Niche brainstorming is the very first process of affiliate marketing and it can be done the fast and furious way.  When you brainstorm for niches you should look inside yourself and see what you already know.  Picking subjects you already know makes content writing a breeze and should keep the topic interesting.  Ask yourself these next questions and you should have a list of at least 50 niches you can do.

What are your hobbies?

Hobbies are a great way to get into a small and specific niche.  For any hobby, there are people who want to learn more.  Most hobbies have products associated with them.  For example, comic books, model airplanes, and chess all have products you need to buy.  You can find multiple online stores for any hobby, so you should be able to find an affiliate program.  If not, you can always create an eBook and sell it online.

What electronics do you currently own?

Electronics are a great niche, and if you can get very specific, the competition will decrease.  If you own any electronics, such as cell phones, gaming consoles, televisions, computers, and mp3 players, write down the brands and models.  People who own electronics love to talk about their products and learn more about their products.  The iPhone alone has created hundreds of profitable blogs.  There is no expense in your research, because you already own the product.  Not only will you make money with your product, but you will know how to use your product better than anyone and get the most out of your product.  There are thousands of online stores that sell electronic products and accessories, so finding an affiliate program should be very easy.

Are you currently healthy?

Health and diet are important topics for everyone.  People are always trying to get healthy and they are always looking for diets.  People want to get healthy and lose weight.  If you are not in shape or are overweight, you can make a lot of money trying different diet products and workouts.  The latest fad in working out is P90X and the latest fads in diet are colon cleansers and Acai berry.  You can start a blog in less than a day and start writing about your experiences.  There are some expenses in this niche, because you have to purchase the products to review it, but the best part of this niche is that you can make money while you get in shape.

What is your current mode of transportation?

Whether you ride public transportation or drive a vehicle, people are interested in learning more.  If you take the public transportation in your city, you can start a blog on tips and tricks to get the most out of your travel.  There are many people who are looking towards public transportation because of the high gas prices and the bad economy, but many people are scared to take public transportation because of their lack of knowledge and their misconceptions about public travel.  Write a quick guide for newbies or about the environmental and economical advantages, and you should get a lot of traffic.

If you own a car, there are many others who own the same car and love it.  If you Google any car model you will find a forum or community.  People become attached to their cars and are constantly talking about their car or researching new accessories for their car.  Since car communities are very active, you should expect to see a lot of repeat traffic.

What stores and restaurants do you frequent?

Stores and restaurants that you frequently go to are a great way to pick a niche that you will constantly have content for.  If you shop at a certain set of clothing stores, you could start a fashion blog and review your purchases and the store’s new products.  Fashion blogs are very popular and building a following should be easy with good content.  If you frequent a certain type of restaurant, you could start a blog relating to those restaurants in your area.   Most people will look online for reviews on restaurants before they go.  If you like any specific food, like tacos, pizza or cakes, you could easily start a blog on your search for the perfect one.

What are you watching?

Everyone has a different taste when it comes to movies or television.  If you like a certain director, like Quentin Tarantino, George Lucas or Kevin Smith, you could start a blog and community just on their movies.  If you like a certain type of movie, like horror or comedy, you can start a blog just on that genre of movie.  Cult movies are a great way to build a community.  They are called cult movies, because they have a cult following.  There are a small group of people who not only enjoyed the movie, but are fanatical.  For example, Rocky Horror Picture Show has a huge cult following even though the movies is decades old.  They even have midnight showings where people will dress up like the characters.  These are die hard fans and creating a forum would get a lot of activity.

Hit television shows have tons of fans and those fans can easily be turned into a community.  Shows like Lost and Heroes have a huge following that are always discussing what just happened and what will happening next.  Create a quick blog and install free forum software and you should get tons of traffic.

What are you reading?

You read blogs, forums, and news articles every day.  Turn that reading into profit by creating a blog about it.  With every article or post you read, you are increasing your knowledge on that subject.  You are obviously interested in the subject, so you shouldn’t get bored doing more research and writing articles every day.  Now, instead of killing time reading, you are actually doing research and enjoying it.

What are you listening to?

Do you have a favorite band or type of music?  Each of your favorite bands could be a separate blog.  Blog about their new cds, music videos, and concert tours.  Blogging about music is easy and fun and if you sign up for the bands newsletters you’ll get a lot of content for your blog.

