I mean where do you start?

I was scared that I would choose the wrong market and make absolutely no money.

Talk about feeling overwhelmed. But until you choose something you will never know and you will make nothing.

It stands to reason that the more interest there is in a topic the more likely you’ll be able to sell stuff.

So the two questions that you have got to ask yourself are:

1. How and where can I find ideas and topics that are in demand now?

2. How can I judge demand or interest toward an idea?

Well the good news is, there are a number of ways to find these topics and judge what the demand is.

I have put together the top five resources I use to assess a market or idea. Here we go:

1. Clickbank
Most people have heard of clickbank, but in case you haven’t it is one of the world’s largest marketplace for digital downloaded products in every conceivable market you can think of with the added benefit that you can become an affiliate and promote them.

When you land on the homepage, along the top there is a tab called “marketplace,” click on this and select your chosen niche that you are considering.

For the purposes of this article lets use “weight loss.” Then go to “sort results by” click on popularity and hey presto it gives you the best selling in that category. How cool is that! Focus on the top 10 for ideas.

2. Amazon
This site needs no introduction. If you haven’t heard of it you must have been living under a rock!

Head over to the books section let’s again use weight loss as an example. Enter this keyword in and it will list and rank in order of popularity the books and subjects within this niche that are currently selling and what people are buying right now.

3. Google
Put into a normal Google search your niche such as weight loss as in the above example.

Now, pay special attention to the first results page and the paid ads that are normally listed on the first three results and on the right hand side.

If people are paying for these ads to get onto the first page of Google, they must be selling well and making money.
Take note of the types of products listed.

4. Article directories
Go to the three most popular article directories goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com and isnare.com and, in each case, look at articles in your targeted niche and pay attention to the “most viewed.”

This will give you a good idea of the specific topics within your niche that are popular and being viewed daily.

5. YouTube
Use the words of your targeted niche and concentrate on the videos with the most views.

However, you should focus on the videos that show how to do something or how to fix or solve a problem. That way you are tapping into people’s questions and concerns.

Once you are armed with the information above you are already ahead of most of your competitors who just guess.

Take these steps and identify niches within a market or to see what interest there might be in a new product idea you have.

Doing this research upfront will stack the odds in your favor and help your business take off from the start saving many lost hours scratching your head and saving money on products people don’t actually want.

At the end of the day, all you want to do is instantly maximize your income and try and automate your online business wherever you can.

The problem is, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of traffic source websites where you press a button and all this traffic comes cascading to you on autopilot for life — come on we all know that does not work.

Historically there are two simple ways to get traffic — either paid traffic or free traffic. It’s simple really.

Back in the day, our friend Google used to be the way to go by setting up a campaign and getting instant traffic based on the keywords you had entered beforehand. Overthe years, this has become very complicated and very expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Thankfully, the landscape has now changed and there are new, proven ways to direct traffic to any website without spending a small fortune.

How would you like to hear about free traffic sources that can help you get good quality reliable traffic on a consistent basis?

So, without delay, may I present you with three traffic options you can use straight away:

1. Forum Marketing

Forum marketing has evolved over the years with the surge of social media and relationship marketing — it is a way to connect with a targeted audience, identify what they want and help them out.

It’s a great way to find out the big players in your market and identify what type of product or service is likely to sell. Firstly it’s good to offer free high-quality content, tools and resources.

Most forums give you the opportunity to create a profile that can include your website address, social media contacts, a short bio and personal information.

However the main advantage is something called a “signature box” and is attached to every post that you do on your chosen forum. In this you can include your URL address to your best address contact page. What’s important is to link to something that is of value like a free report, not an outright sales page.

2. Document Sharing Networks

Check out the potential behind document and content sharing distribution networks such as docstoc.com which is a very simple document sharing site that can generate immediate traffic.

With this, you can upload your content but, importantly, you can embed your affiliate links within the content itself for people to click onto your website.

Another great site is scribed.com and works in the same way, enabling you to upload to specific categories. So if you are in the weight loss industry, click on and upload to that section.

With both these sites, you can upload virtually anything such as eBooks, articles, tutorials etc. so there is plenty of scope.

