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Strictly for the One Man Strictly for the One Man Strictly for the One Man Strictly for the One Man Strictly for the One Man Strictly for the One Man Strictly for the One Man Strictly for the One Man Strictly for the One Man Entrepreneurs and Work Entrepreneurs and Work at Home Moms!

Working at Home? Working at Home? Working at Home? Working at Home? Time is of the Essence!Time is of the Essence! Time is of the Essence! Time is of the Essence! Time is of the Essence!

I’ve heard people say that the main reason that they want to work at home is because they can work only when they want to work. It IS true that you can set your own work hours when you work at home but it does NOT mean that you don’t have to have set work hours.

A ‘hit or miss’ work schedule…or rather, the lack of any work schedule at all, simply will not work. Time is of the Essence! YOUR time!

Working at home can be a very, very good thing. You can be at home to see the kids off to school and be at home when they get home. You can put a load of laundry in and it can run through the cycles while you are working.

You can have dinner cooked before a hungry family descends like a flock of hungry buzzards. All of those things are real perks that you automatically get when you work at home.

Working at home can also be a very, very bad thing if you do not plan your time well and if you do not set up a work schedule that you and your family can live with. When you work at home, time really is of the essence.

You must make very good use of the time that you spend working. If you are not efficient in accomplishing the tasks that must be done, you will either spend too much time working or you will fail miserably at your work at home job or business.

You must set up a work schedule for yourself when you work at home and then you must enforce that work schedule for yourself and insist that you family and friends also adhere to your work schedule.

A job out in the brick and mortar world does two things; (1) It provides a structure for your day and (2) it tells your family and friends that your time is spoken for during

your working hours. You will notice that both of these things that a regular job provides both relate to your TIME.

First let’s discuss the structure that a regular job provides and how you can apply that structure to your work at home job or business. When you have a job that you go to outside your home, you are required to be at that job at a specified time on specified days of the week.

When you have a work at home job or business, you need that same kind of structure. You need to set regular working hours. The freedom that a work at home job provides is that you can choose the hours…but you do have to choose!

Now let’s talk about your family and friends and how they are going to view your work at home job. It is a strange but very true fact that your dear mother would not DREAM of calling you at your ‘real’ job and asking you to drive Aunt Rosie to the beauty shop and wait for her….after all….you are WORKING and can’t be expected to leave your job to run errands. Right?

That very same considerate mother WILL call you and ask you to take Aunt Rosie to the beauty shop and wait for her when you are working at home. Why? Because you are at home and available, that’s why.

Your dear, sweet mother will not see your work at home job as a ‘real’ job. Your spouse will also see you as being free to run errands. Your friends will see you as being available for long telephone conversations, lunch or for a coffee klatch.

You can see the problem. If YOU do not schedule your time and abide by your schedule yourself, others will not. Unless you see your work at home job as a REAL job with REAL working hours, your time will be eaten up. You will not accomplish the tasks that you need to accomplish.

You will fail and find yourself out looking for a REAL job unless you see your work at home job as the REAL THING with regular working hours that make you unavailable for other activities.

The best way to accomplish using your time to your own best advantage with your work at home job or business is to make a schedule and tell your family and friends what that schedule is.

You don’t have to be rude but you do have to be firm. Make it clear to all. “I will be working between 9 AM and 3 PM Monday through Friday. On those days and during those hours, I am NOT available to run errands or take personal phone calls or entertain company.” Then stick to it!

Wise Time Management Tips for Wise Time Management Tips for Wise Time Management Tips for Wise Time Management Tips for Wise Time Management Tips for Wise Time Management Tips for Wise Time Management Tips for Wise Time Management Tips for Wise Time Management Tips for WorkWork -at -Home Entrepreneurs Home Entrepreneurs Home Entrepreneurs Time for work-at-home entrepreneurs is their single most valuable asset. Nothing can replace time…valuable, precious time!

No matter how rich or poor you are, no matter how many things are on your ‘to-do’ list, you still just get the regulation twenty-four hours each day. Sometimes I could use another twenty-four but that isn’t going to happen. I’ll bet that you could use more hours in your work day, as well.

