I must confess that finding a profitable niche from which one can earn from online, is not the easiest of tasks. The surest way to earn cash from affiliate marketing online is via niche targeting. Niche marketing involves an affiliate marketer targeting a profitable program or product that is in high demand thereby enhancing the affiliate marketer’s chances of earning highly.

In this article I will articulate the most outstanding ways to find a profitable niche where to start your online business. To do this successfully, you don’t need to spend money because there are free tools and skills available online that can be employed.

Look at your passion

Top on the list of tools that you can employ to find profitable affiliate niche is to look inwards. Find out what you like, what do you enjoy doing? What are your hobbies? What do you love doing? What is that one thing you will do with ease or you are knowledgeable about, these are very viable links or pointers to online riches. Write them down they can be turned to profitable niches online.

Research or Brainstorm

There are free tools available online where any kind of research work can be carried out easily. Sites like Google.com, Wikepedia list of topics are fantastic places to start where you can gain great insight into any subject. Another site you can look up is shopping.com consumer demand index, you will find a list of the hottest products online searchers are looking for earnestly.

The Technorati popular list, a leading blog search engine, is another source site worth mentioning, you have tens of hundreds of what is popular in the news compiled from thousands and millions of blogs. Hot trends from Yahoo! Buzz and Google Trends are also very vital places to do online brainstorming for profitable niches.

Find out niche that have high profit potential

Google AdWords Keyword tool or Free WordTracker Keyword is another powerful tool you can use to find a niche where a large numbers of people are searching for on a daily basis. Understand that the major reason they’re searching using those keywords is because they’re looking for solutions to their needs. You can use the same tool to estimate the profit potential of the niche you are interested in. If the niche has a high cost, i.e. around one dollar per click, than the niche has a high profit potential if you will be using AdSense to monetize your site.

One other important way to monetize your blog is using affiliate programs or networks like Clickbank or Commission Junktion to find products related to your niche that pays a minimum of $20 for sale to generate a good profit. Outside of these two networks, you can also employ Google for search query to find other useful affiliate programs, type niche keyword + affiliate. You will have a list of affiliate programs in your niche, visit a few of them, check their viability and potentials to determine their payout and sign for the reasonable ones.

We have seen the importance of the niche market, and now we are going to know step by step, how to target that niche. We must select that niche first, than find what they are eager to buy, and give them what they want.

Here is a list of various niche:

health and fitness, religious and spiritual, financial reinvestments and trading, travel, in hot countries, trekking, camping, going to the sea, or may be the mountain, foods, cakes, or fish, or meet, vegetarian peoples, people who loves safari, the desert…

Niche market is not something you will not find, don’t worry, there are plenty of them everywhere.
You will find your niche in places like click bank marketplace, or in general directory groups, or at amazon.com, you can also find them in yahoo groups and commingled.
you should watch infomercials.
You should take the first general idea, then go to a more specific idea.

For example you are interested in martial arts, you may choose a niche in self defense, then self defense for women, then define, let’ say for example: krav maga, and you continue like that until you find the niche which will make you profit.
You will find a lot of free tools on the web to help you to find your niche.

Go to alexa.com, you will know the traffic rank for websites in that niche, how many visitors visited that site per million visitors.
You should also find related keywords, you can go to kwmap.net, or use word tracker, and there is a lot of these tools disposables for you.
you should also find out if there is a lot of portal site related to that niche,, see the number of sites listed there.
You will then check the growth of that niche, is the niche growing, or is it in decline?
Search for competitors, as they can become your partners in joint ventures.

Now it is time to act: you may have three ideas or more, but you want to start a project, then another one. So you got to test all your idea, and you will keep the one that you found most profitable.