I have been a housewife for 15 years. For 15 years my life had revolved around my only child.

Now not only is he already independent, he spends more time with his friends and doing his school work that I am feeling bored at home.

That was when while surfing the internet, reading gossips about celebrities, one topic keeps on appearing on the net.

It is blatantly 'splashed' everywhere - You Can Make Money Online!!!

I have always though that the internet was for doing research besides reading the news and gossips. I began to dig further. The more I dig, the more I believe that you can actually make money on the internet. Hey, I did not say you can be a millionaire, but I can build a business for myself. I have all the time in the world. So what have I got to lose?

It has been 8 months now since I started. I learned about affiliate marketing, I learned about web designs, I learned about HTML, learned about Web 2.0 etc.

I could not believe it. 8 months ago, I do not even know about blog...forum...let alone create my own website.

So today, I am going to tell you a little story. My story to be exact. I decided to name my story: "How A Housewife Capture Her Niche Market on The Internet."

It is a mouthful, but that is how I strongly believe that if I, a housewife for 15 years can do it, so can any of you out there. I also hope that I am able to at least, for some of you who are thinking of doing internet business, help you 'avoid' making the mistakes that I made. Anyway, niche marketing offers a lower costs and much lighter workload to start. I personally felt that it offers a great advantage for someone like me to start an internet business.

My aims are to give the knowledge and the resources that will allow YOU to start. However, you need to DO STUFF. You need to put in time and take action, just like you would have to do to be successful in ANY pursuit.

I know that it will not be easy and there will be some of you who will not have the drive to make it happen. However, I also know that there are some of you out there who will. So, whichever group you below to, I just hope that you can learn everything that I have learned and APPLY even more. This is the recipe for success.

I intend, to set-up a blog and a forum soon for us to communicate in the future. By doing that I hope that we are able to help each other and at the same time motivate each other. To be kept updated, join my mailing list at CuriousToKnow.

The search began......

The first question I asked myself is : What to sell?

Hey....for 15 years my constant companion, (besides my husband), is my son. It was difficult to decide especially there seems to be endless product out there. That was when I attended my very first internet business seminar.

The one major thing that left an impact on me was "Niche Marketing". This guy kept on repeating "Niche....Niche...Niche.." throughout the entire 2 days seminar that I became so curious I began to focus on finding out more about this "Niche". My knowledge of niche was - specializing in certain topic or area! That's all!.

But, since the speaker makes US$60 million a year - so he must know what he is talking about!!

To simplify it, according to him, A Niche market is a group of people searching the internet for a solution to a problem and not finding many relevant search results.

Here is a step-by-step procedure I did in identifying my niche.

I started by doing a complete search in my MANY areas of interest and areas that I have some expertiese in or experience. I did a list and came up with 10. The whole idea is for me to start with several areas of my personal interest.

My advice, if you have any idea about a product. Forget about it at the moment. No point thinking and entertaining the idea of a product until you found a market that is hungry for something on the internet.

However, it is advisable to decide if your niche business is going to be focussed on a Niche Topic or a product within a niche topic.

5 Steps to doing your research

1. What - assess a hot market
2. Who - your target segment
3. Why - the important needs/values to the market
4. Where/When - their location and the 'ready' buyer
5. How - ways to reach the market

Here are some great places that I did my research:

Lycos : http://www.lycos.com/retriever.html.

The retriever page at Lycos is an information infusion engine. It soude the Web for the best information on thousands of up-to-date, easy-to-read reports.

Yahoo! Buzz at http://buzz.yahoo.com/

eBay Pulse : http://pulse.ebay.com/

eBay also puts out a PDF report on their hottest categories each month. You can check it out at http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf.

I also suggest you go to Amazon. It is a great place to see what currently exists in a given niche. Chances are, the more books there are written on the subject, means people are spending on those topics.

I pick a sample niche "espresso coffee" as an example. You can see the items , the niche and sub-niche.

For Espresso coffe, the sub-niche can be coffee beans, Lavazza coffee, coffee machines etc.

To go to Amazon quickly, just click on the box with the amazon.com icon.

