If you're planning on starting an online home business from scratch, and want to profit fairly quickly I would advise you to read the following very carefully.

In order to start an online home business that will start making you a good income fairly quickly these days requires you to target a specific market. A niche market. The whole purpose of starting an online business is so that you can potentially have customers from all parts of the globe, however in order for you to do this you must rank well in the search engines. When I say rank well I mean you must be up in the top 10 search results when someone does a search for your particular keyword you're optimizing for, any search engine rank over that is not likely to get too much traffic as around 96% of Americans don't go past the first page of search results! So in order to be in the top 10 results you must target a niche subject, but also keep in mind this niche subject should be one where you can actually sell something, or offer a service to the people searching for that particular keyword.

The niche that you target must not be a heavily saturated market, for obvious reasons. For example I wouldn't suggest you choose subjects like internet marketing, web hosting services, and weight loss to base your home business one, as these topics are very competitive on the internet. I don't however mean you can never target these areas; in fact I think it's a good idea to target a slightly more competitive market such as the ones above over time. To do this I would recommend you do the following.

Think of a topic that has a fair amount of competition, such as weight loss. Do a search on weight loss on Overtures keyword selector tool. Now you should notice that weight loss is searched every month hundreds of thousands of times on yahoo, and if you look down further there are other keywords containing the keyword "weight loss". These more specific topics such as "safe weight loss diet" (I made that up) for example are more likely to have less competition, so you may decide to target more specific keywords like this one.

Now just think about this for a moment. If you decided to target a keyword such as "safe weight loss diet" you would make it easier for yourself in the future to increase your search engine traffic for other terms relating to "Weight loss". Just keep in mind to check out how many web pages are indexed in search engines such as Yahoo, or Google before you make your final decision. Just remember that if your analyzing how much competition you may be up against, just by typing in your keyword and searching for it wont give you a %100 accurate estimate on how many competing websites there are. This will only tell you how many web pages contain any of those words within your key phrase.

Probably a better estimation on how many competitors you may be up against would be to put your keywords between " " such as "safe weight loss diet". This will at least show you how many websites contain that exact phrase, which would mean those websites have a good chance of being optimized for that particular keyword.

Regards
Bret Kim.