Many of us learn from the Gurus that we should identify a niche and dominate it, so we can make money online. They give us brief glimpses about what is to be done, like identifying a niche market by browsing magazines and hanging around in forums and discussion groups to see if we can be hit by an idea brainwave.

Oh how I wish it was that easy. My first attempts at finding a niche made me feel like I've gone deeper into quicksand, and the niche with a great demand had an awful lot of competition. Not one to be outdone, I went and bought software and books to learn what mistakes I made and try to recover from the mistakes. I learnt all about demand, and how "wordtracker" is the best service to use to assess demand for keywords and how to assess and estimate supply from "Google" manually. I saw lots of products offering to teach me how I should target the market, research the keywords, analyse the KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index, which tells you the relative profitability of the keyword you select based on demand,supply and competition), and signed up for a lot of courses to learn more about niche marketing.

To cut the process short, this is what I learned:

a. You must have a niche (this is easy, you don't want to try to compete with the biggies)

b. You must assess the demand - i.e. find buyers in this market with money to spend.

c. You must see who you are pitted against - your supply estimate to see the competition.

d. Having found the demand and supply, and with a fair idea of the competition, you must find the profitability of your niche business idea.

e. Once you feel it is profitable, get into product development around this niche.

f. Promote the product and pocket the cash ...

What you end up learning the hard way is that all these people who write about earning money with google adwords ads don't tell you how much they spent on the ads, and if it is really that profitable..see, it is a numbers game, as I will show you below:

Assume you will have a decent 1% conversion rate for your product. That means for every 100 clicks you will make a sale. At a minimum bid of 5 cents, you will surely turn a profit for every $5 spend you do. But then, real life is not that easy. You have people competing against you, and your 5 cent bid doesnt attract clicks, leave alone buyers. So you either lose this small amount every day, or hike your bid to get some good clicks. Say you hike your bid to $0.25. At this rate, you would spend $25 to make a sale... get the trend of my thinking?

Unless you are lucky and able to find cheap keywords with high demand to bid on, the google adwords will remain a losing proposition. Or else you have to find the words people use when they look to buy something on the internet, and bid high on those keywords, to increase your conversion rate. This was the situation I found myself in..until I found a good software which did everything the sales page said it would do.

With this software, I was able to assess demand, supply and profitability scores on my idea, and come with lots of keywords with these demand/supply/competition data plus the top 3 PPC bids. I knew clearly what I needed to spend, before I went into product creation or promotion. How I wish I found this software before I sunk in money in internet marketing! But then, as they say, better late than never.

Well, now you know the rub... find a good software which does a great job. It takes the guesswork out of niche marketing.