Now that you have brainstormed the fast and furious way, you should now have a huge list of niches you can do.  But before you finalize your niche selection, make sure to use the other articles found here to finalize your list.  Check if your niche is profitable and then use Google keyword tools to find a domain name.

Finding Out How Profitable Your Niche Is

An important part of selecting a niche is checking the market to see how profitable the niche will be.  Selecting a niche that is not profitable wastes time and money.  The goal of affiliate marketing is receive maximum returns on minimum efforts.

There are two key factors that you will use to measure a niche’s projected profitability.  The first is the amount of traffic the niche gets through search engines.  The second is the visitors value, which is the potential revenue for each visitor.  These 2 items will tell you the quantity and the quality of potential customers in that market.

Importance of Traffic

The amount of traffic is an important metric because the more people are searching for your product, the bigger the market is and the bigger the market is, the more potential customers you will have.

Using traffic as your only metric would be misleading, because there are some niches that get a lot of searches, but do not have any revenue attached to them.  For example, jokes, celebrity names, and quotes have little or no revenue stream.  Most people searching for these terms are usually looking for free content and are not looking to purchase any items.  A profitable niche will have buyers actively searching for it’s products.

Calculating Traffic

To find out how many people are searching for keywords in your niche, use Google’s Keyword Tool .

For this example we will check the traffic for camping gear.  Enter your keywords into the text area, fill out the captcha, and then click get keyword ideas.

Sort the results by Local Search if you are planning on targeting your local market or sort the result by Global Monthly Search Volume if you are planning on targeting the world market.

The results tell me that for the previous month, camping gear was searched 1,000,000 times.  That is a lot of buyers searching for camping gear.  This could be an interesting niche.

Importance of Visitor Values

Visitor values are an important metric, because the income comes from the sale of products and clicks on ads.  Unless the visitors are actually motivated to purchase, they have no value.

Using visitor value as your only metric would be  misleading.  There are some niches that would have really high payouts, but there are not enough buyers.  For example, yacht rentals and jet rentals are high cost items, but they have very little search traffic.  These high end products usually have a smaller market because of their high cost.  Not everyone can afford to rent a yacht or jet.

Calculating Visitor Values

To find out the visitor value we would go back to Google’s Keyword Tool and use our existing search.  Click on the drop down arrow under Choose columns to display and select Show Estimated Avg. CPC

Now we know that advertisers are willing to pay $1.64 on a minimum for each click.

Calculating Market Value

Calculating the market value is very easy.  Take the Search Volume and multiply the Estimated Avg CPC.  For camping gear we would take $1.64 and multiple it by 1,000,000.  Our monthly market value for July is $1,640,000.  To calculate our yearly value, we would just multiply our monthly value by 12.  So the yearly value on camping gear is $19,680,000.  Based on these calculations, camping gear looks like a very profitable niche.

Putting It All Together

Now that you know how to calculate market value, learn how to use it properly.  Think of a few niches that you are interested in.  Calculate each niches market value.  Choose the niche with the highest market value and get started.  Remember the whole point of affiliate marketing is to receive maximum revenue with minimum effort.  Do the research and don’t waste time with unprofitable niches.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is formatting your web site for search engines to easily read and understand your content.  SEO is used to make your site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keywords.  If you aren’t on the first page for your keywords, it’s likely you won’t receive that much organic search engine traffic.  SEO is like poker, it takes a few minutes to learn but a few years to master.

How A Search Engine Works

Search engines use automated software that grabs information from websites all over the internet.  They are called crawlers, spiders, and robots.  The information is stored into the search engines databases.

When you submit a search query into a search engine, it uses a sophisticated algorithm to provide you with results.  The algorithm looks at many factors to determine the order that the results will show.  SEO is basically trying to optimize your site for these factors in their algorithm to bring your site to the top of the search engine results.

The Basics of SEO
1. Use keywords on your site
Using keywords on your site is one of the most important elements of any web site.  Keywords should not only be used in the titles and headlines, but they shoud also be in the actual body of the text.  An important aspect of SEO is to learn keyword research.

