find the sweet spot within a niche that has a high level of interest.

Not only does competition in a niche indicate interest, but it will also give you many working examples of how others are capitalizing on that niche. So, all you have to do is some reverse engineering. Remember the old adage… where there’s smoke there is fire… in this case the opportunity to make some online money. The preference is all yours. I personally try to find that sweet spot between too much competition and too little.

But remember (and this is where many people miss) when you initially look at a niche and you see a whole bunch of competition. This means people are making money online with this niche. Now you might be thinking that the competition is way too stiff for you. But, think of using all this competition (which means interest) to your advantage.

How… simply be looking for those sub niches that fall below the main niche. If a main or top level niche has a lot of competition and interest, I guarantee you that there will be multiple tighter sub-niches below the surface. Another factor to consider is whether the niche you are looking at lends itself to monetization or not… or to what level.

So ask yourself what type of buying profile does the niche present to you. In other words, are the people spending money in the niche. Do you see a lot of products or services being offered or is the niche more tuned to be as frugal as they can. In other words if the niche seems to have trouble parting with a dime or are always looking for the freebies. If they are… you probably need to move on… you get the idea.

So rule number 1… you want to deal with a niche and an audience that has cash potential if you’re going to progress making money online.

Think back for a moment if you would to some of our earlier discussions about the underlying core principles of Internet marketing.

Internet marketing (or any marketing for that matter) really is in its simplest form finding a need in a marketplace and then fulfilling that need.

So let’s talk about finding your niche for just a moment.

I think probably the biggest mistake that most everyone makes when they get started in trying to make money online is to go after a niche in a far too broad a sense.

I know I certainly did. With my first website I ever did I was the poster boy for this mistake.

The niche refers to a very distinct portion of a particular market place. The key word there is distinct portion… or narrow portion… or thin slice… are you starting to get the picture?

With my first niche I started way too broad and had no chance to get traffic from these very broad keywords. However, unlike many I was too stupid to quit and just kept promoting and writing content. Over the course of time I began to hit the longer tailed keywords and subsequently spend started to make a little bit of money.

Now fast forwarding a bit the site now makes very good money online, but it took far longer to get there by starting at the broad end of the niche and working my way down… essentially I did it completely backwards and it took far longer to be successful than it should have.

Now, since you are here, you won’t have to worry about making such a egregious mistake.

So what is a niche?

A niche can be anything… any thing at all.

Since you are here and just starting out, I would strongly suggest that your first venture be into an area that is of great interest to you. Everyone… and I mean everyone… has some area in their life that they take an interest in or have a particular level of being a subject matter expert.

Use this to your vantage… let me say that again… use this to your vantage.

Having a strong interest, a passion, or even a background in a particular niche or subject matter is going to shorten your learning curve and make you money online much quicker.

There really is no right or wrong way when it comes to choosing a niche. The key is just choosing one and getting started. And remember you can’t sell everything to everybody so keep your focus tight.

With that in mind, we’ll talk about what some of the strong indicators are that you can look at when it comes to trying to determine if a particular niche has any potential at all. And we’ll also take a look at how to evaluate and eventually pick out a product that you can either create or promote.

So check back soon… and I’ll start working on that.

Every component of Internet marketing generally gives you the opportunity to make money online at just about any drilled out level.

Advertising dollars is a perfect example. Since just about any and every marketer uses some form of advertising to promote their products and generate traffic to their site; you then can make money at that level–and this is without any sort of product creation or even product purchase taking place by you or on your website.

How… simply by displaying advertising banners on your intranet Web properties will make you money online.

Displaying ads on your website for the purpose of having visitors to your site and then click on those ads is one of the most common ways people earn money online.

Without question the most notable program for this is Google’s AdSense program. This program is so simple it’s stupid. Advertisers pay Google for their Internet classified ads to show up on relative websites all across Internet. When someone visits one of these websites and happens to click on and advertisers add Google then pays a certain amount to the website owner. As far as making money online goes, this is as simple as it gets.

Simply go over to Google and sign up for their ad sense program and once you have your Google account you can display these ads on your website and start making money.

