But here's the thing: assuming you have identified a niche, gotten all excited over it, developed a product, built a website, written articles about it - when and how do you review its value? When do you stop? In short, when do you get out?

This, in a nutshell, is was what Sally asked me recently. "I've been working on this niche for a couple of months now, James," she said. "It's OK. Well, OK-ish. I've made a couple of hundred bucks from it but I just have this nagging feeling that I've mined the seam and am getting to a dead end. But I'm not sure. How can I tell? How do I know when to get out?"

Knowing when to leave a niche is just as great a marketing skill as identifying one in the first place. And it is a key skill. How many posts have you read in an internet marketing forum that say something like, "I have been doing this now for three/six/nine/twelve months and I haven't made a single dime, let alone a dollar - it's a waste of time" and so on.

What's happened is that the writer - as my Grandpop use to say - is flogging a dead horse. He or she needs to move on. There's no gold left in them thar hills.

So here are three ways to assess a niche, and determine whether it will be profitable, or whether it has passed its sell-by date.

First, is your customer actively searching for an answer to their need or problem? In other words, are they "hot to trot"? Are they at that point that they have become so emotionally stimulated that they have taken the step to fire up Google or Yahoo to search for a solution? Have they a problem or a passion that is crying out for an answer even if it two o'clock in the morning? Are they desperate?

Second, is it the case that your customer has few, or no perceived options? In other words, are solutions to his pressing problem shouting at him from every Internet street corner? Does she actually have to bother entering a search term? If there are plenty of options to choose from, your "niche" is actually only going to be one twig lost in a very large forest.

Finally, is your customer experiencing pain, plus urgency or irrational passion? I should think that it would be a "Yes" for an arthritis pain reliever than, say, necklaces. And this is where I've made mistakes in the past. I developed a product related to Adwords or something, which was horribly swamped with wannabees. I got nowhere. But as soon as I started to identify a niche (probably less than 200,00 pages in Google, the $$ began to accumulate.

This, I think, is the key point: Don't be a competitor in a niche. Be the first mover, be the category creator, be the niche dominator.

So when you've done your research and come up with a list of possible topics to refine further, take a moment and reflect. Is this niche going to meet the needs of someone who is 'hurting' for an answer? In other words, will it press their button so hard that they will click the 'Buy' button before they realize what they've done? Will your niche stand tall in a clearing because you have few, or no, competitors, or will your voice be lost in the crowd? Is your niche going to meet the needs of a specific, particular group of people who need your product NOW?

However, if the answer to these pointers is 'No', don't be too quick to move on. The canny marketer knows how to create a need that a prospect didn't know they had! You can persuade the customer that they don't have any option but yours. You can convince your web visitor that the pain of losing your offer will be greater than not purchasing.

Remember Sally? At the beginning of this article? Well, she mulled over these three pointers and decided that she would just leave her website to tick over and move on to a new product area. But a few months later Sally sent me an email. She now had five income producing niche sites, and had decided to revisit the original niche that she had talked to me about.

And - guess what? She had outsourced the copy and had the entire site re-written to emphasize the solution that her product offered. Then she tweaked the product so that the selling point could be described as unique. And finally she invested in some software that raised the price automatically every thirty minutes. This tapped into the potential purchasers fear of losing the initial, good, deal.

Niche marketing is a win-win situation, just so long as you know when to stay, and when to leave. Good luck!