The thing about those twenty-four allotted hours per day is that we can’t spend all of them working. We have to sleep some of them. We have to take time to eat and there is the occasional shower, too.

Our families and our friends require some of our time. Relationships must be nurtured. So…we can allow ourselves just so many work hours each day. Since our working time is limited that means that we must make the very most of the hours that we work. We can’t waste time on unimportant details or on tasks that others can do.

When you shave a few minutes here and a few minutes there, you will make more efficient use of your allotted work hours. Here are a few suggestions and in the interest of saving your time (and mine), I’ll keep this brief and to the point.

Email account efficiency: We all have various email accounts. We use one account for this and another account for that. Checking each and every email account more than once a day can be a time consuming task that you very easily make less time consuming by having all of the email that comes to all of your various email account to come into one gmail account. One email account takes a lot less time than several and you can still maintain all of your various email addresses.

Additionally, you don’t need to spend a lot of time reading and answering emails that are not going to add to your bottom line.

Email comes in several varieties. There are emails that are business related, emails that are important but not business related and emails that are simply frivolous and time wasting. If an email has been forwarded several times, don’t waste your time.

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Affiliate Marketing – How Really Competitive It Is

When you watch a football game on TV, you can easily see how games are won or lost in the battle that takes place on the line of scrimmage. Offensive plays are designed to protect the quarterback and/or to open up holes in the defense so that yardage can be gained.

Defensive plays are designed to sack the quarterback or close holes that would allow yardage to be gained. Quarterbacks and coaches get the credit for wins and blame for losses but the battle is won or lost in the trenches.

Affiliate marketing is a lot like a football game just without the bruises and sore muscles. An affiliate marketer must design offensive plays and defensive plays that will put him in a position to win the affiliate wars.

When you are one of many marketers who are trying to sell the very same product to the very same consumers, you had better have a plan to get at least your fair share of the market or more.

Every niche market on the Internet is highly competitive. If it isn’t competitive then there can’t possibly be much of a customer base to sell to. That is just the nature of all Internet marketing and in every niche.

Maybe you do have a long and impressive list of paid customers. That’s great! It means you have already won several of the affiliate marketing contests and come out on top. The problem is there are always those up and coming marketers who want your customers on their lists.

Your list and your competitor’s lists may well contain many of the same names and email addresses. Just having a list will not be enough to assure you of a victory when selling an affiliate product. You have to design some offensive plays that will assure that your customers buy from you and not from your competitors.

So, you ask, what is it that I can do that will assure that my customers will buy from me? The answer is just one word... unique!

You have to be unique. You have to offer something that sets you completely apart from your competitors. You have to make your offer for a product or service for which you are an affiliate more attractive to buy from you than it is to buy from you competitors. If you simply send out a marketing email advertising a product or service that you are an affiliate marketer for, you need to remember that there are dozens or maybe even hundreds of other marketers who are sending out marketing email advertising the exact same product or service and many of them are sending them to the same people that you are. You have to do something to make sure that your customers buy from you...you have to be unique.

There are several ways to achieve uniqueness. One way is to have established yourself as an expert in the field for which the product or service is being sold. You have to have become not only visible but credible, as well. This visibility and credibility is not easily achieved. It takes a lot of hard work, time and effort.

Visibility and credibility are established by taking such measures as writing and marketing articles and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums, appearing as an expert on teleseminars and webinars, etc. The fact is that when people know you and trust you, they buy from you. They will buy from you even is your competitors are offering a better deal or more incentives.

People do not like to buy from strangers. The Internet is a big impersonal and even frightening place to many consumers. They want to feel like they know and trust the people that they buy products and services from. The time, effort and energy that you put into becoming visible and credible is the best time, effort and energy investment that you will ever make. Reputation is everything in the world of Internet marketing. Credibility makes you unique.

