Starting a Home Based Internet BusinessThe first thing you need to do when starting a home based internet business is to figure out what sort of business you want to start: in what field, topic, or niche will you be building your business?If you have already jotted down several niches or business ideas you are passionate about, grab that list now. If not, take the time to jot down three to five potential ideas or even broader categories that you really are interested in. Once you have your list, it's time to move on to assessing market demand. How to assess demand for your business conceptIn the past, it could be quite costly to even figure out if there was demand for a home based business concept. You had to conduct market research or pay to have it done for you.But today, thanks to the internet, there are a variety of great low-cost and even free tools to research demand for your business. This helps make starting a home based internet business much less expensive than starting up many "brick and mortar" businesses. The primary way you assess demand for an internet business is to find out what exact words and phrases people are searching for on the major search engines, specifically, Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live. This is known in the industry as "keyword research". ****Note that a "keyword" is simply a word OR phrase that people enter into one of these search engines when conducting a web search. So, for example, a "business" is one keyword, and "starting a home based internet business" is another keyword. Free keyword researchRight now, there are currently still several great free keyword research tools online. These tools work best for helping you brainstorm online business concepts and niches and are invaluable in starting a home based internet business.Once you have decided on a niche or site topic, you might want to move on to one of several great pay tools that I will cover later.
The first and best free tool for keyword (demand) research is the Wordtracker free keyword tool. This tool allows you to try out Wordtracker, which is widely considered the best keyword demand database.
The Wordtracker tool gives you demand for up to 100 results based on whatever keyword you enter. These results are "vertical" search results, meaning that they all contain whatever keyword phrase you enter. In the above example, I entered the keyword "internet business", and the shot above shows the top three of 100 results that Wordtracker returned. So how do you use this tool to determine demand for your niche? Assume your niche was "internet business". The demand numbers given by Wordtracker represents an estimate of DAILY searches for that keyword across the major search engines.
In this case, the keyword "internet business" receives 952 searches a day, according to Wordtracker. This is excellent demand. In fact, it might even be a bit TOO high for our purposes.
How much demand is too much?In general, when starting a home based internet business, you are looking for a niche that has strong demand, but one in which there is not TOO much competition.As a general rule, when looking for a "site concept keyword" - in other words, the keyword phrase which will become your site's topic, you want to see Wordtracker demand in the range of about 300 to 600 a day (or roughly 10,000 to 20,000 per month).
In the screenshot above, I have marked off the Wordtracker results for the search term "internet business" that fall within our target demand range of about 300 to 600 searches a day. As you can see, there are nine keywords that fall into this range in this example. Of course, finding demand is just the first step. Next we must determine how much competition there is for a given keyword. But first things first. Your "assignment"What I want you to do now is to enter the three to five topics, business ideas, or niches that you previously jotted down into the free Wordtracker tool.Next, once you get the results, write down the keywords that fall within the 300 to 600 per day demand range. Once you have done this, you can move on to assessing the competition. Simple, isn't it? By now you already have come up with some niches or topics you are passionate about, and you have assessed demand for your niche in the greater internet marketplace. Believe it or not, you have already laid the groundwork for starting a home based internet business. So let's move to the next step!
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