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Make Money Online: Size of Market

crowdThis is the second post in a multi-part series I’m writing about making money online.  The first step is to decide whether you want to create a blog or develop an online service. Next, you need to decide on a topic for your blog or determine the type of service you would like to provide.

Perhaps the three most important factors to consider in deciding what to put on your website are the size of your market, the competition you will face, and the quality of your content or service. In this article, I share some of my observations on size of market, including examples on how I’ve failed and succeeded in properly assessing it.

success-and-size-of-marketWithout a doubt, size of market is the most important factor for making money online. There are millions of people using the Internet each and every day, which is why it has attracted so many as an opportunity to earn income. However, it is likely that only a very small fraction of them will be in the market you will be targeting.

My Failure in Assessing Size of Market

For the most part, I’ve not had a lot of organic traffic so far on my blog. I’ve come to realize that my eclectic mix of content does not really appeal to a wide range of individuals. Although there are a lot of other geeks out there in the world, most of them are not particularly interested in many of the things I write about and the tools I develop.

Improving My Assessment of Size of Market

Part of the reason I’ve decided to develop this series on making money online was to try to appeal to a wider audience. There is no doubt in my mind there are more people interested in making money online than there are people interested in things like a Greasemonkey script for Google Webmaster Tools.

I also decided to write about making money online because I recently had my first real big hit with organic results on this blog. Earlier this month I wrote an article on how to remove Antivirus 2009, Spyware Guard 2008 and other malware, and it definitely seemed to appeal to a wider audience than any of my other posts on GeekLad. I decided that sharing my success could provide some good information on how to make money online.

My Success in Assessing Size of Market

There are a lot of people that encounter problems with Antivirus 2009 and Spyware Guard 2008. I used Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware to remove those programs from my parents’ computer, and decided it would make a great blog post that would appeal to a wide audience. It is apparent by the amount of traffic I’ve received that I was right.

I also signed up for an affiliate account with Malwarebytes.  If anyone decides they would like to purchase the full version as a result of reading my article, I receive a commission for it. Signing up for the affiliate account and including an affiliate link within the article has allowed me to make some money with the article.

Selecting Your Audience

When deciding on a topic to blog about or the type of service you are going to provide, you need to take your audience into consideration. You need to figure out how many people that will be interested in your website.You can use the Google Keyword Tool to determine the amount of search volume there is in the areas you are considering for your blog or service. Keywords with higher search volume will provide you with a larger market.

If your content or service is very specialized, you can expect to have a small audience. If you decide to blog about a very popular topic or develop a service that would appeal to many individuals, you can expect to have a large audience. Having a small audience isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you can convert visits into cash and each conversion is worth a lot of money.

What’s Next?

The size of your market should not be taken into consideration alone. It is also very important to consider existing competition. Although there may be millions of potential visitors in your audience, there may already be many competitors servicing that market. If the competition is fierce, you may find it difficult to make money.

In the next post in the series, I’ll be taking a more detailed look at sizing up the competition.

Photo Credit: Apreche

2 thoughts on “Make Money Online: Size of Market”

  1. This is great stuff. I wonder how much time you took to gather this information. Yes, I agree with you. Internet offers multiple streams of income. However, one issue with this flexibility is that there is equal number of scam sites available online. So we need to careful while choosing these online programs. And all the sites you have listed on this post are genuine. On the whole, this is a great website offering what people need to earn money online.  I think that you did a very good job with this article. the economy is not so great right now and people need to know there is still ways to make money.This is also a great article for stay at home parents that need to make extra money on the side.

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