Another very important thing that you can do to insure that your customers buy a product or service for which you are an affiliate marketer from you and not from one of your

competitors is to give them a very good and compelling reason to make the purchase from you. Offer something extra or a lot of different extras that will enhance the value of the product that you are marketing.

No matter what the niche or what the product is that is being marketed, there are free gifts that you can find that will make the product a better value if it is purchased from you.

For example: if you are marketing an E-Book about Internet marketing, you could add several additional free E-Books concerning different aspects of the broad subject of Internet marketing.

E-Books can be downloaded from PLR sites or even from E-Book banks and repositories. Another free gift that people can’t ever seem to get enough of is free utilities. There are many on the Internet and you can bet that there are some that will fit right in with whatever product or service that you are promoting.

While other marketers who are selling the very same product that you are, simply send out marketing emails that recommend the product to their lists, you will be adding value to the product and doing it for free to boot.

Add extras! Add free gifts! Even better than extras and free gifts is additional help to use the product or service that is being sold. You can offer a free teleseminar for those who buy the product or service from you that will make the product or service better or easier to use.

You can most likely even get the producer or the product or service to speak at your event if you plan far enough ahead. People just love teleseminars... and they love free...when you add teleseminar and free together, you will have a winning play that might just score the proverbial touchdown for you.

Offer Your Prospects Bonus Incentives

What usually happens when an affiliate marketer goes to Clickbank or Commission Junction and signs up as an affiliate marketer for a particular product or service that is relative to his affiliate marketing business topic?

The first thing he does is usually to place a logo for the product on his website and send out a marketing email to his list advocating the value of whatever the product or service happens to be. If this average affiliate marketer has any zip at all, he will make his sales letter as good as he can make it.

It will address each member of his list by name and there will be bullet points listing the advantages provided with ownership of the product or service. Then he will sit back, cross his fingers and toes, and hope to make a few sales. Well, that IS a plan but it isn’t a very good one.

If this average affiliate marketer happens to get lucky and be included in the launch of a new product, he does pretty much the same thing. He notifies his list of the upcoming launch (the average affiliate marketer usually only sends one preparatory email) and then he sends out the marketing email at the launch.

He will make a few sales...very few. Of course, he won’t be working very hard either and maybe he is very happy being an average affiliate marketer. There is a problem, however, with being average. Average is a very crowded place.

Average! Why would anybody want to settle for average anything? Doesn’t ‘average’ mean ‘common or ordinary...nothing special’? If you are not happy with being an average affiliate marketer, then you need to keep reading.

What puts one affiliate marketer above the average affiliate marketer? The answer is uniqueness.

Being unique is a quality that sets one apart from all of others. If you want to be better than just average, you will need to develop some uniqueness in your marketing techniques that will set you above just an average affiliate marketer.

Average affiliate marketers just don’t grasp the idea that in order to sell a lot of product, their offer needs to be more valuable than the offers their competitors are making. Most affiliate marketers won’t offer any incentives to their lists for buying a specific product from then rather than buying the same product from some one else.

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“How To Write Your Very Own Free Report In Less Than 60 Minutes & Quickly Distribute It For Generous Profits!”

How often do you see those words as you surf the Internet looking for information? About a bazillion? Everybody seems to be offering a free report about almost any and every subject under the sun now days. The question is, why? Why should anybody go to all of the work, trouble and effort to produce a report that is not going to be sold but be given away for free?

Ah! You see the point in NOT to sell the free report and make a bushel basket full of money from the sales. The entire point of a ‘free report’ is to give people the report in exchange for their names and email addresses. Not that the report isn’t valuable... sometimes a report is and sometimes it’s just a bunch of hooey, but the names and email addresses of those who download these free reports are much more valuable than the report will ever be...even the good ones.

There are exactly two kinds of people who live and work on the Internet. There are those who are marketing gurus and those who are not. The latter number far exceeds the number of the former.