How much you earn from these clicks is completely determined by Google however the pay rate is generally determined by the popularity of the subject matter and the keywords involved. The more expensive it is for the advertiser to rank for a given keyword, and generally speaking the greater percentage Google will then pay the website owner.

As you might imagine what you make per click is relatively small compared to what you make per sale as a product creator. Most of the people that make good money online with AdSense, do so by the volume of websites they produce.

Although the Google AdSense program is not the only pay per click provider that you can use to make money on clicks, it is certainly the most predominant and popular. There are others and the payment model is essentially the same.

Why is the Google AdSense program so popular?

Easy… it’s simple and easy to implement and start making money online.

It’s just a matter of getting your publisher account the Google and then inserting a small bit of code into your website which is very easy to do and you’re up and running.

It’s also essentially maintenance-free. Once you have the Code in Pl., Google does the rest. Google will track and keep your stats and even has a direct deposit so this online money making model is about as auto pilot as it can be.

This online model is also not contingent upon a sale in order for the website owner to make a bit of money… just a click is all it takes. For many this is an extremely attractive model. Simply because there’s no sales copy to write, there is no product support to be administered, and there is no customer contact. Certainly all great advantages and they do have their place in the world of making money online.

So as you can see for great many people the Google AdSense model is a great fit. And it is certainly one model that we here at API used quite effectively.

Now that we’ve introduced the three most popular ways to make money online as an Internet marketer, coming up, we’ll start digging deeper into each of the individual pieces, so stop back by.

So… why would you want to create your own product to sell online.

Because this is where those who have great ideas and a bit of talent for market research can really, really make some good money.

It’s not just about being creative though, there’s much more to like about the product creation business model.

First of all… and probably why you’re reading this as we speak, product creation tends to be where the big money can be made online. Yes, it is quite possible for an affiliate marketer to make a small fortune online (it happens all the time), but for the average person just getting started I would say the odds are better for you to break through to a top income level as your own publisher or creator of a product.

The reason being, if you think about it for just a moment, as we discussed with affiliate marketing you are essentially out there working on a website, trying to drive traffic to a website, to sell a product that has been created or is owned by someone else. Even if you get your commission… and granted some of them are a pretty good commission… you are still only getting a smaller percent of the gross sale.

However, when you create your own product, you not only have the advantage of keeping 100% of the gross sales if the sale comes through your website, but you also have the marketing ability to begin recruiting vast numbers of affiliates that will sell your product for a commission.

I mean think about that for a moment… you may be thinking why pay your affiliates such a high percentage commission such as 60%, 70%, or even more!

The answer is easy… and it’s one that is the linchpin of making money online. It’s simply volume… but as you’ll learn further along in the course it’s not just the volume of affiliates that make you a good money online, it’s what you can do once you capture your customer’s name and e-mail and continued to market them on what we call the “back end”.

Let’s use of numbers just to help illustrate the point and do some simple math with the revenue.

Let’s say as the person who has just created a product and has put their website/sales page together that early on you are able to sell 10 copies per month of your e-book that you sell for $50 apiece.

Okay… simple enough… for that month you grossed $500.

Now let’s introduce those affiliate numbers. Let’s say you are able to recruit or sign-up an additional 10 affiliates and let’s say you pay them a 50% commission.

Again keeping it extremely simple, let’s say just like you each of those affiliates sold 10 copies of your e-book the next month. So, 10 affiliates times 10 sales equals 100 sales for the month or a gross revenue from your affiliates of $5000.

Now let’s not forget you have to pay them the 50% commission as promised. So after you pay commission of 50% your take is $2500. Plus, during this month you sold your 10 e-books at $50 apiece for a total of $500. So your gross earnings plus your net affiliate earnings just made you $3000 for the month. $2500 of it came from your affiliate worker bees out there promoting your product.

I think you can see now the advantage of taking the time and putting forth the effort into promoting and taking care of your affiliate sales army.

Although this particular example uses nice round numbers just to keep the math easy for yours truly, I think you can get the gist of the big advantage of of making money online when you are the product creator.

So what are the components then of creating your own product?

It’s very basic form there are probably about four areas that come into play when creating your own product. These would be, the preliminary market research, the creation or assembly of your product, the sales funnel or the logistics of selling your product, developing interest in driving traffic to your sales page.