2. Optimize your meta tags
Meta tags are tags found at the top of the page within the header that describe certain elements of the site.  The two most important are the keyword and description tag.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”dog training,dogs,training,collars”>
<meta name=”description” content=”Dog training the blue collar way”>
Some search engines do not use these tags

3. Optimize your HTML tags
Title tags are very important.  They appear at the top of the browser.  They are set with an opening and closing tag.  Keywords should appear within this tag.
<title>Blue Collar Dog Training</title>
Header tags are used to assign headings to copy.  Keywords should also be placed here.
<h1>Dog Training Tips</h1>
Anchor tags are used to create links to other pages.
<a href=”www.google.com”>Search Engine</a>
Your outbound links help tell the search engine what your content is about.  The anchor text is the text wrapped by the anchor tags.  If you use keywords within your anchor text, it should also help tell the search engines what your site is about.

4. Relevant And Working Outbound Links
Make sure that your outbound links are actually relevant to the content found on that page.  In the past black hat SEO’s would create link farms.  These link farms were sites full of links that were used to boost search engine rankings. Search engines caught on to this trick and were able to detect this abuse.

Make sure all your outbound links work.  If a search engine detects a lot of broken links on your site, it will lower your search engine rankings. Broken links make your site seem not as useful.

5. Optimize your images
Make sure all your images have alternative tags.  Search engines cannot determine what is in your images.  Alt tags tell the search engines what is in the image.

Make sure your file names say what is in the picture.  Seperate the words with dashes so that search engines can read your filenames.  For example, if you have a picture of a dog being trained name the file dog-being-trained.jpg.

6. Hosting optimization
The quality of hosting is important for SEO.  The faster your sites load, the easier it is for bots to index more pages at a time.  If you are on a shared hosting you usually share an IP address with multiple websites that are not under your control.  If a malicious web site is hosted on the same virtual hosting server as yours, then it is possible your search engine rankings will go down.

7. Domain Name optimization
Having keywords in your domain name is optimal but is very hard to do.  The domaining market has made it very hard to get great domain names without purchasing them for a premium.
Here are a few tips when choosing a domain name

Get a .com domain whenever possible.  There are multiple domain extensions but the best is .com

Keep the domain name as short as possible.  The shorter the domain name, the easier it is to type
in to a browser without making mistakes.  Shorter domain names are also easier to remember.

Avoid non alphanumeric characters.  Using weird characters makes your site harder to remember.

8.URL Structure
Keep your URLs as short as possible, but also as descriptive as possible.  Seperate your words with dashes so that search engines can read your URLs.  Many ecommerce sites have URLs that use product id #’s instead of descriptive URLs.  For example, http://www.ecommercesite.com/?productid=1234123 doesn’t tell you anything about the page.  If you were to instead use something like http://www.ecommercesite.com/handbags/beautiful-red-purse would help you show up for the keyword beautiful red purse.

9. Optimize Your Code
Try to reduce the amount of code on the page.  The less code on the page, the faster bots can load your page and the less confusing it is to read the information.  Make sure all javascript is stored in external files and included into your code.  Make sure all CSS styling is done externally and linked to within the code.  Do not use tables unless absolutely necessary.  Tables are an ancient way of building sites.  Tables require a lot of code which could easily be replaced with divs and CSS.  Whenever possible try to validate your HTML with http://validator.w3.org .

10. Avoid over doing anything
If you are optimizing for a keyword, use any of the methods above within reason.  For example, if you are trying to optimize for dog breeding, do not register www.dogbreedingdogbreedingdogbreeding.com and put up a page called dog-breeding-dog-breeding.php with a page full of dog breeding within h1 tags.  Search engines can detect when you are trying to game them.  Optimize, but don’t over do it.  Do not repeatedly spam your keywords.

SEO is not a quick method to increase your search engine rankings.  It takes time for your site to earn the search engines trust.  It’s a slow process that requires experimentation and dedication.  The best thing to do is to keep a diary of the optimization that you have done and then to track it’s effectiveness on your search engine rankings.  Hard work will produce results.

One of the very first things you should do after you have completed building your site, is to submit to all the top search engines.  Most search engines will not index your site until you have submitted it to them.  Search engines are a free way to get traffic to your site.

Google
Submitting a site to google is very easy.  Just go the their url submission site and enter your url, a comment, and the captcha.

Bing
Submitting a site to Bing is very similar to Google’s url submission.  Go to their url submission site and enter the captcha, your url, and click submit URL.

Yahoo
You can submit your site to yahoo by going to their site explorer website submission page.  Enter your url and hit submit.

