When I first started out online I decided to choose a niche market. Or that's what I meant to do. I possessed specialist expertise in a specific area and I was keen to share it, for a modest price, naturally. With even a few hundred people a month purchasing my $17 publication, that secure retirement income seemed within my grasp.

There were plenty of gurus available and eager to tell me that the most reliable way to make money online was to have my own product or service to be in charge of my own destiny. While that does have a certain truthfulness to it, the disadvantage is that all your eggs are in the one basket.

What they didn't let me know about was how complicated it would be for ME to produce and promote a professional looking program that could be competitive with the solutions already available. Yes, I could have out-sourced it, but that would have been very expensive and still left me at the 'mercy' of web-site-developers and other people.

When I started working on my own product (an ebook on a specific topic) I soon awakened to the fact that although it was one huge task in its own right, developing a niche product was the simple bit. Marketing it was the real challenge.

Undeterred I next started studying putting up and editing the website, writing a blog, social bookmarking, copy writing, article marketing and generating the traffic. I quit before I reached the "design an affiliate plan" stage. This was all part-time, in addition to my day job. Whew!

But what had I forgotten to do, in my excitement? Deciding on a small enough niche in which to promote my product!

It had totally escaped my notice just how huge and competitive the Internet is, and especially how many other extremely good solutions there are out there.

Whereas my product can compete for quality once people have actually decided to buy it, I will be the first one to concede that it cannot compete at the pre-sale stage.

This was a bitter pill to swallow even without having put many hundreds of hours of hard slog into product production, figuring out the skills to get myself a web site and a king's ransom into lessons.

So if you are planning to start your web based career, spend plenty of time choosing your niche and don't overlook the products currently in existence on the market.

Decide on a product where another person has already done the hard work of product production for you; use key phrase exploration and competition analysis methods to pick a small niche of a target market, where a sufficient number of people are excited about some detail of the product; put that out to market, then, to increase your chances, rinse and repeat, probably in a completely different niche, to spread the risk of your selected niche failing.

If the initial choice of package isn't an immediate success, or even if your first 10 products generate only mediocre sales, at least you should have 10 niche products "on your books" and if every one makes just $50 per month, that gives you your very first $500 per month in ten distinct niches.

There is plenty of free help available on how to find a niche product.

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