The first step in product creation and making money online for that matter, is all about finding a need in the marketplace, and once you find that need coming up with a product that simply fills that need. I know this sounds overly simplified, but I’m quite serious marketing is all about finding needs and filling them.

Your planning and creation in the actual assembly of your product comes next after you have determined a market need and a product that will fill that need. But also under the creation of a lot of the product you’ll need to think about the physical sales page that you will need to create. This of course involves writing your sales copy. And even other details such as your thank you page and any other necessary website elements that will complete your online presence.

Sales logistics is a pretty broad area to talk about, but let’s at least do a high level overview as we close out this article and certainly we will get into more detail later.

Once your product is completed and all ready to go of course you will need to upload it to your website and have some sort of process or mechanics of actually tracking your sales.

And speaking of sales, don’t forget to put some thought and effort into developing your affiliate program. Which means offering your affiliates auto responder e-mails, graphics, banners, and any other promotional tools to make their job as easy as possible. Just as a quick and popular example of a third-party that handles most all of the aforementioned logistics would be Clickbank.

Once you’ve got the market research done, you’ve created your product, and you’ve got them place all of the logistical pieces of the puzzle, now it’s just a matter of driving traffic to your website. Certainly no small task, but without it you ain’t going to make any sales.

And we’re going to spend a whole bunch of time on driving traffic later on down the road… so stay tuned.

If you are marketing online, and you are not an affiliate then you’re probably selling your own products instead.

With the product creation model, there is more work associated with this approach, however since the work is all yours and the end result being the product that you are going to Internet market; then the profit margin is going to be much greater and be all yours as well.

Just keep in mind that as a general rule it will take longer to see an ROI on your efforts when it comes to creating your own product and getting it into the Internet market arena as opposed to simply going the affiliate marketing route.

So what is product creation?

In Internet marketing the product creation model simply involves creating your own new product and then marketing it for sale. Technically the product could be a physical product and you sell it via the Internet, but for our purposes and for the vast majority (particularly you knew Internet marketers) will keep our discussion on product creation in the digital format.

First… you come up with a great idea.

I’m not trying to be flip here, but you have to do diligence market research in order to make sure that the idea you have involves a real market. And unless you can get your product to the market very rapidly, you should be looking at markets that are considered evergreen. Evergreen is simply a term used to define the market that has basically an unlimited life span.

Once you determine that you have found market potential to you then of course create and fine tune your product for Internet marketing.

You’ll need to create the necessary online infrastructure to handle the sales process (the sales funnel). You’ll also want to take a look at recruiting actual affiliate marketers who will then he out there promoting and selling your product. Recruiting affiliates to get excited about and sell your product is a course in and of itself… but not to worry we are going to cover that in later discussions on affiliate marketing.

Of course, part of the sales funnel is the handling of the product delivery and your customer service after the sale.

This may sound like quite a lot… and it really is… because I haven’t even touched on many other aspects of the Internet marketing sales funnel and we will cover all of that. But for now keep in mind that even though there is much more work and more difficult logistics, the potential profit can be very well worth your efforts.

API is just getting started with the the (re)construction…

actually the complete overhaul of our website… so what you are seeing now is not even a shadow of what is to come.

API busy working on a complete A Powerful Income University (APIU) and classes will be beginning in the near future so stay tuned and check back.

API University is going to be geared for those who need detailed step by step coaching on how to get started, stay started, and run a successful online business.

Many sites that provide great information, often times make the assumption that those visiting the site and read the articles and the tutorial assume the reader already has a working knowledge of what it takes to not only understand the concept but also have the knowledge level to implement the process.

APIU is going to take you step by step right from the basics of getting your business started even before you begin clicking on the mouse and venturing out. API believes that a good foundation and understanding is the absolute best way to give yourself the best chance of success in this competitive business.

So, you’ll have the opportunity to get on the right track right from the ground floor.

API is excited about what its got in the works behind the scenes… and soon you’ll have the opportunity to look right over our shoulder as we show you proven techniques that make money, some we’re testing, and even those that we’re just on the cutting edge with….Make it point to check back because we’re working away behind the scenes…

working away on plan for your success!