What do I enjoy doing?

What things do you love to do so much that you would probably do them whether there was a profit involved or not? The best place to start with this question is to look at your hobbies. These are often things you pay a fairly significant amount of money to be involved in. Why not check it out to see if you can make a profit at these very same things? Starting a home business can take a lot of time and effort, and having a passion for focus of your business can be a great source of stamina necessary to make it through difficulties in beginning.

What is there a need for?

After you jot down what you are good at and what you love to do, it's time to assess market for these things. Are you always looking for supplies for your hobby, but can't ever seem to find what you need? It's very likely others are having same difficulty, and a home business that supplies this need would be very well received by this segment of market. Or maybe you love to decorate your kids' birthday cakes, and your neighbors would rather pick theirs up at local grocery store but can't stand small selection. This is a market for which you already have skills and interest to meet needs.

-----Side Bar----- If you are planning to do your business entirely on Internet, one great tool you can use to check whether there is market for your idea is Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

You simply enter keyword that people might use to search for your product and it'll return number of times that term was searched on last month. Amazing isn't it? -----Side Bar-----

But don't be afraid of markets where you may have some skill, but have a lot to learn. As long as you have willingness to put time and effort into becoming an expert in your niche, you will be able to develop specialization you need to be a leader in market.

Once you answer these questions and find distinct area that will set your business apart from others, you have identified your niche and are ready to develop your home business.

For those people using websites to promote home-based businesses, it can be stressful constantly trying to determine "what search engines want" and agonizing over every downward fluctuation in rankings that their website may experience.

Looking forward in time, I think we can expect that rankings will fluctuate frequently and will not be at all consistent from one search engine to another. It will be quite common that for a particular search term a website might suffer a drop in position ranking for search engine "A" and an increase position ranking for search engine "B" at essentially same point in time.

Rather than stressing out over every position ranking "wiggle", a better approach might be to just focus on "what do visitors to my site want?". The search engines are striving to give their users a quality (relevant) search experience and if you are focused in giving visitors to your website what they are looking for, these paths will meet somewhere down road.

You can save yourself alot of consternation by focusing upon needs of website visitors you are seeking to attract, rather than chasing frequently changing ranking algorithms of several search engines. Focus on a single target instead of chasing several moving targets at same time.

This article pertains to natural searches only, as paid search engine advertising is a completely different situation.