• Section: Money Guide - Category: Home Business
• Written by Musharf

I'm sure that you've heard about how many startup companies fail when they first begin, and the reason that most (if not all) of their failures is because they don't create a good fountain to build on.

If we start right, it is easy to go right all the time. But if we start wrong, it's much harder to go back and get it right. So please pay close attention, get out your pen and pencil, and let's get to work.

When you first start, you need to decide which niche you are going to conquer.

When I first started my online business, I made the same mistake that 99.9% of people make. I read an eBook about how to make money online, and I decided that I would...

can you guess...?

I wrote my own book about "how to make money." I compiled all of the regurgitated information I could find, put a twist on it, and started to sell it. After 2 weeks and a little over $30 in sales I started to think:

"Why am I selling a book about h

ow to make money... when I have NEVER in my life made any real money!?!"

You may laugh, but it took me a few weeks before I realized that there was a problem there. I decided to stop selling my book, and started to look for other ways to make money online. What I stumbled upon next really gets exciting.

I was going to college at the time, and my degree is in "Computer Information Systems." I knew some things about programming, but not enough to create anything real. What I did know is where programmers spend their time online.

So I started visiting places where you could hire programmers and got to know a few. I then started to search for a market that needed something.

What I came upon was the "Resale Rights" market. Basically this was people buying and selling digital products (eBooks and software) that they could then go and sell to other people. This concept really excited me. I purchased a lot of these products, but struggled to sell them because all of the products had links back to the author's websites.

These authors were making money every time I sold these products... on the backend. When I realized that, the first thing I thought was,

"I wish that had a way to brand all of these files with my own links."

And there the idea was born. I just needed to create a product that would brand these "resale rights" products. I wouldn't be competing directly with that market, but make a complementary product that would benefit them all.

I went back to the programmers that I had been building relationships with, and gave them my idea. Within a matter of weeks they created a product that is now known as Zip Brander. (You can see the product at www.ZipBrander.com)

I'm not going to go into how I marketed it in this lesson (I'll save that for another day), but with the one product I made over $1,000 my first month with it, and it made us over $50,000 in 2004 alone.

Since then I've been able to branch out to a lot of various niches and have had amazing success in most of them. In other issues I will share exact case studies of these that you will be able to model in your businesses.

How To Pick The Right Niche

I want to show you know how to choose your niche. Just follow these 3 simple steps.

Step 1 - Do not choose the "how to make money" niche. I'm not sure why, but I made this mistake along with thousands of other people. This is the most competitive niche in the world. If you want to fight against the marketers, good luck. But there is a lot more money (and it's made a lot easier) in the niches I'll explain below.

Step 2 - Look at your personal talents, and start from there. I have had this conversation more than once - usually every time I discuss an online business with someone.

I ask them what their hobbies are that we could market, and they almost always they tell me that they don't have anything they could sell. The problem is that people usually look at their current job, and can't think of ways they can market that skill.

Don't look at your current job, but look at what you do on your free time. The thing that is you

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