This may come as a shock to you, but over the last 20 days, a friend of mine called Steven managed to earn over $4,500 online starting absolutely from scratch. He is currently waiting for his paycheck to arrive and wondering what he can do with this unexpected pile of money that is going to land in his bank account at the end of the month. The secret of Steven's success lies in his ability to spot profitable residual income opportunities online.

What types of residual income opportunities exist on the Internet? There are many things you can do online to help you earn passive income, but, for the purposes of the first part of this article, we are going to look at the most popular one - affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing refers to the process of promoting products manufactured by others, in return for a lofty commission. For example, about two weeks after Steven started out, he was earning approximately $100 a day in affiliate commissions from the various products he was promoting.

How do you look for residual income opportunities online when it comes to affiliate marketing? The most important thing you will ever do is find a good market niche. A market niche is a relatively small sub-segment of a much bigger market - however, there are little to no people selling products to this niche, which means that you can have the market pretty much to yourself. Finding a good niche is the foundation of affiliate marketing success, which is why so many professional Internet marketers guard their niches so closely!

Finding a niche to exploit for maximum residual income opportunities can be tricky business - luckily, there are many tools that will help you in doing your research. Wordtracker offers a wonderful free tool called Keywords that helps you see what people are looking for on Google. All that remains is to enter those queries into Google and see how many results you get - for example, if you find a keyphrase that gets 200 searches every day and there are only 800 results that Google produces for it, then you know you've found a good niche for yourself!

Of course, there is a lot more to finding good residual income opportunities than just spotting a niche. For example, you have to consider factors such as whether people looking for this type of information are actually ready to spend money, whether the product you chose to promote sells well, etc. However, once you have found a good niche, you will probably be able to pick the right product for it - which is why niche finding is the most important aspect of spotting profitable residual income opportunities on the Internet.

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Part II of this article explains what tools you should use to spot the right niche, how to evaluate its profitability and how to pick the right affiliate program that will yield you the best results. You can read Part II of this article at http://establish-multiple-streams-of-incomes.blogspot.com