Ask.com
Ask.com’s site submission is a little more complex. They require an XML sitemap.  An XML sitemap is a map of your whole site in an XML format.  There are a few ways to build an xml sitemap.

You can build an xml sitemap manually using the structure found here http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php .  This is very time tedious and time consuming.  If you do choose thise method, I would recommend using an actual XML editor like the free one from microsoft found here.  This will prevent you from making syntax mistakes that youw make your sitemap invalid.

Another way is to build your xml sitemap is to use an online tool such as the one found at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com .  You enter your URL, frequency of change, last modification date and priority, then click start and it will generate your xml sitemap.

For wordpress users, there is a very simple xml sitemap generator plugin.  You can download it here . Upload the plugin and enable it.  Your sitemap should then be available at http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Once you have your xml sitemap ready you can submit it to ask.com by using the link below and replacing [Link To Your Sitemap] with the link to your sitemap.
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=[Link To Your Sitemap]

You should then see this page from Ask.com

Now that you’ve taken the first step, start learning Search Engine Optimization.  The higher you rank in the results pages, the more ttraffic you will get.

The shock tactic is exactly what it sounds like.  Shocking headlines jump out at you.  They  grab your attention by using words that peak your interest.  We all fall victim to shocking headlines because they stick out so well.  They are so interesting that we just have to learn more.

Shock Tactics In Everyday Life

You see examples of shock tactics used everyday.  If you watch television in the evening, you see shocking headlines everyday.  The evening news only has a minute to capture your attention, so they will say things like “What household item could kill your family?” or “Murderer on the loose, we’ll tell you where at 11″  Another place you see shocking headlines is at the grocery store in the checkout line.  Those outrageous tabloid headlines are ridiculous.  “Elvis and Britney Spear’s Love Child speaks” “John and Kate Selling the 8 on Ebay”  We all know how ridiculous their claims are, yet we still want to grab the tabloid and read the lies.

Shocking Headlines For Affiliate Marketing

Shocking headlines are used in all methods of marketing.  The point of marketing is to get people interested in your products or services.  On a page full of words, yours have to stick out.  Here are a few examples of commonly used headlines

WARNING

DON’T BUY THIS PRODUCT

IDIOT MAKES 4X MORE THAN YOU

IS THIS PRODUCT A SCAM?

IS THIS PRODUCT LEGIT?

DO NOT CLICK THIS

YOUR WASTING X DOLLARS EVERYDAY

STOP BEING A MORON

How Shocking Headlines Turn Dull

When a shocking headline works, affiliates will find out.  Affiliates will monitor ads on larger sites.  They know the people spending a lot on advertising are constantly testing and optimizing.  They will start spending more on the better converting ads, so those ads will start show up more frequently.  The lower converting ads will start to dissapear.  Affiliates will start using these popular headlines in their ads.  The internet will then be flooded with these headlines.

Shock has it’s value because seeing that series of words is uncommon to the person.  As people see the headlines more frequently, they start to become desensitized to it and the headline loses it’s value.

You have to constantly be trying different headlines.  What worked last month, may not work this month.  Be creative and try to use new headlines that will shock your audience again.

Where Should You Use Shocking Headlines

You should use shock when creating headlines for your posts, when creating banners for your sites, when writing copy for ppc ads, and pretty much about everything you do.  But you should not use it all time.  Remember, shock is only shocking when it occurs infrequently.

Benefits of Commenting

One good way to build back links is with blog comments.  Many WordPress blogs have comments that do not have a nofollow tag.  Nofollow tags tell googlebot to not consider these true outbound links which means they will have no value towards building your Page Rank.  Commenting on other relevant blogs will not only add back links for your site but it will also bring traffic in.

Getting Traffic From Comments

When you add a comment to someone’s blog, they usually ask for name, email, and website.  When your comment is approved it will display with your name linked to your website.  Not everyone reads the comments, but the ones that do will spend more time reading on your site.

Comments Are Like Search Engine Results

Comments at the top are more likely to be read than the ones at the bottom.  This is just like search engine results.  Search results on top are more likely to be clicked on than the ones on the bottom.  So you have to get in there early.  After you find a good block related to your niche, subscribe to their feed.  This ensures that right when they post it will show up in your RSS feed reader.  Make sure to comment as quickly as possible, but also make sure to write a good comment.

