Okay, so maybe it’s a little late for making money by selling products for Halloween.  But now is the perfect time to ramp up for the big push toward Christmas.  If you have one or more established sites, you’re in great shape.  But there are things you can do even if you’re just getting started here at the end of October.

And of all the ways you could possibly make money online, I think the fastest and easiest way to go from zero to profitability as quickly as possible would be to start a niche store.  This is especially true throughout the holiday season.  I’ve operated several of them for well over a year, and they continue to provide a nice monthly income.  Although they’re fairly easy to set up for someone with a little computer knowledge, they can be tricky for newcomers. The niche store site provides some good reference material to help you get started, but feel free to ask me a question if you get stuck.

I’ve learned some interesting ways to create sites that attract visitors and keep them coming back.  And I continually look for ways to add value to my sites beyond just the products that are available to purchase.  This is very important because anyone can set up these niche stores and compete with you.  You have to find a way to stand out from the crowd.  And you have to know how to get the visitors to your store in the first place.

That’s why from now until the end of the year, I’m going to be offering lots of tips and tricks for getting the most from your online niche store. There are several store scripts out there, so you don’t necessarily have to go with the one I recommend.  In fact, I’ll cover a couple of the others as well.  But I happen to have my preference simply because I think it’s the easiest to set up and maintain.

Go ahead and subscribe to my online niche store blog to be sure to get every tip as I post them.  It’s time for the holidays, and you’ll want to be ready for making some good holiday cash.

Here are a couple of earlier posts that may be helpful as you begin to build your new store:

Choosing a good web host 

Getting content for your niche store

Reasons for starting an online business

Finding good niche keywords

Getting traffic to your online store

eBay recently launched their new affiliate program, called the Ebay Partner Network.  Commission Junction has managed their affiliate account until now.  If you’re not familiar with sites like Commission Junction and LinkShare, they manage the details of paying commissions to thousands of online publishers for many of the largest online sales sites.  With today’s launch of eBay’s new self-managed system, publishers will have more tools and resources available for promoting a huge array of products.

Plus, this is also great news for anyone selling on eBay.  With an army of affiliate marketers working day and night to promote your products, you’ll likely sell more with less effort.  If you haven’t heard, the number of web publishers promoting products on eBay is growing like wildfire.  That’s because eBay pays a percentage of their take on each transaction that is referred to their site via a third party publisher’s site.  And, what’s even better is that, as an affiliate publisher, you can promote products all around the globe through eBay’s partner sites in countries all around the world.

I’ve been making money as an eBay affiliate since last summer, and my income has grown steadily as a result.  I’ve enjoyed working with Commission Junction, and I plan to continue working with them to promote their expanding list of products.  I’m equally excited about the new eBay-managed affiliate program.  I’ve checked it out, and it looks very promising.  As I transition my sites to the new system, I’ll report my results.  You can see an example of one of their new affiliate web widgets in the sidebar to the right.  There are several different types of widgets available, and many more are on the way.

In the meantime, be sure to give the new eBay Partner Network a look.  It might just be the ticket to your online success.  And be sure to subscribe to the Profit with Your DotCom feed to stay on top of new and exciting ways to grow your new online business.

Deciding on a niche market to target and researching keywords go hand in hand.  You can’t really do one without doing the other.

1. You must know if the niche you want to target actually has a market.  You wouldn’t want to try to sell products in a niche where there was little or no interest.  Remember the online grocery store delivery sites?  It may have been a great idea, but no one was interested. Creating new markets requires time and money.  Unless you have large amounts of both to spare, you should target existing markets.

2. You need to know what customers in your selected niche are searching for.  You may think they’re looking for product A when they’re really looking for products X, Y, and Z.  Or they may really want more information on a specific topic.  If you provide the information, they just might pay your site a visit and make a purchase.

3. You need to know how much competition you will be facing.  You can almost always find something within any given niche with little or no competition.  But if you don’t do the research to find these hidden gold mines, you could very well be competing with some large established online businesses.  I’m not saying you couldn’t compete with the big boys, but if you’re just starting out, it would be much easier to build a following around a specific element of a niche and expand from there.

So, how can you do the necessary keyword research to successfully compete online?  There are dozens of free keyword tools, and there are dozens of sites that provide historical search information.  But, if you’re really serious, you’ll want to buy a subscription to WordTracker.  WordTracker is probably the best keyword research tool available.  The free version of WordTracker is very basic, but it’s a great place to get started.  The paid version offers far more information, so you may eventually want to give it a try.

Okay, so now that you know where to find a few good keyword resources, let’s talk about how to use them.  First of all, you’ll want to begin with some keywords that you have in mind for searching within your niche.  For example, if you’re wanting to create a website about antique tractors, you would begin with the keyword phrase “antique tractors.”  From there, WordTracker will return a list of related terms that your potential visitors might use to find your site.  Along with the words, you’ll get the number of searches made by visitors for each keyword and the projected number of searches for those words over the next 24 hours.  Drilling down, you’ll get information for each of the major search engines, such as the number of competiting web pages for any given keyword.  You’ll also get the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) number, which compares the count of searches for a keyword with the number of competing web pages.  This number helps identify words that you could target with the best chance of getting a top spot in the search engines.

To summarize, don’t fly blind when it comes to creating content for your website.  First, find out what your potential visitors are looking for.  Then find out how much competition you’ll have for your selected keywords.  And finally, create content for publishing on your site that incorporates those keywords that will provide the best chance for getting located by potential visitors.  In an upcoming post, we’ll look at this in more detail.  Plus, we’ll look at some interesting ways to use what you learn from your keyword research to really boost traffic to your sites.