Making money online can be so fast and so simple, it's almost a magical experience. Magical that is, if you don't mind stirring up your magic with some keyword research, competition sleuthing, a little writing, content marketing, and add a little advertising voo-doo.

Getting started is easy because all you need is an idea.

For example, your 13-year daughter has been acting all sensitive and weird since she became a teen. Instead of 'growing-out-of-it', she's worse with every passing day. Worried, you take her to the doctor.

After her exam, the doctor informs you she's suffering from the early stages of 'directionitis'. History suggests nature will cure her in 10 years or so.
 

Until then, he warns you to expect more of the same behavior from her. Plus, he cautions you, be prepared for her to eventually display episodes of highly
dramatic scenes that would make Lady Gaga green with envy.

The doctor suggests you take a stiff before dinner drink, or perhaps two, if you don't already. The drinks won't help your daughter, but might do wonders for your personal sanity. After all is said and done, the doctor's advice is "you'll just have to live with it and make the best of it that you can."

Obviously, you think, the sainted doctor is clueless, or on the least, childless!

In the weeks to come you agree with the doc about one thing. It appears your daughter's new mission in life is to make you crazy enough to be a guest on the Jerry Springer TV show.

You're slowly reaching your rope's end. You need help. Your Mom laughs hysterically every time you bring up the subject. And your friends don't understand because their kids are younger.

Desperate for help, you decide to try the Internet for information about living with a child suffering from directionitis.

Wow! You quickly discover "directionitis" is an ailment common to teenagers worldwide. You're even able to find blogs and discussion forums whose members talk a lot about how their kid's directionitis is making their lives unbearable.

As humans will, there are even forum strings where parents detail their kids
destructive directionitis behavior in an attempt to 'one-up' the evilness of other parent's kids.

You also find a lot of directionitis related questions and answers. Actually, you're surprised how active parents are about directionitis. And bam, there it is: "A Money-Making Idea"!

"Directionitis..!" Is going to make you rich!

Isn't this IM thing simple? You bet. Clutching your hot idea close to your chest, you head over to Google's external keyword research tool. You type in directionitis cures to see how many monthly searches Google estimates. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Bingo! You see your keyword phrase has 19 thousand monthly searches. Plus, and be still your beating heart, you see six additional keyword phrases with monthly searches above 3,500!

So far, so great...

But how much competition is there? You immediately enter the different keyword phrases, with quotation marks around them, into Google's main search page. You note that Google search shows competing pages from a high of 100 thousand to just over 50K. Still looks good.

Before you get busy buying domain names and planning your monetization strategies, you need to know if you have any hope of beating the competition's current search engine positions. Basically you're looking at the top five sites showing up in search engines for your different keyword phrases.

Back to Google. Search each phrase in quotation marks, "directionitis cures", etc, and etc...

To get page rank, and see the different site's number of back links, I use either Mozilla's 'Firefox' browser with the addon SEOBook installed.
http://www.seobook.com

Or, I use Google's 'Chrome' browser with the SeoQuake software addon. http://seoquake.com/

Either browser, with the added software programs, will quickly give you the competing websites page rank (PR) and their number of back links.

Actually, you'll get a plethora of useful data about the competing sites. Great free tools for your basic research.

At this research stage, you want to know how weak/strong the competition is. The PR and the number of back links they have. With this knowledge, you decide whether you have the skills to beat out the competition for organic search engine position.

Generally, if the competing sites have PR's of '3' or less, and reasonable number of back links, you're still working on a good idea. PR's higher than a '3' should be left for people who love a good fight. 'Reasonable back links' is indirectly dependant on specific market variables, a number will do more harm than good here.

At this point in your research, you have to find out if you can monetize your 'directionitis' niche. Which will be a simple chore, too. Your obvious monetization choices are: sell 3rd party advertising; pimp affiliate products, and services, or create and sell your own product. Actually, it could very well be simple to use all of these choices.

You already know the organic search traffic is available. You can build a blog, or a website, with web pages targeting the different keyword phrases.

On the different web pages you can add 3rd party advertising codes, like Google's Adsense. You can also add links and reviews of related products, and services that pay you a commission when your visitor buys through your links. (Don't stop with just Adsense. Depending on your traffic source, there are other good options rather than Adsense.)

You can get an idea of the kind of money you'll make when visitors click on your 3rd party advertising at Google's External Keyword Tool's 'show average cpc' settings. (At this writing, the link is in the 'left' sidebar.)

Google's share of the cpc money isn't officially disclosed, estimated between 50 - 75%. And, you won't get all the search engine traffic, even if you take over top spot in the SERP rankings. But, you can get an 'educated' idea of your returns.

You can find affiliate/commission products using search engines. Do searches like this: "Directionitis" + Affiliate". You can also do a keyword search at Clickbank's Marketplace to find digitial affiliate products.

You could easily create an info product from the questions and answers you find on the different blogs and support websites. Don't forget to research Yahoo's answers, as well. http://answers.yahoo.com  

Google Answers (http://answers.google.com isn't accepting new queries now, but you can still search it's past entries data base. You could also interview an directionitis expert and turn the interview into an audio, video, or PDF type product. Lots of free resources for this process.

While this isn't meant to be a complete tutorial, it should give you an idea, or three.

And, a good idea, is all you need to cast a spell of "Online Money-Making Magic"..!

Disclosures: The author, me, has no association with Google, Yahoo, Clickbank, or any other afore referenced business entity, or person. Secondly, as you probably know, "directionitis" is a word made up by someone, me, to describe strange behaviors exhibited by teenagers during their frustrating years of figuring out who they are.