I bet your wondering why so many affiliates are making money, yet you continue to struggle. The answer is closer then you think, it has the words niche affiliate marketing all over the place. You’re not different. You’re just missing the most crucial piece of the puzzle, your target audience.

How do you find a target audience that is willing to fork over there hard earned cash? You target a problem or group of people that would love to better there current situation. Once you learn to niche affiliate market using tightly focused keywords, you will see the difference in sales.

How do you find these groups of people? Look at Q & A places, yahoo answers, forums, Myspace, Facebook groups and there are thousands of places people ask questions online. Research is the key to niche affiliate marketing and finding out exactly what you potential customers want.

Acne for example is not a highly targeted niche market, but how to cure acne’s dry skin, redness and irritation is a highly target niche affiliate marketing audience. The research secret sauce is right under your nose.

Use Google Insight for Search and find keywords related to your product and audience. These are tightly focused keyword terms people are using to search online. Also look at demographics, interest over time and articles written on a specific topic.

Also use Google’s wonder wheel, found by hitting options under the search bar. This drills down and shows you relevant, highly targeted keywords for your niche affiliate marketing. Also gives you reviews, videos, blogs and recently indexed pages to target with your niche affiliate marketing.

Make sure you record all your findings, include all the terms displayed at the bottom of Google search page.

Next, use the Google keyword tool and discover why you don’t need paid tools. You get Google search volume, CPC and many others.

These paid keyword tools are almost always based on Google’s. Also don’t forget to look at the competition for your keywords. Golden nugget, how to articles are a great way to find a target audience using Google’s Keyword tool. You can also target product related keywords.

Next, look at DMOZ to drill down niche ideas and find some really cool smaller niches ripe for the taken. Remember the more research you do upfront, and learn about your niche, the better your affiliate marketing will be.

Last, you are now ready to take on your niche affiliate marketing. Wright a product review, record a video or testimonial for the product. No selling, just pre- sell your potential customers and they will follow.

Choose your weapon, free or paid tools and make a day by day schedule of tasks to complete. This will keep you focused and making affiliate niche affiliate marketing sales.

Marketers have come to understand that niche marketing is powerful and can be extremely profitable when you find the right niche to target. Some smaller players are smart enough to dig deeper into broad niches to discover smaller and underserved ones. They know that these are where potential gold mines can be found. However, not everyone is willing to think of new research methods to discover new online market niches and prefer to stick to old conventional ways.

Keyword research is a significant inseparable part from niche marketing research. Almost everyone has at one point of time used keyword tools like NicheBot, Overture, Google’s Adwords Keyword research tool and even WordTracker. The basic concept is to check out the competitiveness of a keyword. With the right keyword and niche, they then use PPC or build a content website around the keyword.

While this works fine, the truth is a lot of money is left on the table. For you to optimize your earnings, there is a need to tap on niches where profit margins are great. A lot of these are in the tight narrow niches where supply is really low. There are many online tools that are available for you to conduct your research with:

1. Top online auctions like Yahoo Auctions and eBay are great for finding out what people are spending their money on. From there, you get to see which are the best selling products, and what the most popular categories are. This gives you a good feel of what sub-niches you may target. From the prices offered as well as the selling prices, you can understand more about the consumer behavior and market trends. This is perfect as your niche marketing tool.

2. Social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace and Groups Google are great places to do your research as well. Read the posts and comments of the visitors and members. Check out the most popular topics and categories. You would surely notice what people are gossiping about and most importantly discover new niches you can pay attention to.

3. From a broad niche, you can easily narrow it and dig deeper. Search for news online on the subject and check out those with the most views. This is likely to shed some light on what people are searching for and love to read. Article directories and email news groups are ideal as well.

The list goes on. There are many other websites online that can be used as your niche marketing tool. As long as it is getting a lot of attention, there are telltale clues you can pick up on the favorite topics. Add these sites to your research arsenal. Be creative and innovative when conducting market research. By doing things differently from other niche marketing competitors, you are one step ahead of them!

With possible ideas discovered from your niche marketing research, you can easily churn out an income earning website in 5 minutes with a powerful tool that I talk about on my income blog. Check it out!