There are a few very, very, VERY savvy marketing gurus out there who know how to put together a ‘free’ report and market it so effectively that it takes on a life of its own and continues to produce the desired results (list building if you haven’t already guessed) for weeks, months or even years after the free report is released.
Free reports are used by many Internet marketers as incentives to encourage people to join a mailing list. That is so common that it has almost become ineffective. These free reports that are offered as incentives to join mailing lists probably contain as much useful information as the kind that are marketed by these marketing geniuses. They just aren’t as effective at producing the desired list building effect.

Let me give you an example:

Mike Filsaime’s “Death of Internet Marketing” is a prime one. “Death of Internet Marketing” was a free report that was launched with a lot of fanfare. Mr. Filsaime PAID $1 for every lead that was produced by his “Death of Internet Marketing”. Yes, that’s what I said...he PAID. Now, if you were an Internet marketer with a list and you received an offer to be paid one dollar for each time a member of your list downloaded a FREE report, wouldn’t you jump on the bandwagon? Of course you would...everybody would...heck, everybody DID!

Now Mike Filsaime has some pretty deep pockets to be sure...we don’t all have those kinds of resources but his strategy was absolutely brilliant. He already had a mailing list of over 300,000 and I wouldn’t even hazard a guess at the number of names and email addresses that are now on his list. Every marketer that had a list that was even remotely interested in the free report sent it out in their newsletters. Don’t even think about the numbers, it’s just too mind boggling.

Actually, Mike Filsaime’s “Death of Internet Marketing” free report contains some very good information. The scare tactics used weren’t very appealing but the information was good. It wasn’t world shaking and it wasn’t anything that was really new. It was a well put together report and it was very well written.
Here is another example:

Rich Schefren’s “Internet Business Manifesto” is another free report that was really well marketed. As a matter of fact, Rich actually marketed the daylights out of his Internet Business Manifesto” And, marketing genius that he is, he later released it in three segments. The last release was called, “Internet Business Manifesto: The Final Chapter”. How is THAT for marketing genius in action?

Rich Schefren’s “Internet Business Manifesto” free report is another example of how to market a free report to gain the maximum desired benefit from it. This report is also well written. It contains plenty of useful information for new Internet marketers, as well as, for some who are well seasoned but there really wasn’t any new, world shaking information in it. Still, it was very effective and the desired result was achieved. He built his list to astounding proportions.

The free report list building technique isn’t limited to Internet marketers. It spills over into brick and mortar marketing as well...or maybe that’s where it started. Who knows? The lines between Internet marketing and Brick and Mortar Marketing have become a bit blurred over the years.

If you don’t believe me, go in search of nothing but ‘free marketing reports’ using your favorite search engine. You’ll find free reports about all kinds of products and services. You will find free reports about marketing beverages, sports, music, B2B marketing and dozens of others. The point of these free reports is the same. The idea is to give valuable (?) information to a potential customer in exchange of his name and address or email address for the purpose of future marketing of products and services to him.

Free reports that are used to build opt-in lists, either of the cyber space or brick and mortar variety, must contain good information. The information does not have to be completely unique but it must be accurate and free reports must be well written... no poor grammar or misspelled words are allowed. The information needs to be presented to readers in a clear way, as well. Good reports whether they are free or paid for, must be helpful to those who read them. If data is included it needs to be fresh.

The whole point of a free report, however, is NOT the report. The report is only a means to and end as demonstrated by the real marketing geniuses of our times. Scare tactics are not very appetizing but they are effective. “The Death of Internet Marketing”? That’s enough to scare an Internet marketer out of 10-years growth...but it worked. The word, “manifesto” produced visions of serial killers but it was effective as well.

How To Write Your Own Free Report In 60 Minutes Or Less

Free reports are big now days on the Internet. It’s a bandwagon that many Internet marketers are jumping on simply because it works.

People jump on the “Information Super Highway” that is the Internet because they want and/or need information about all kinds of things. People seek out free reports about subjects that will make them feel better, look better, become more proficient, or solve a problem for them. Reports can take many forms but no matter the form, a report is simply a writing that provides information about a specific subject.

Writing a report doesn’t have to be a time consuming task. A short report can be written in as little as one hour or less provided the writer has access to sufficient information on the subject and since the Internet really is the “Information Super Highway” information on almost any subject is readily available.

