It’s pretty obvious that in order to Make Money Online you must find profitable products.  Fortunately, the internet provides a myriad of sources to help you in your research to identify products which are profitable.  You should start by considering what products people are buying.  There are few surprises here, but to research this check eBay, YahooShopping, Amazon. Magizines and Bookspots.

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When you visit these sites, you should be looking for the following things.

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1.  What’s Popular? Can you see trends? Write down what is popular at this

    moment and consider it in relation to long-term, seasonal and cyclical demand.

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2.   Top Lists.  Most of these sites have Top Lists of products, which are currently

selling the most.  Book lists are especially useful in identifying what is going     on in a market.

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3.    Related Items. On sites like Amazon and eBay you can discover some very useful information on what related items the market is interested in.  Amazon, particularly, tries to entice the buyer by indicating, “Customers who bought this item, also bought ____”.

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4.     Niche Market Ideas.  This is one way to narrow things down to find a niche that attracts you within your market.  Titles of books, and magazine articles, especially, can give you clues as to where a market may be going, and what might be the next “hot” niche.

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The next thing you want to do is to see if you have found a current or future hot trend.  Pulse.eBay, 50.Lycos and Trendwatching can give you a peek at where popular culture and society is going and may indicate a hot trend you can take advantage of.

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It is good to check trends to the extent you can against any affiliate products you may be considering.  You would like to avoid a market that is cooling down, and obviously, would like to find one that is heating up.  You are trying to be in the right place, and particularly, when looking at a market where opinions change rapidly and are subject to fads.  For example Making Money Online is still a hot and growing market.  It's the market that Working For Our Future is in the middle of.

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I’ve already mentioned magazines articles, but magazines really require in depth research.  Visit ezines, Goarticles, ArticleAlley and IdealMarketers and look for articles related to your product.

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The reason for doing this that popular subjects get people talking.  In a good market you’ll find lots of articles covering a wide range of topics. The more questions and concerns a market has, the more demand for answers and solutions.  It also suggests passion about the questions and concerns, and increases the opportunity to provide solutions.

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The last step that I want to mention is one, I am sure, that all of you have done.  That is to validate your market with free keyword research tools.  This is, of course, critical because if the market is not present on the internet, you have nothing to offer them.  You can start with the Featuring and Adwords.Google by entering some broad keywords related to your market.  The results you will get indicate how many times the keyword was used in a search in the past month.  For the bigger picture run the same keyword and a number of synonyms on Google’s Keyword Tool.  This does not give numbers, but does give you a good feel for how active your market is on the internet. You can get the numbers from Google, but you have to download your keywords into a file to get them.

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So now you have an idea of whether your market generates enough searches each month to be attractive.  You should also check to see if there are commercial websites in the market and the quantity of advertisers.  This you can judge when you do a keyword search on Google and check the number of advertisers on the right side of the screen.  A market with lots of advertisers probably indicates competition is good and some people are making money in it. 

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After you have completed these steps you are in pretty good shape to decide whether the  product you want to market has the potential to be profitable or not.  You still need to carefully consider your specific product in terms of how it fits into your niche, how it is priced and how you plan to promote it before you make a final decision.  However, having made this kind of research you certainly are in much stronger position to begin in earnest you Online Money Making Business.