So you’ve decided that you want your own online business.  You want to be able to stay home with your kids, or just work from home or for yourself.

How do you decide what kind of business to start?  How do you know if it will be profitable?

Good questions, and ones you need to answer before you do another thing.

First – how do you decide what kind of business to start?

Begin with what interests you – what do you do just for the fun of it? Are you a great cook, always making up new recipes?  Share them on a cooking site.  Do you enjoy crafts?  Selling them online can be far more profitable than heading to craft fairs every weekend. Maybe you’re into fitness or health or make-up and beauty.  Share what you know online and turn it into a business.

Do you have a special area of interest?  Maybe you have a child with special needs and you’ve made it your business to find out everything you can; you can share your experiences with other moms and make a difference in their lives, while making some money too.  That’s how I started my site, ADD Moms.  I have 3 kids with ADHD and my husband and I are ADHD too.  I’ve been studying it for years and now I have a business sharing that with others.

Maybe you want to sell a product that’s already on the market, like Mary Kay Cosmetics. You can get a site through the Mary Kay company, but you’d be wiser to set up your own site offering beauty tips and telling women about Mary Kay.

The point is that you want to pick a topic that is of great interest to you.  Hopefully you will be online a long time and you don’t want to lose interest in what you’re doing.

OK, so let’s say you’ve figured out what your site will be about. Now how do you know if it will be profitable?

There are some simple ways to tell if there is interest in your topic.  Do a Google search and see how many results come up. Also check out the top results and the ones on the right hand side.  Those are paid ads and if there are several or even a lot, chances are there is interest in your topic.

By the way, don’t be discouraged by the number of sites that come up.  I can teach you how to use your competitors sites to your advantage and it’s completely OK to do so.

What about magazines and books?  If there are books or magazines covering your topic, it means there is interest.

You can also go to Google’s Keyword Tool and use their free service to search for how popular your topic is and what keywords people use to search for it.  There are a lot of others out there, too. Check out Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. What these tools will give you is an estimate of how many times a word has been searched for; from that, you can tell how popular it is.

Good luck on your search, and remember – Take Action – Be Consistent – Never Give Up!