First, let’s discuss writing a free report from ‘scratch’.

The first thing that is required for a report is, of course, a topic.

The topic that you choose to write a report on should be one that is directly related to the topic of your website or of your free membership site. The people that you will give your free report to must be interested in getting the information that will be in the report.

Choose a general subject first and then narrow the general subject down to a specific point or two. In order to choose a great topic, you can listen to the members of your own free website or visit blogs and forums that relate to the products and services that you sell.

Once you have settled on a topic for your free report, the next step is to gather information that is related to that topic.

This is a very easily accomplished task. Use your favorite search engine and plug in key words to find information about your topic. Usually the problem is too much information rather than not enough. You are going to have to sift through and consolidate information but if you have narrowed your topic down far enough, it won’t be all that difficult.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Welcome to Fire Your Boss And Join The Internet Marketing Revolution!

Most people would like to start a home business. They like the freedom of being able to work whenever they want to or wherever they want to. However, it is not easy to get there because many of them are stuck in a rut!

They feel that they are controlled by their bosses. They feel that it would take too much time.

Some of them even whine that they are too tired to do anything the moment they reach home!

Whatever your excuses may be, you will most probably find the solution in this book (or at least, know what it takes to get started). The fact that you are able to pick up this book and read it shows your initiative and you should congratulate yourself for taking the first step!

The Internet is a place that is filled with endless possibilities. It is very easy to find a business model that makes money for anyone as long as they put in the effort to learn and work hard.

All that it takes is that you believe in yourself and believe that you will be able to free yourself from the shackles of your 9-5 job and you will be able to find the means to achieve it.

After all, if you want something badly enough, you will go all out and find the means to achieve your goals.

Alright! Let’s get started immediately!

Chapter 2: Key Concepts behind This Book

In this book, you will learn all about the following:

1• The type of mentality one must adopt if they ever want to break out from the rat race!
• How to turn your skills into your greatest assets!
• How to pick a business model and apply your skills to it!
• How to invest merely 4 hours a day and be able to quit your job or fire your boss… within 6 months!
• Lots of resources to get you started IMMEDIATELY!

Working Part Time with A Full Time Mentality

One of the biggest reasons why people fail at Internet marketing (or fail to break out of their rat race) is because of a flawed mindset towards Internet marketing.

Yes, it is true that you have to spend the remainder of the hours you have left after work to work on your business part time. But that does NOT mean that you will adopt a part time or half-hearted mentality towards your business.

Imagine this analogy…

Let’s assume that an air plane takes off at 150MPH. You will need to ‘drive’ at a certain speed before the plane develops enough speed to take off. Do you think the plane will be able to fly itself off the ground if you are only travelling at a 100MPH? Of course not! It will not take off even if you are flying at 140MPH!

Internet marketing is just like this. You will need to work at a certain momentum before you:

• Develop the necessary knowledge to build your business (you can’t really ‘drive’ far if you are constantly locked in 2nd gear).
• You need to show others that you are committed enough before they are ready to do a joint venture with you (after all, no one wants to JV with a half-hearted marketer – especially if they know that you are not constantly available).
•You need to build your reputation strong enough because it will lessen your promotion work – the speed of trust between you and your customers is very crucial.

The Art of Building Assets Online

When you are building your business online, you must be able to build assets if you want to quit your job. Allow me to explain:

A 9-5 job is only short term income. It can be a lot or a little, but fundamentally it is still short term… Why? Because the moment you stop working, you stop making money immediately!

Your boss may tolerate your laziness for a few days but if you don’t put in the hours, you will never get any more pay whether it is weekly, daily or monthly pay!

If you keep on trading time for money, you will never be free from your job!

