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With the current state of the economy many are looking for info on how to find an online business to start.   The first thing people usually want to do is start a business selling something on ebay or start their own clothing store or something like that.  With all of the websites and competition out there you have to start with doing your research on products and information that people want.   The way to succeed online or in any business is creating information or a product that people need.   In these tough economic times people need resources for saving money, making extra income and living simply.   They need resources for self growth and improving their lives.  They need good solid products and services from reliable, moral business people.

You can start researching what people want by just taking a look around online.   You can go to places like amazon.com and ebay.com and look at each section on their website and see what the top products that are selling in each category.  You can also go to ezinearticles.com and choose any article in a category and at the end of the article it will show you a list of the most popular articles.  This is a sample of what people are looking for.

Another cool tool is the Google Trends data which will let you see how things move over time and what people are currently searching for and what is most popular.

Then start thinking about what it is that you know a lot about or are an expert at.   Information is big online.  People are looking for information really online.  You can get an idea of what people are searching for by using a few free keyword research tools.   Try the Adwords Keyword tool and the Free Wordtracker software.   There are other tools given in this handy research tool called Searchit!

These tools will give you an idea of how many people are searching for different words or products online.  The next thing you want to get an understanding of is how to know if you have any chance of getting a site found for a given keyword or topic.   Like Travel will be too broad of a topic.  You want to narrow it down into a specific area of travel – like to a certain area, city or type of travel.    I call it ’spinning’ your topic around until it feels right after you analyze all of the data including how many people are searching for the keyword/possible niche.   You do that by doing a Google Search for the keyword in “quotation marks” which no one really uses but what this will tell you is how many sites there are out there that are doing the same thing and using that exact keyword or phrase.   Anything over a 100,000 and you don’t have much of a chance of getting found very easily.

Once you narrow down a few different topics what you will want to research is how will you make money.  The two biggest ways of making money is by using Google Adsense or promoting affiliate products which are other people’s products.  You can find many different affiliate programs and make money when people buy them through special links that you put on your website.  With Google Adsense all you do is get a free account with them and place their ads on your site.  When people click on the ads you will get paid.  You can research what the guesstimated amount people are paying Google for the ads so you can get a sense of how much you can make by using the Keyword tool again and clicking on the CPC in the drop down box.  Now you don’t get that much directly but will get a small percentage of that.  Google doesn’t really tell you how much.  The higher the better of course.

So now you have some ideas for websites and how to make money with them.  You just have to decide which one to start first.   I would recommend that you go with whatever you know the most about first because it takes a lot of patience and perseverance to get a website going to the point of making even a little to pay the electric bill let alone to make a living.

After that you need to learn how to choose the best domain name, set up and optimize the pages for search engines and get your pages found by the search engines.  You will need to have a newsletter and/or way of getting people to give you their email address so you can stay in touch with them and continue to offer info.