Finding a profitable niche to build a site about is a two-step process.

1. Find several potential niches.
2. Check to see which one is most profitable.

This article looks at the first part - coming up with ideas.

This is often the biggest stumbling block for those starting out in this affiliate marketing business. Where do you get ideas from? I do get a lot of people asking me for ideas, but it really is not that difficult.

There are lots of places you can get ideas. Here are a few that I use:

a) Go and surf around Amazon.com. Amazon is a huge online retailer that stocks not only books, but also a huge range of other products, separated into a large number of niches. Make a few notes of potential areas you might consider.

Simply look down the categories and sub-categories to come up with ideas for a site. Stick with what you know, and enjoy.

b) Visit online portals and directories. I recommend that when you find some good ones with lots of categories, you bookmark them.

For example, visit http://dmoz.org/. Drill down some categories to find potential niche markets.

Here is a directory I found by accident

http://www.oramd.com/resources/index.htm

This site has a huge category list of health niches which you can use for ideas.

c) Another idea is to go to eBay and drill down through the categories on the left hand side.

e.g. Go there now, and click on the Health & Beauty category. Do you see how many sub-niches are available for you to choose from?

d) Use Wordtracker to find what people are looking for (you can use the trial version if you don't have a membership).

Try entering words like this into Wordtracker and seeing what phrases you get back:

buy
purchase
online
prevent
fix
info
learn
remedy

There is a huge amount of potential niches that can be found this way, and the best of all, they are being actively searched for at the search engines, so you know there is a demand.

If you have a subscription to Wordtracker, you can also browse down the top 1000 reports. The long term report gives you 1000 phrases that have consistently been search for in the last 120 days.

As you can see, there is a wealth of tools and places you can go to get ideas for your site.

Write down a few ideas that interest you before moving on to the next section.