Just a word of caution though, just because a niche or a sub-niche topic or subject is popular does not mean people are spending money on it.

As mentioned earlier, eBay is a very good place to start if you are just starting out in your niche business.

It now has a simple "Build A Niche Store" website builder which enables anyone to create a network of traffic pulling niche websites focused around the eBay affiliate opportunity.

You simple choose your niche....build and develop your site...promote...and you repeat the whole process with another niche.

Everything is done in 5 simple steps.......It not only helps you target your niche, it comes with an eBay affiliate opportunity but also easy to set-up with a professionally designed template specific to your niche.

Check it out....it is really addictive once you get the hang of it. I know I did.

I am having more success and faster results from here. eBay has already millions of visitors everyday and they are BUYING visitors. They go to eBay with a specific need to buy a specific item. ;)

So, go and Build Your Niche Store now....

Conduct extensive keyword research on all those areas, pull the statistics and store them in an Excel sheet. I use Wordtracker. It is free to join and they give you a 2 hour trial period. So I suggest you identify your keywords before you start. You can go to Wordtracker from here: http://www.curioustoknow.com/recommend/wordtracker.htm. The free service has limited reporting information compared to the paid service. As a start, using the free service is sufficient to get you on the right track.

Another good resource centre is Overture at http://inventory.overture.com. A word of caution though, the link sometimes does not work.

You will notice that even though you will have completely different key phrases/keywords, the intent behind the search could and will be the same.

Please do not be picky at this point. I placed all my research in an excel file. I decided to do my research more throughly by isolating 10 sub keywords that have the most favourable ratios of competition in Google and Overture.

Review all your results to look for the area that has the most demand with the least amount of competition.

Next I have to do a TREND research in my niche. Compile the statistics of each one of those interest.

The next think I did was to group my interest according to INTENT. What 'intent' means is "what problem(s) I was trying to solve when I did my research."

After that process, I need to compare the different areas of interest and look for the grouping that have the most demand but with the least amount of competition. Once I was able to identify the one that fits these criteria, I need to continue researching by starting to look at my competition.

Once that is done, you need to answer these questions:

• how do you determine if there is a void in your niche that you have identified?
• what are the needs that need to be filled?
• what is the best way to navigate around discussion forums like the Yahoo, MSN and Google groups when searching for clues to what your customers want?

Once you have completed the above steps, you are well on your way. Just pay special attention during your niche research phase, your focus is on finding a market with lots of demand and a reasonable amount of competition.

Once you find the BEST market, then you can start focusing on how you want to fulfil that market. That is when it is time to think about 'product' or 'services.

If you have done the above research properly, you will come to the same conculsion as I did.

During your research you will realise that most of the interest or area of expertise listed down earlier will give disappointing results. Initially I was disappointed but then I realize that it would be a lot better for me to find out now then to find out after I have invested my time and money. Imagine, if I had not done my research, I would be putting up my website only to find out that the demand for my niche is 'not there'. I would then come to the conclusion that 'the internet does not work'.

As mentioned earlier, you will definitely come across the same conclusion during your research process. There will be a few great opportunities and a few not-so-great ones also. Along the way, you will learn to make a good business decision about what niche you should enter.

So please do not skip the above steps. It is not the 'internet' that does not work. It is the method of doing business on the internet that does not work.

The above steps are the foundation that I use to start my internet business. It is a tedious and frustrating process but it is WELL worth it because when I was able to identify the right niche for me, I will have a better than average chance of success.

So would YOU!

To your success.

I also recommend you read the free report on "How to identify your niche market with ease." It has great information on the common mistakes made while researching your niches as well as a List of Hot, In-Demand Niches Online.. Get your free report on Identifying Your Niche here.

If you are interested, check out my first niche : Dental Emergency and my first niche report : Braces for the Child, What Every Parent Should Know.

I also wrote a hub on how I created my very first ebook on my niche. You can read it at http://hubpages.com/hub/How-I-created-my-first-ever-Ebook-from-scratch

In Chapter 2 at the next hub......

I will write on creating your own website.....I did it. It is so simple and fun.

Till then.......