3. Tutorial-Based Learning Communities

This resource is based around tutorial-style websites. If your niche market has a demand for instruction-based content, then you have struck gold.

What you can do here is create a series of guides and videos that show people exactly how to do something in your niche. For example in weight loss it could be a series of how to develop six-pack abs over two months.

You can include a link into your chosen website so people can click on and find out more. The good news is, tutorials don’t have to be long masterpieces, short, sharp and to-the-point is best.

Some of the best sites I’ve found for tutorials are: tutorial-index.com designfloat.com good-tutorials.com and envato.com

Check them out. They are free to sign up to and with a little effort you can get fantastic results and quickly.

So there we have it — three resources that I have / do use to generate traffic to my websites on a regular consistent basis. It does take a bit of effort but produces fantastic results.

If you are simply publishing content hoping the sales will come flying in, I’m afraid to say that just ain’t going to happen. Sorry folks. You need a solid plan and approach to reap the rewards of your hard work.

In my experience over the years, I have dropped into many pitfalls that have sucked the time, effort and motivation out of my plans. I was OK at English in school and actually quite enjoy writing, but it takes time and inspiration.

Therefore, I thought it would be useful for me to share the pitfalls that I and many other marketers have experienced so you don’t have to suffer the same misery.

Mistake 1 — Missing Your Call To Action
We are normally passionate about the topics we cover and just hope someone will agree and buy stuff from us. However, if you don’t tell your readers about your products and services, guess what, they are not going to know how to buy.

This sounds mad doesn’t it? But you will be staggered how many times this happens. Each piece of content you produce must have a call to action. This can be as simple as a link to view one of your videos, e-mail for more information or ideally present an opportunity to get a freebie — a tactic I have found to be very popular.

Mistake 2 — Not Understanding Your Niche or Market
It is important to discover and understand what makes your audience tick because, let’s face it, how else can you create what they are looking for? There are a number of ways to do this. Consider keyword research via free tools like Google keyword tool. This will show you what people are actually searching for online in your niche.

I have just jumped on and used “weight loss” as a keyword example which, as you would imagine, is very popular but it gives you sub keywords like “hcg diet” which has 550,000 searches a month and has low competition.

Now I haven’t got a clue what this diet is but, if you are in the weight loss industry, I reckon creating content and selling an eBook on this subject would be a good idea.

Mistake 3 — Creating All of Your Own Content
This is something that I have started doing recently. Even though I enjoy some aspects of writing, it can be very time consuming, Therefore having someone else do it makes some sense. Hiring a ghostwriter from sites like elance.com or oDesk.com, means he or she writes the content for you.

Now before you ask I did compile this article myself, however, these sites are awesome. On Elance you post your job and wait for people to bid. You check out their profiles, look at previous work and comments from previous jobs and agree to a price you are comfortable with. How cool is that?

Another option is using PLR (private label rights), content you can buy and then edit for your audience. I have used sites like theplrstore.com where you can buy a PLR book in your niche for as little as $0.99, then simply reword it.

In fact, here’s an idea, why don’t you combine the two above and buy the PLR book and get someone on Elance to rewrite it for you. You could probably do this for around $50 and within two to three days.

Mistake 4 — Lack Of Relevance
I bet you have experienced this one yourself. You sign up to an e-mail list from someone that interests you on a particular subject, but then you get bombarded with daily e-mails on a totally different subject. There is nothing more frustrating for readers. If you do this, people will unsubscribe and you have wasted your time. The more relevant you can be the better your results will be in the long-term. Your readers will get to know, like and trust you and ultimately buy from you.

Mistake 5 — Quantity Over Quality
There is an argument that the more content you can get out there, the better the more chance of people finding you.

However I have found that producing shorter quality content gets better long-term results because people who do connect with you are more likely to stay.

Take time to do things well and make it visually appealing and people are also more likely to recommend you to others.

This way, your business will grow on a viral basis. There are many pieces to the content puzzle and consumers are getting a lot more sophisticated and demanding.

Therefore, if you can satisfy their hunger and give them exactly what they want you should have a customer for life.