Online assets are different. Here are a few principles that you can apply to your online mentality:

• Leveraging on the Internet: You can draw in traffic from search engines or viral marketing.
• Leveraging on other Internet marketers. You do not need to build a mailing list if you have created a fantastic product that will keep customers buying and affiliates selling over and over again.
• Leveraging on your mailing list. The money is definitely in the list. It takes 15-30 minutes to write a proper E-mail to your mailing list. The great thing about E-mail marketing is you will take the same time to mail your list regardless if your list has 100 people or 100,000 people
• Leveraging on your reputation online: A blogger may start with no RSS subscribers, but the more you blog and the more you network, you will be blogging for the same effort but with more people reading your blog (and you will be able to monetize from the traffic!)
• Leveraging on outsourced work. If you are making good money, you will be able to outsource your work to other people and spend more time on marketing your products (hence, making more money!)

Take a look at this graph for example:

Let’s take a look at a typical Internet Marketer…

The blue line is your 9-5 job. You may get increments and bonuses (hence the rising graph and your salary will most definitely exceed your online income in the first few months, but after awhile, when your online assets start generating residual income, you will be able to quit your job once you have all the elements in place.

Investing Into Your Assets through Outsourcing

Not everyone can do everything at once. Even if you are proficient at all the tasks (albeit a master of none…), you will still need to outsource from time to time as the need to create more and more assets should NOT be limited by your time alone but by creating more through leveraging on other people’s time.

Remember this principle; the sum of the whole is more than the parts combined.

You may outsource certain tasks like writing, graphics or SEO services, but ultimately you must develop a goal (using a proven business model) that will piece everything together and synergize.

In the next chapter, we will explore a little on core competencies which is also related to outsourcing in general.

Chapter 3: Monetizing Your Core Competencies

The best way to start your business off the right foot is to examine yourself and see what your best skills are. Here is a list of which business model you are able to excel with:

• Writing
• Graphics Design
• Statistics
• Programming
• Networking

Monetizing Your Writing Skills

A writer is always in demand amongst Internet marketing circles. You will be able to monetize in the areas of ghostwriting, copywriting, blogging, article writing, newsletter publishing and content creation.

Contrary to what some people may assume, creating a written product is one of the most daunting tasks a person can undertake. Unless you have a flair for writing, nobody in their right mind will mass produce E-books (unless they are willing to make huge sacrifices for their financial goals).

Writers are also a great asset when it comes to product launches in Internet marketing. You will be able to find joint venture partners easily if you are willing to contribute your writing skills to the areas of writing sales letters, E-courses, and promo E-mails.

Recommended Resources

Monetizing Your Graphics Designing Skills

Graphic designers are also very important within the Internet marketing niche. A graphic designer can easily earn a hundred dollars for good quality E-covers, blog banners and site graphics.

You can even sell the Photoshop PSD file by giving away the rights for someone to rebrand them on their own sites.

One of the reasons why a graphic designer (or artist) is always in demand is because graphics tend to sell themselves.

People DO judge a book by its cover and it is very important to tap into this psychological factor. It can make the difference between getting a sale and NOT getting a sale.

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Introduction

With the advent of systems like Shopify and WooCommerce that make it easier than ever to set up an online store without vast programming knowledge or deep pockets, and the prevalence of drop shipping companies that have affordable prices, e-commerce is booming like never before.

E-commerce is one of the only systems you can use to make money online that is truly long-lasting and sustainable, and, in a profitable niche, can keep making you money for many years to come.

In fact, there are ordinary people with no business background, no advanced education, and no huge starting bank account balances who are making millions selling everyday items.

If you’re interested in starting your own online store, I recommend reading this guide from start to finish. I’ll teach you the basics, and it’s up to you to pursue it.

So let’s get started.

Choosing a Profitable Niche

You can create the coolest, best looking, most exciting online store ever created, and fail miserably if you don’t choose a profitable niche. Niche selection is so important that it can literally make or break your success.

A good niche should:

Have a moderate to large audience
Have low to moderate competition
Have buyers who are passionate about the niche
Have products that are priced high enough to be profitable

You want to make sure there are enough people who are interested in the niche to support a good number of sales, but you don’t want the niche to be so saturated that it’s difficult to make a profit.

