Work at Home Ideas: How to Target Your Niche and Make More Money

What is a niche? Basically, a niche is a specific market aimed towards people who are interested in this specific market. When you are promoting a niche you usually do that in the form of a keyword or keyword phrase. Here is an example: take the keyword "pregnancy". This is too broad of a niche and has very high competition. If you were to look up the word "pregnancy" in Google you would see that there are over 102,000,000 other websites competing for this term. Yeah, way too competitive. You have better chances of flying than you do reaching the first couple pages of Google with this keyword. You want to narrow it down more to make it a much lower competition keyword and therefore make more money from it.

A better example would be: "pregnancy diet" with 343,000 competing sites. This is still a bit competitive but much better than the first. Let's try something a bit lower in competition. Lets try: "morning sickness pregnancy". That's a bit better with only 13,100 competitors. If you keep looking you can find long tailed keywords using the word pregnancy with much less competition. You can use this same method to find long tailed keywords for your niche.

Now the way to do this is to use a free tool called Google Keyword Tool. You simply type a keyword of your choice in, and it gives you that keyword statistics such as monthly searches, yearly searches and your competition. There are other keyword search tools out there, but I find this one the best.

Now, once you find your niche keywords you want to use, there are many work at home ideas you can use to use these keywords to make you money. I will list a few below:

Affiliate Marketing: This is one of the most popular methods for making money from niche products. Basically, you join an affiliate network such as ClickBank or Commission Junction and choose between an array of products to promote that fit your niche. Then you can promote these products through many forms of marketing such as blogs, forums, email marketing, pay per click advertising or the resources below.

Squidoo lens: This is a very popular choice. What is a squidoo lens you ask? A squidoo lens is basically a small little website that you create which usually only takes about 10 to 15 minutes. It is very simple to do and Squidoo gives you step by step instructions. Squidoo is really great for people who do not have a blog or website to promote their products.

Basically on these lens you write a small article on your niche product using your keywords you selected and place some links of your affiliate product in it. You do not want your lens to look over promotional. You do want to make it something that will give people valuable information while linking to your product. This is the most effective way to use this tool. The good thing about squidoo is that Google absolutely loves these lenses and ranks them pretty high. So, if you create a lens and keep it updated, promote it as much as you can, you might be surprised to find it in the first 3 pages of Google. To find out more about squidoo you can go to squidoo.com. They have a great beginners training email series that you can utilize to get you started. It is one of many effective work at home ideas.

Hubpages: Hubpages is basically the same type of service as squidoo. You simply make a page writing some valuable content for people and toss in a link to your affiliate product site. Hubpages is a bit more strict when it comes to promoting your products. They do not like over promotional pages and will flag you for it. Do not put your link in your page more than twice. Google also loves hubpages! I've included a hubpage in the resource section for you to view and get a sense of what it is about.

These are just a few work at home ideas that you can utilize to make yourself some money, but there are many other ways out there. The key to being successful with any program is to be consistent with your efforts regardless of the results you are getting today. If you keep working hard promoting your niche, you will begin to see results in no time at all.