Let me show you you about a process to go through when you’re trying to brainstorm for ideas…

For starters, always be aware of trends and existing events in the world. Study magazines, both broad-spectrum and niche-exact, watch the news, and listen to the radio. When something that you hear or scan sticks with you, continuously jot it down!

At some point you’ll have more than a few general ideas to delve into. Now you must look deeper, and make sure there is a decent market for them before you even think about promoting or designing a product.

So, start completing the next steps…

To set off with, inspect out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist (www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html).

From here you can choose:

• Google Trends - For a general look at search query data, enter up to 5 search terms to see relative popularity over time.
• Trends for Websites - Google Trends for website traffic data. Type in a website address to see visitors by zone and connected sites visited.
• Insights for Search - A deeper dive into search query data for marketers and power users. Produce your own lists of “most popular” and “fastest rising” queries for different geographic regions over time and by topic.
• Hot Trends - The top 100 fastest-rising search queries right now (U.S. only). Updates throughout the day.

You can also click on “Year-End Zeitgeist” or “Zeitgeist Archives” in the upper-left corner to look at past trends, in particular if you’re researching recurring or other trends over time.

At this point you are just searching for ideas. If you see that a particular theme is hot, make a note of it and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites (which I’ll show for you shortly).

Lycos Top 50 (50.lycos.com) is an alternative site, like Google Zeitgeist, where you can go through the newest trends and look for hot topics to examine further. eBay Pulse (pulse.ebay.com) is a great position to begin looking at sub-niches. What you want to do is opt for the category first (using the topics gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category. The best possibility for success is if you are as specific as possible with your niche selection. Yahoo! Buzz (buzz.yahoo.com) Also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas.

Also, continually examine the largest stores as well to see what they’re selling. There has to be a explanation why they are the major stores. They must be doing something right.

Now that you have some possible sub-niches to work with, you want to see how much of a market there is there. Just because a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean people spend money on it.

Amazon (www.amazon.com) is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche. Probabilitys are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.

Next you may use certain qualifying keywords to discover likely niches. You may have heard about these “discovery keywords”, and they are exactly that.
If you go to Google and type in any of the following keywords (make sure you surround them with double quotes for exact matches):

• How to
• How do I
• How do you
• How to fix
• How do I fix
• How do you fix
• How to prevent
• How do I prevent
• How do you prevent
• How to cure
• How do I cure
• How do you cure
• How to remove
• How do I remove
• How do you remove
• How to quit
• How do I quit
• How do you quit

Discovery keywords are a great way to find what people are searching to do, solve, or achieve.

Finally, you should benefit from the “low hanging fruit.” That is, it’s always much easier to sell a similar product to one that’s already selling well, than to try to pierce a market cold. If you explore your potential competitors up front, you’re going to get a pretty good notion as to how well they’re doing, both in terms of checking their traffic rankings by Alexa (www.alexa.com) and Compete (www.compete.com), as well as their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (at a minimum).

If you are looking for more niche marketing information you must visit Think Home Business! Subjects like starting a home business | affiliate marketing scams | internet business scams are also discussed.

Article published by Geine Geyser of Think Home Business!