You want a market in which the buyers are passionate, or have a real need for the product. It’s going to be difficult to make good money selling ordinary products unless you have a very unique selling point, such as a drastically lower price, or some sort of value added selling point. You want to sell products people will be excited to buy, and that they will keep coming back for.

You want to make sure you have products that can be priced high enough to make you a good product without pricing you out of the market. You probably won’t make a lot of money selling products priced under a dollar, because you won’t be able to build a large enough market quickly enough, but a product priced at ten dollars or more would probably be enough to justify the opening of a store. Of course, there are people who have made fortunes with very inexpensive products, but it takes more volume than a beginner could likely manage.

A good starting point for niche research is to simply make a list of your own hobbies, interests, areas of knowledge, and needs. The more you know about a particular subject when you open the store, the easier it will be for you to source products people would want to buy and to find the right marketing channels to reach your core audience.

Once you have a list of at least 10-20 topics, you can begin to research them in earnest. You want to find out how many people might be interested in each potential niche, how many products are available that you could sell, and how much of a profit margin would be possible.

There are many different ways to do this, but one of the most popular ways is to check Amazon. Start by searching for individual products you might buy in a particular niche. For example, if you want to research the golf niche, search for things like golf clubs and golf balls and find out the bestseller rank for each product. This will give you a general idea of how well each product sells.

You want to be able to find at least a few products selling well enough to be in the top 10,000 in their main category, and in the top 1,000 would be even better.

Here is an example from a live Amazon listing for a particular brand of gold balls:

This product is currently #857 in its main category (Sports & Outdoors), which shows there is a strong market for golf balls, especially when I take a look at other products in the Golf Balls category. The top product in this category is #125 in Sports & Outdoors.

Now, you should be aware that strong demand within a main category might not always mean huge sales. Some categories will have fewer sales than others, of course. But this will give you a general idea if there is a market in the niche.

If you want to learn more about niche selection, I highly recommend checking out Ecom Smart Start. You’ll learn all about niche selection from start to finish, including dozens of broad niche topics you can use as a starting point for your brainstorming.

Finding Your Passion

It’s not enough to choose a niche that is profitable. If you choose a niche you aren’t passionate about, or one that you find you truly dislike, your business is likely to turn into a drudgery very quickly. In fact, one of the reasons many people start a business is to get away from jobs they hate, and the last thing you want is to end up in the same position you were in before you left your job—unhappy and wanting something different.

So as you look for potential niches, try to find something that interests you and you’re passionate about. This will make it easier for you to source products, market the products, and spend the time required to make your store a success.

It’s possible that you won’t have any interests that would be profitable, but it’s highly unlikely. Even if you like some relatively obscure things, there will usually be at least a decent number of other people who are also interested in it.

Going Deep

Once you have found a niche you believe has a lot of potential for both profitability and passion, you should try to drill down even further to create the tightest niche possible.

For example, let’s say you’ve decided you want to concentrate on the outdoor hobby niche. This might include things like camping, backpacking, hiking, hunting, and fishing. But there are thousands of popular stores that specialize in this area, so it would be quite difficult to compete.

In order to have an all-encompassing store in a broad niche like this, you’d have to source thousands of products, and make sure the prices stay updated. It would be a tremendous amount of work for just one person, or even a small team.

Instead, it’s good to focus on a single area. It could be the area you are most interested in, or the one you believe will be most profitable (as long as you’re still interested in it). But it’s important to drill down to the tightest niche you can without going so tight that it would be difficult to find an audience or source products.

For example, instead of “outdoor hobbies”, you could drill down a bit to fishing. This may still be too broad, so you could drill down to fly fishing. This is pretty good, but you might even go a little further to specialize in a specific type of fly, or maybe into fly tying supplies for people who want to tie their own flies for fishing.

Keep drilling down until you reach a point when you can no longer find enough products to source or interest in the niche. You’d be surprised just how far you can go in many niches! For example, blacksocks.com specializes in—you guessed it—black socks. They also have other products that they expanded into, such as colored socks and underwear, but they started out selling black socks and have been wildly successful!