Writing A Good Comment

Writing a good comment takes some effort.  You have to actually read the article.  Do not just put a garbage comment.  Write something intelligent and thought provoking that actually adds to the conversation.  If you have a question about the post, write your comment and add the question at the end.  Make sure you enter a minimum of 3 sentences.  When I read blog posts I will only look at comments that are at least 3 lines.  Most comments under 3 lines are just kudos or garbage.

Finding Relevant Blogs

Here are a few sites that should help you find relevant blogs.

Google Blog Search is a great site to find blogs relating to your niche.  Enter a few keywords and click search blogs and a ton of blogs will show up.

Blog Catalog is another great site.  It ranks #1 for blog directory.  It will search their blog directory and blog posts for your keywords.

WordPress.com is one of the world’s largest hosted blog solution.  These blogs are hosted on wordpress.com and not on independent sites.  It is still a good way to get traffic to your site.

Limit Your Comments

Try to limit the number of comments you do a day.  I would say 20 to 30 a day max.  Building links to fast may get you penalized with search engines.  Search engines know that people are trying to game them, so they will flag any activity that seems out of the ordinary.  Building 1000 back links a day with comment posts seems impossible.  Reading a blog post might take 5-10 minutes and there are not 5000 minutes in a day.

Controversy is one of the best ways to generate sales.  It will create negative and positive interest in your offer.  You can make either type of interest profitable.

I bet you’re wondering, “how do I get negative interest to turn into a sale?”  There has to be a conflict to provoke the negative people into buying.  This will require the positive interest people and the negative interest people to conflict.  If the positives and negatives are provided an easy way to communicate they will do battle.

If you browse any forum that isn’t overly moderated you will see evidence of conflict creating conversation.  A topic will come up that will polarize the community.  These threads turn into pages upon pages of passionate arguments.

Try going on a forum and ask which is better Mac or PC.   Or go on any car forum and ask brand a vs brand b.  You will start a war.

The sales will come from both sides.  The positives will want to purchase your product because they agree with you and also to prove the negatives wrong.  The negatives will want to purchase your product to prove that you are wrong and so they have more ammo to argue with the positives.

To create this controversy you have to write with passion.  You must not be afraid to piss someone off.  This is what you are going for.  There will be some who love your writing and others who think you are a complete retard.  Either way, they will both come back.

After you write your post or article, you have to become a split personality.  Clear your mind and become that negative person.  Pretend you hate everything that was written and that it is completely wrong.  Measure how much it enrages you from 1 to 10.  If it is 6 or below, you haven’t written with enough emotion.

A common saying is if you don’t like it, then don’t come back.  Yet they come back every day to be enraged by your writing.  It’s pretty masochistic, but it still happens.

Using controversy to sell works because products sell when people are talking about them.  When there is a conversation, it means they are paying attention.  Profit from your opinion.  Create a spark that explodes a controversial conversation and ends in conversions.  As Yoda would put it “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to sales.”

Stop guessing when it comes to choosing a domain name.  Use actual search data provided by the largest search engine in the world.  Stop wasting time and money buying crappy domain names.  Follow this quick and easy guide and you’re on your way to making money online.

After you have selected your niche, you can use google keyword tool to help you select your domain. Google keyword tool is an application provided by Google to help you find keywords for your adwords advertising campaigns.  It is full of useful search information and can help you choose your domain name.

To begin your domain research go to the google keyword tool.  For this example my niche will be dog training. Enter your niche into the text box and make sure use synonyms is checked.

Click Get keyword ideas. It will display the keywords, advertiser competition, local search volume for that month, and global monthly search volume for that month.

I will click Local Search Volume: Month because I plan to target local search. Now I have the view I want. I now know what keywords people are searching for in my niche.

Now I will start grabbing the uniqie words from the top keywords.  Dog, training, train, dogs, obedience, collar, collars, agility, school, your, tips, free, potty, schools, behavior. Next I will make 5 domains with no dashes using these keywords and a few of my own.

1. freeandeasydogtraining.com
2. bluecollardogtraining.com
3. dogtraininghomeguide.com
4. freepottytrainingdogtips.com
5. homeschooldogtraining.com
6. goodbehaviordogtraining.com

Now I will check if they are available. 1,2,3,4 are available. 5 is taken. The one I like the best is bluecollardogtraining. I was able to sneak in collar into the domain which shows up in 2 of the top ten searches. Blue collar is also a common term which has 10,500,000 results in google. Now I will search the term blue collar dog training and see how many results I get in google.

