Finding niche ideas can be quite a tough prospect when you are just starting out. The problem is that we humans are very set in our ways, and we tend to want to stay with “what we know”. This forces us into particular mindsets and we sometimes battle to think laterally. Often, all it  takes a little “prodding” to get the creativity going.

This post can be read in conjunction with the series that Kev is currently writing on niche marketing. Its purpose is to give you some good spots to look for profitable new niche ideas. My focus for this post is primarily on tangible products that you may want to build-out into an eBay store, or an Amazon store, for example.

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Contextual advertising with Google Adsense is an extremely simple way for you to monetize your site. There are a number of WordPress plugins that make it very easy to place Adsense ads on your WordPress site, which has probably made this the most commonly used method to make some money with your website.

How it works

1) Advertisers from all over the internet sign-up up with the Google Adwords system. They then design small contextual adverts (of 3 lines + 1 URL line), and make monetary bids on specific search terms.

2) Publishers (you) join up with the Google Adsense system, and specify certain places on your website where you wish to display the contextual adverts that the advertisers created.

3) Google spiders the content of your page/post and gets a very good idea of what your page/post is about. They then display RELEVANT contextual ads in the places that you have specified.

4) If a visitor to your site clicks on one (or more) of the adverts, then Google pays you a percentage of what the advertiser paid to them for that click.

That’s it in a nutshell. Read the rest of this entry