One of the first problems a new person to internet marketing encounters is how to find a market niche. How do we go about finding these niches?

Well what is a niche? It is simply a section of a market. It’s not for example the sporting goods market as a whole but it might be baseball bats and gloves for children or exercise equipment for baby boomers. It is  a question of "drilling down" and finding the sector that might suit your area of expertise.

The importance of finding a niche cannot be overstated but it is not easy to find one that is not over saturated with other internet marketers or alternatively is not overpopulated with potential customers!

Where do you or I start? Well I got to thinking about this while I was looking at eBay. There is no shortage of niches on that site.

Niches are everywhere and you have to get into the mindset of looking for them. Obviously not all of them will make money and you have to find a decent sized market. There might be a number of people collecting old dolls or antique fishing lures and they might be fanatical about it but there may only be a small number involved and it might not be a market that interests you or you haven't got a product to sell to them. Unless you have a lot of old fishing lures lying around that is.

Think about what interests you. Find your passion and do some research. If you like gardening, is there a specific part of it that you really love? Is it looking at seed catalogues, propagating, digging or no dig, flowers or vegetables? Think niche within niche.

Here are two sites you can look at too start getting your ideas. http://www.ebay.com or http://www.ebay.co.uk for those readers in the UK (although there is nothing to stop you looking at both.)

If you go into the categories list on the left hand side, for example Home and Garden, you will get a list of categories within that category. In this example, there are sub categories such as Hydroponics and Seed Starting; Pest and Weed Control; Planter Pots and Window Boxes and Plants Seeds and Bulbs. Scroll to the bottom and you will see popular searches. This will give you some ideas of what might be selling well in that category.

In association with this, take a look at eBay Pulse http://pulse.ebay.com. This site gives a daily snapshot of current trends and popular stuff on eBay. A great site to drum up some new ideas.

Here is another great site to do research at Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends. It is updated daily and tells you what people are looking for.. It gives the top 10 but you can drill down and see more.

Another great site to look at is http://www.Digg.com. This is a social bookmarking site. People post stories which others vote on. For every user that "diggs it" the count goes up and the story gets promoted. It gives a flavor of what people are finding interesting at a particular moment in time. Think laterally, and you will get some good ideas here. You might just find a niche there.

You could try Google News as well. Besides keeping you up to date, you can search against specific terms and see if there has been anything happening or any new press releases which might give you an idea for another niche.

Every marketer always needs to be thinking seasonally. You have to plan in advance but Christmas would be a great time to think about selling box sets, jewelry, toys etc. In the new global economy, there are plenty of niche markets to go around. There is no need to just stick to a local market anymore.

If you are still finding it difficult to think of a niche market, try some brainstorming. Draw a mind map. Think of a topic and write it in the middle of a piece of paper. Then draw lines radiating away from it and lines radiating from them. For example, let’s say its beer (a topic close to my heart).Think, different types, breweries, countries famous for their beer, methods of production, things used in manufacturing, history etc. Then draw lines off those words and think of more words that associate with your main word and the word it is branching off. The idea is to create a chart of ideas by brainstorming. Use a thesaurus if it helps. to get your mind thinking.

So brainstorm and visit relevant websites and keep an eye at what's happening around you. Got some potential niches now? Great! Now all you have to do is research them.