Viable Online Business for Beginners

Question: Why is it so hard to get started with an online business in affiliate marketing?

Answer: High levels of competition as this is the lowest cost of entry into a thriving market!

I personally spent countless hours and a substantial amount of money staring my online business. I was smart enough, I guess. I mean I did well in university and made a good living as a project manager following my stint in the academic ranks. I did even better later on as a project management consultant.

The problem was that I was working too much and too far from home. There had to be an answer to develop a steady income stream entirely online. There had to be a way to generate a good income and stay close to my family. I was determined to figure it out.

I purchased, downloaded and read countless eBooks touting anywhere from $100,000 in 90 days to $1,000,000 in a year. Like the good student I was, I followed the instructions to a tee (save the cheesy, hard selling, red letter web sites) and nothing. I spent money on key words with Google, generally letting Google's Key Word tools select them for me as I did not and do not trust the third party web sites claiming superiority to Google, and why would I! The return was, again, NOTHING.

I eventually found that the rules to online marketing and building a sustainable online business with a steady stream of income closely resembled those learned in my Marketing 101 class in university. The online marketing and business success necessitate three things:

1. Niche identification
2. Niche market exploitation
3. Niche identification

You will note the repetitious nature of the cycle. This, unfortunately, is not as easy as one might think. In the online marketing realm, it is often even more difficult than in the bricks and mortar world due to the millions of intelligent competitors. Unfortunately for me, most of these competitors had far more time on their hands for the research and identification of the niches and the subsequent steps.
There are a few tried and true ways to identify the niche and, more often than not, it involves the same philosophy the Wall Street Traders hold dear; follow the herd.

At the Click Bank market place one can easily identify where the heard is going simply by sorting high gravity and popularity of the affiliate products available there. Just go to www.clickbank.com and select "Marketplace" and sort by "Gravity". This will tell you what the rest of the folks in the herd are going after in a frenzied state. Now, not all of them are niche markets, but a bit more Google research can help confirm or deny this.

Now that you have your niche identification, comes the second step; exploitation. This can be a bit tricky, or not, depending on your field of expertise. I strongly encourage people to avoid attempts at exploiting niches in which they have no expertise as the efforts, save the lucky few, generally produce results commensurate with the knowledge.

If you have a background and physical therapy or personal training, for example, you can easily exploit health & fitness niches. I like my beer and sweets too much to delve into this, so generally stick to exploiting things that I know something about such as general marketing and computer & internet software, add-ons, technical papers etc. Get started with a plan to exploit your niche, execute and move onto the next step.

The next step, of course, is to repeat the entire process. It is can be cumbersome, but trust me on this one, it gets easier with each repetition. Hey, it's not easy. However, few things worthwhile enough to get you more quality time with your family while you work from home are.

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