It has 209,000 results and all the search results do not look like authority sites. Now I know if my site ever gets popular and people search blue collar dog training it should show up on the first page and quite possibly the very first result.  I have my domain name and now I’m ready to go.

Now if none of my 5 domain names were available, or I didn’t like what I was left with, I would start trying domains with dashes in it. Dashes help google separate the words in your domain, but dashes are really inconvenient for type in traffic. Expect to get most of your traffic from search engine instead of direct when using dashes in your domain.

Here’s the breakdown of the process.

1. Enter your niche into google keyword tool and click get keyword ideas
2. Sort it by local search if your market is local or sort it by world search if your market is global
3. Take the first 10 to 20 keywords and write down the unique words
4. Make 5 domains that make sense grammatically using 3 to 4 keywords
5. Pick your favorite from the unregistered domains
6. If they are all registered then your niche may be really competitive and you may have to use dashes
7. Google the keywords in your domain and if the competition is tough try again, otherwise you have your domain name

Before you go out and buy your domain make sure to check out our special Domain Registration Deals.

Magazines are one of the best sources for finding profitable niches.  Magazines are a  businesses, and no business can survive without making any money.  If there is a magazine about it, you can guarantee there is an audience who is willing to spend money on that subject.  Magazines survive on ads, and if not enough ads are sold, then that magazine wil die.

The real value in the magazine is not just in the headlines, but in the advertising found in these magazines.  Small businesses usually cannot afford to buy ads in these magazines, so you will normally have large businesses advertising in these magazines.

Large businesses usually have the budgets to have a marketing division or the ability to hire an advertising agency.  Advertising agencies will test their ads in all markets and will track their effectiveness.  When you start seeing alot of ads for a specific type of product in a magazine, than you know that that product is working in that market.

So start buying those magazines and do your research.  Look at what stories are on the cover.  Magazines need to sell you at first glance.  These stories should be on your site and on the front page.  Look at the design.  Those colors should be on your site.  Find the leading magazine in your niche and try to emulate them as much as possible without completely copying them.  This takes all the guessing out of developing your site.  They’ve already done the research for you.  Now go out there and take some of that market and make that money.

What is Alexa?

Alexa is a web information company where you can find out useful information about websites.  Alexa tracks the popularity of many sites.  It is very useful when analyzing the competition.  Alexa has a Top Sites section that displays the top sites on the web and can even be organized by country and category.  You can even pull detailed information about a websites.  You can find a sites traffic rank, average time on site, backlinks, and how long they’ve been on line.

How does Alexa get their data?

Alexa pulls their data from their Alexa Toolbar.  I highly suggest you download this and install it on your computer right away.  You can download it here.  Think of it as a nielsen rating system but for the internet.  They gather traffic data from their toolbar and estimate the popularity of sites.  It is not a 100% accurate but it is pretty close and is considered the authority.

Finding a profitable niche

Alexa has a Hot Urls section which displays the hottest pages on the web updated every 5 minutes.  Alexa is different from Google Trends because Alexa gives you the actual most visited sites.  not the most searches.  You can use Hot URLs to find out whats going viral.  Using the screenshot below you could create multiple niches.

#1 is Google Adsense and the link containing system_down.html tells me that Google Adsense has gone down.  Adsense is the most popular ppc advertiser and them going down is a pain point for webmasters.  For this item I would come up with a niche for webmasters who do pay per click(ppc) advertising.  I could put up a quick blog and create a post with “Alternatives to Google Adsense” or “Adsense Down Again Try These PPC Networks”.  Now the next time Adsense goes down I could get a lot of traffic and make money having webmasters sign up for alternative ppc networks.

#2 is Americas Best College on Shine.  Colleges are a very profitable niche.  You could setup a quick blog about finding the right college for you or finding scholarships.  There are a lot of college related advertisers.  Just do a little research and you could come up with multiple blog posts.

As you can see I have already found 2 profittable niches and I now that there are people actually visiting these type of sites.  Alexa.com should be one of your first stops when researching your niche.  They are the authority and help you keep in touch with what is going on with the internet.