The first concrete step in internet marketing is choosing your niche -- choosing what market you're going to serve. Until you've done that, you can't choose a relevant domain name and create a website. You also can't decide which products promote or develop.

Since profit potential varies widely from niche to niche, it's worth spending some time and thought to make sure you're starting down a road you'll want to continue following.

Lots of internet marketers select their niche at random. Maybe they buy somebody's internet marketing course and get into the niche that it recommends or uses in its examples.

Maybe they promote internet marketing products because that seems like the most obvious thing to do, or because that's where they see internet marketers making money.

Maybe they jump from niche to niche every time they find a new product to promote.

Josh Spaulding recently released a report called Easy Review Cash that talks about how a website he created in about one day's work made over $800 profit (it's up past $1,000 now). On his blog today, he gave this executive summary of the niche selection part of the report:

I'm obviously not going to type out the entire niche research section of the report, but I will tell you it basically consists of brainstorming every niche that you have at least some knowledge and/or passion in and using a simple process to cut it down to one.

He goes on to explain why you should select a niche you're personally interested in:

...because you are MUCH more likely to keep going with the site when faced with failure. Think about it, if you're plugging away spending a lot of time working on a new site that is targeting a niche that you know nothing about and care even less about only to realize it isn't making you a penny, what are you going to do? Most people will quit.

Reader Comment:
Jeremy Young said:
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Well, if a niche isn't making a penny, sometimes you really should quit. But I'd guess that more internet marketers fail by giving up on a site too soon than by sticking to it too long. That's just the nature of a lot of people who get into internet marketing, even when you're serving a niche you enjoy. I wasn't able to keep this blog active for years (till I created SEO Content Factory, which has helped immensely), even though I enjoy internet marketing.

Blogging experts often say it takes six months to a year or more of regular posting for a blog to really take off. If that's true, then the person who gives up if the profits don't start rolling in after the first month will never make it.

Now sure, instant hits do happen. But not very often.

If your strategy is to keep trying things for two weeks till you find the one that takes off fast, guess what -- that's not a get-rich-quick strategy. You may spend three years trying things before you manage to "get rich quick". Wouldn't you be better off sticking with one or two things for six months to a year?

When selecting a niche, I strongly recommend choosing one that you'd enjoy sticking to for the long haul even if it wasn't making money.

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