The best place to start is to get yourself a master list of words and phrases that you would be interested in pursuing. If you are just starting out, try and think of topics that you have some sort of interest in. There’s a lot of money to be made with topics such as insurance and surgery, but unless you have a fascination with those topics, it is going to be a chore to get content out there on them. Start off with the easy stuff and work your way up. Let’s say you’re a musician, or a music lover. Your initial “brainstorming” list may look something like this…

• drums
• guitar
• keyboards
• rock and roll
• old time radio
• jazz
• symphony
• sheet music
• guitar strings
• mp3 downloads

…etc, etc. You really need to just open up your mind and let the words start flowing. At this initial stage, don’t over think anything. We are looking for a big big list, preferably in the thousands, and the good ones will rise to the top in the later steps of this process. If you over think the process, you may discount a word that you think will not be a viable money maker and leave it out of your list. This is not a guessing game, it’s a numbers game, and following the logical steps I will lay out for you will ensure that you find some winners.

“In the thousands??” you say. Yes, over a thousand keywords in your masterlist is a great place to start. If you get stuck (and you will), here are a few tricks that you can use to get your creative thinking juices going. Go to Amazon and find the category of products that matches the topic you are concentrating on. In our example, our first stop would probably be the Musical Instruments section. Scroll through this section with your notepad open and throw every related word you can find on your list. Don’t forget to include brand names and accessories. You have guitar, but do you have guitar pick, guitar strap, Fender Starcaster, kids guitar? Write them all down without judging any of them.

There are, of course, places other than Amazon that you can get ideas from. eBay is another great spot to get ideas, as is Dmoz Open Directory Project. Once you have sucked all the words out of these three places, you might want to go to Yahoo Answers and see what sort of questions people are asking about your topic. Turn these questions into two or three word phrases and add them to your list. For example “Where is a good place to learn guitar in Philadelphia?” becomes “guitar lessons”, “Where can I find a cheap acoustic guitar for my grandson?” becomes “cheap acoustic guitars”. You get the drift, anything that is relevant should be added to your list, and if you add “guitar lessons”, then you are going to want to add “violin lessons”, “clarinet lessons” and “didgeridoo lessons”.

So your homework is to go and get yourself a masterlist. Don’t come back here until you have at least a thousand words, and then I’ll show you how to turn that 1,000 word list into a 30,000 word superduper list.