How much money you make with your online marketing is largely determined by which niches you decide to become active in. Most people start by setting up websites on topics that they know well. While this seems like a logically intuitive way to start, your time might be better spent researching trendy, profitable niches and then educating yourself in them. You want to promote products and services that are naturally in high demand, as it just makes your job a heck of a lot easier.

In particular, study price points and commission levels. Promoting a higher-end product that you sell less of might be the same amount of work as a lower-end product that you sell more of. The bottom line month-end profitability is what’s important. Of course the best of all worlds would be a high-end product that you can sell a lot of, but that goal may be unrealistic.

You need niches that can be turned on semi-autopilot once you get them set up, so that you can run the business with a minimal amount of work while you research new projects. This is what trips up a lot of marketers. Getting caught up in two and a half day’s work in an unprofitable niche is the worst thing that can happen to you – and if you are not very careful it will happen to you!

Keeping up with trends in society is very important. Try to operate only in strong market segments. A good example as I write this is the health industry. With millions of baby boomers retiring and getting to an age where health problems are starting to make them miserable, you have a growing market with a voracious appetite. They have money, and are willing to spend it on anything that even sounds like it stands a chance of reducing their misery.

Likewise, any group of people that has a problem which needs solving is fertile ground. Find a possible solution and sell it to them.

Don’t be scared by competitors. If a market has multiple competitors it’s only because that market is strong enough to support them. Get in there with a strong offer and take your share. One advantage of existing competitors is you can often find new angles to sell from that are currently overlooked. Or, just look at what they are doing and improve upon it.

To find hot trends you will need to stick your head up from your computer once in a while and take a look at what’s going on in the world. Magazine racks at the store and magazine-style TV shows are great for this. If you just can’t do that, then browse the social 2.0 sites on the web (such as news aggregate sites, 43things.com, etc.) to see what people are raving about at the moment.

Develop your marketing strategy up front and determine if the likely results are worth your time. For example, PPC (Adwords and Yahoo Pay Per Click) ads have gotten so expensive that you can really only sell higher-end products with them. Research the organic search-engine keywords results and see if there is room for a solid content site at the top of those results. Make sure there are at least several long-tail keywords you can market to within your niche.

If there is one magic key to the internet marketing business, it is the up front research. Understanding your entire market in the beginning and knowing exactly what you will be doing to target customers within it  will produce dividends for years to follow.