Whenever you think about starting an Internet business of some sort there has to be some research carried out first.

The first question ought to be how many people are actually searching for the thing you plan to sell or market online? Below are some places to help find those answers:

Google Zeitgeist - Google Zeitgeist will give you tidbits of extremely interesting information such as top searches for the week etc.
This is a great way to find out what’s a hot subject right now on the Internet. (Could you build a site around that subject?)

Good Keywords - This is a Free downloadable tool that you can run of your desktop to see how many people are typing in a certian keyword on Overtures network or Yahoo. This is a fantastic little tool and I highly recommend you download it as it also provides you with keywords suggestions too.

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Simply type in a word and it will tell you how many people searched for it the month before.

The Lycos Top 50 - See the top 50 searches performed on Lycos.

Niche Finder - Niche finder is a very useful bit of software that helps you to see how competitive a market is.

It’s all about supply and demand on the Internet and even now you can be sure there are hundreds of great opportunites for individuals to make a great living.

Many Website owners use articles freely available from places like www.articlecity.com or www.goarticles.com to add useful content to their sites.

However when you find an article to use it’s often surrounded by adverts and it is tricky to copy asnd paste them into your Website. Also if you are using the content to attract traffic for certain keywords such as “career advice” it would be useful to know how many times the words “career advice” appears in the article.

Jason Potash a well known Internet Marketer has come up with a useful little piece of software that helps you extract the articles. It’s called Orwell and you can see a tutorial video of it here: http://www.portalfeeder.com/report/orwell_demo.html and if you want to download it for free go to: http://www.portalfeeder.com/report/orwell.exe.

Jason is also going to be launching some software that looks to answer a lot of Internet Marketers problems when trying to produce content Websites - it’s called Portal Feeder and if you want to be kept posted of it’s launch go to: www.portalfeeder.com

If you want to make money by displaying Adsense on your Website, these days your content has to be truly useful to a human visitor or else it’s doomed. If Google beleives that you are producing “Adsense Sites” (Sites designed to make money purely from Adsense and that have no real benefit to a real person) then you can expect to be dropped from the S.E results like a stone .

I make a nice side earning with Adsense and keep informed of changes so keep an eye on my Adsense section for the latest news.

Google is currently testing a new system on Adwords that could prove very popular indeed. Basically you see a small phone icon nest to the advert and if you click it you can type in your telephone number and it connects you free of charge to the advertiser.

Here’s a screenshot:

In Googles owns words:

“What’s the phone icon on Google search results? How does it work?
We’re testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone.

Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party. Then, chat away on our dime.

We won’t share your telephone number with anyone, including the advertiser. When you’re connected with the advertiser, your number is blocked so the advertiser can’t see it. In addition, we’ll delete the number from our servers after a short period of time.

Am I charged to connect to an advertiser?
No. Google foots the bill for all calls - local and long-distance. However, if we call a cell phone number, you may incur airtime fees depending on the cell phone plan. Check your cell phone provider for details. ”

As an adwords advertiser I am interested to know how well this works so as soon as it is available to all I will let you all know my findings.

I have already experimented with putting in our telephone number within the Adwords advert already and it didn’t appear to bring in better results for me.