Is the "Make Money Online" niche still worth exploring?

I have been reading a lot of blogs and forums in the past few days after I stumbled upon one blog post on the topic "Make money online - a dead niche". The post was beautifully written, explaining why people should not even think of getting into the "make money online" niche now, because it is too late and the competition in the niche was so high that it was not worth the efforts. The author has some understanding about the topic that he was writing and was not just any other blogger who would write on "anything under the sun", without actually knowing the meaning of "being under the sun". This made me ponder - was the make money online niche actually dead?

Whatever the expertise of the author of the post, I would want to assume that he is much ahead of me in terms of basic blogging knowledge (going by the quality of the post he had written). But I would have to apologetically say - "Mr. Author, I beg to differ and disagree with your view". I feel that even today, the "make money online" niche is still worth investing and there is huge profits waiting to be made in this niche. The only thing required is a bit of research and some extra efforts to excavate the goldmine to find the real gold.

Though I do not have substantial data to support this, I had enough evidence to back up my conclusion and that is when I decided I would take a plunge into the "make money online" niche.

A friend of mine, who was working with a leading insurance company, once read one of my blogs (this is about 8 months back, to be precise) and found reference to a post by Yaro Starak. This took her to his blog and she downloaded the "Blog Profits Blueprint", e-book from Yaro. She was tired of the 9 - 5 job that she was doing and wanted to desperately make some money online. She went by everything line-by-line that Yaro had written in the book and started a blog. Guess, what the niche was - "Make Money Online" Niche.

Her blog oriented around, how women could make money online along with a 9 - 5 job. She even had tips to help housewives make a living out of the internet. She researched enough and found a few excellent keywords around these topics and started the blog. I had the opportunity to set-up the entire blog for her and optimize it for her keywords. In about 26 days her blog started to show up on the first page of Google for those keywords. These 3 keywords for which her site was optimized had more than 15,000 searches every month and only about 200 results. 8 months later, she is actually making a living out of her blog. Her income from advertisements on the blog, sales from affiliate products and a few mini-sites that are being promoted through her blog comes to almost about $22,000 per month. Decent income, isn't it?

So, who says, that the "make money online" niche is dead. No niches die. There are lots of niches within niches. The only thing required is that you put in some more efforts and research to find this niche within the niche. If you are to go by the wisdom from the Goobers, this would mean that you scrub through lots and lots of forums, read blogs, use the best tools and keep your eyes and ears wide open. Don't even wink your eyes - lest you might just miss the goldmine.

If you have decided that you want to go after the "make money online" niche, then go after it. Don't listen to the people who profess that this niche is dead. These are the same people who professed that the dotcoms are dead, when the IT bubble busted. But here we are - the dotcoms are very much alive and is probably the biggest money-spinners even today.

Research ,research and research is the mantra for success in today's competitive blogging environment. You might not become a Yaro Starak or, a Jeremy Schoemaker overnight, but who knows, 2 years from now, I might be reading an e-book written by you on "making money online".