The most important thing to decide is what your market is. If you've been looking into this business for a while you’ve probably read you should do what you love. In other words if you have a hobby you really enjoy, then you should do that. Well the fact is if there’s no market for your hobby, then there’s no money in it for you either. It would be great if we could all do something that we enjoy 100%, but sometimes that’s not reality. Sometimes we need to settle for something else. I’m not saying do something you don’t enjoy. All I’m saying is that you don’t have to live and breathe what your websites are all about, but you should enjoy it and you should be knowledgeable in the content.

You may already have some idea what you want to do. If you already know, then get yourself a domain name so you can be ready to get online at some point. If you don’t really know what you want to do, then it’s time for a little research. Start thinking of things you know about and enjoy. Open up a web browser and go to google.com and type in your ideas one at a time. Look at the number of website hits you make. If there are literally millions of hits for your search terms, try to narrow them down. Preferably you want to get less than 50,000 hits and 100,000 to be the most. Remember, these are the websites you will be competing with. That’s why you want to find a niche that has enough interest, but not too much where the market is very competitive. This is one of the hardest things to do and can take a long time. So take your time and narrow down your focus. Start experimenting with words that are similar to your niche and search on those. Click on websites to see if some of these sites are doing what you want to do and write down their URLs. Once you have many written down, start going to them individually and make note of the things they do that you want to do. Also of things you don’t want to do and finally things that you may want to add that nobody else is doing. This could be the one thing you could help differentiate your website from the rest of the pack. When you think you’ve got the niche you want to start targeting, it’s time to get yourself a domain name. This won’t get you online, but it will reserve a domain name so nobody else can grab it from you.

There are also some free tools available to you when searching for potential keywords. Keywords are simply words you type into search engines like Google that allow you to find websites. You should also be thinking like your potential customers trying to find you. What words do you think they'll type in to find you. Try out http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion for a free keyword tool to help you better fine tune the niche you're looking to target and try to get into your potential customers head. Think like them. Think what would they be searching or to find you. The free Overture tool will display many different variations of keywords based on what you typed in. It will display how many searches were performed each month on those keywords. Also remember, if a keyword is very popular in the searches, then you may have found a very competitive market. Be careful. The idea here is to find smaller niches where there is less competition but still a large enough market for you to make some nice income. This takes time but this part of the process is very important. Take your time and you will soon find what you're looking for.

So the next thing is to Find and Reserve Your Own Domain Name.