One of the best home business opportunities for generating a little extra income in these dark times is niche marketing.

Niche marketing means that you sell a product or service to a few people who really want or care about that product. The Internet is perfect for niche marketing because it can place you in contact with people all over the world who maybe interested in what you have to sell. Now you probably won’t get rich through niche marketing but you can make a few extra bucks doing.

The key to niche marketing is having something interesting or unique to sell online usually something that you’re passionate about. The place to start is with your hobbies and other interests. Perhaps you have make something such as quilts, jam, dolls, candles whatever that you can sell online. Maybe some other people are already generating a little income selling those things online.

You can quickly find out if there’s a market for your hobby or craft by going to Google. Simply Google your hobby or craft and see if others are selling it on line and what they’re selling it for. That’ll give you a pretty good picture of the market and how you should sell it. Another suggestion is to go to Ebay and see if anybody is trying to auction or sell that product through Internet auction.

Once you’ve done this, figure out business costs and see if you might make money. Check out the cost of setting up a website, and taking payments for your product. Then if you need to ship, check out shipping costs with UPS, Fedex and the Post Office. At the same time you probably should investigate tools and raw materials. It might be cheaper to simply sell your product through E-Bay. Get out the calculator and figure if you can break even or make money.

If you don’t make something, you can market perhaps you can create an informational product that you can sell. If you have a lot of knowledge about a subject, perhaps you can write an e-book and sell it. There are a number of outlets for doing that including www.ebooks.com and Amazon’s Kindle, www.kindle.com. Kindle is an electronic book reading device Amazon lets anybody create books that can be sold on it. A great place to sell something like an E-book through affiliates is at www.clickbank.com

The same thing can be done if you have an unpublished novel on your computer. Instead of waiting for that literary agent or publisher in New York to buy your manuscript maybe you should self publish it online now. That’s another kind of niche marketing and a potentially profitable one. You will need to create a website to market your book whether it’s a novel or nonfiction.