Visualize building a website targeting the wrong niche only to find out after months of search engine optimization and internet marketing that your idea may be too general and rarely holds the interest of your visitors and makes it hard to earn money after spending hundreds of hours of your own time. What a nightmare!

Well this was me a couple of years ago. I created several websites and spent hundreds of hours of my own time and hired programmers to create scripts for credit card processing. Only to find out I could not make any money. None of my visitors purchased my products and I felt completely lost in the internet jungle. With all the hype of making money on the internet and after spending thousands of dollars buying training material from so called internet guru's I still could not get it right. What did I miss? Does this sound familiar to you?

Finally by trying lots of different ideas I magically hit the correct formula. I built a very popular website on trucks and to date earned over $70,000 from this. How did I accidentally discover this success? I tried building more websites only to fail again. Did I just get lucky? Could I duplicate my success again?

Most people underestimate the importance of getting this first step of choosing the correct idea when first starting a website. Only to find out months later that their idea cannot make money. After months of researching I finally discovered the magic formula of long tail marketing i.e profitable niche markets. When you understand this process completely you can duplicate your success every time you build a website and save yourself countless hours of wasted emotion.

Brainstorm some ideas on paper. Find topics that interest you like fashion, gardening or fish to name a few examples. If you can't think of any ideas look at the newspaper, shops in malls, yellow pages, tv or do a search in Google for general ideas. Don't worry about your keyword research yet. At this stage you would like to find a unique angle on your chosen idea. You want to give your visitors a compelling reason to visit your website and return. Preferably choose an idea that you already know a lot about. If you choose an idea that you are not familiar with you will be forced to hire professionals on Elance or similar websites to create content for you. Unless you already making significant money I do not recommend doing this. Rather keep your costs low when you first start out and create the content yourself.

Once you found a good idea (examples swordfish, organic gardening, bonsai trees) you need to do your keyword research. The importance here being that you would like to build a website that gets significant free search engine traffic from your chosen keywords but at the same time not too competitive. You can use the Overture Inventory Tool. In my opinion a profitable niche keyword searched 15,000 to 45,000 times a month with virtually no competition rates as the best keyword to use. You can also use the Wordtracker tool to check the competition on the keywords. You can check the amount of ppc adverts on Google and once you discover a keyword with virtually no competition will become your goldmine. You also need to look for similar keywords related to your theme that you can build your website around. Say for example if you chose truck bed liners as your profitable niche keyword you can also create content on keywords related to this like spray on bed truck liner, pickup truck bed liner, rhino truck bed liner etc...

After choosing your keywords you need to create your content and monetize your traffic using contextual advertising like Google Adsense, affiliate links or by creating and sourcing your own products.

You need to test your completed website with ppc marketing. You can use Google Adwords and do an initial test and send 200 visitors to your website to see if the traffic converts into money. If not you need to improve your sales pages or layout to improve your conversion statistics. Once satisfied with your conversion and that you can monetize your traffic you can start on your search engine optimization process that will take at least 6 months and years of consistent white hat optimisation. After completing this step you will generate cash with free search engine traffic for years to come. You can build your virtual real estate by duplicating this process with other ideas.

Make sure that you follow the steps outlined here. It will save you thousands of hours in wasted emotion and heartache when building a profitable niche.