If you want to make money online, you may wonder what you should sell and who you should sell it to.

The first step of any plan to make money online should always be to check for what people are buying. It’s very difficult to create markets and make any money, it’s a lot easier to pick a market that already has a flood of buyers and position your offer in front of them.

The cool thing about online marketing is that you don’t have to guess, there’s a sure-fire way to find out.

And this technique works as a way to identify market demand even if you are not selling anything online too . . .

Are you familiar with Google AdWords?  These are those ads you see at the top of a page in a Google search and also down the right side. All those listings are paid ads.

The other search engines do the same thing and that’s how they make their billions.

So, if you could find out what the advertisers pay for a click on their ad and also find out how much traffic that keyword had, can you see how that might be useful to help you make money online?

Well, you can.

There are plenty of places to find this info, just type something like “Most Expensive Google AdWords Keywords” into Google. Here’s the best one I found when doing that:

Here’s what the column headings mean:

• “Keyword” is the word the advertiser is paying to get their ad seen on.
• “Search Volume is the number of searches per month in the US
• “Average CPC” means the average price an advertiser is paying per CLICK on their ad
• “Category” is the general category that keyword falls in.

The green and red arrows refer to the trends and whether they are going up or down.  They update this list monthly.

The top 4 terms on the list all refer to a kind of cancer caused by asbestos.  Per click costs of $146 sure tell you that a lead is valuable in that market!  And, in fact, the lawyers chasing those clients are looking at million dollar settlements.

So, what these numbers are telling you is what a customer is worth in those niches.  If you wanted to make money online just by doing SEO, pick some of those terms to get leads and then sell those leads to the companies paying $146 per click!

You will probably find the top few terms to be competitive since most Internet marketers already know this, but if you do this analysis in your market or niche, it can be extremely helpful to gauge the “commercial buying intent” of someone clicking on those keywords.

One more tip – do a search on the keyword(s) you are considering.  If there are no ads on the top or the side of the search results, that means the term does not have high “buying interest” so is not worth targeting.

There are many ways to make money online, but my favorite is here.  Check out this short video to see what it is.