I found that it’s “almost” easy to find Niches online, even what’s called “Micro-niches”, which are very tiny sub-niches, by visiting very well known places such as the following:

Yahoo! Answers
Answers.com
Magazines.com
Ebay Pulse (but also check out products within Ebay… you might find something interesting)
Meetup.com
Yahoo! Groups
MSN Groups
Google Groups
General Forums of a Niche (example: Auto Forums which contain many different Auto Brand forums, within them — browse around and learn!)
Wikipedia
MySpace Forums (these people love to talk…learn what their problems are and you might find a GOLD mine in these forums!)
Google Hot Trends

Etc… I hope you get the point.

For forums - all you need to do is find a Niche Market and type it into google as:  niche+forum (niche being the name of the actual Niche)

There’s so many great places to find Niches and Micro-niches, but you need to find a HUNGRY crowd that is looking for a solution to fix their problems… who knows, you may find that there’s a VERY lucrative Niche that doesn’t even have a product yet! This gives YOU the opportunity to create your own and cash in on the problem, while helping others!

Google Trends is a great way to find out if a Market is hot. You can put in keywords (use plurals and NO plurals to see the difference!) and see if the trend is moving up or down.

Microsoft AdLab can also offer some great advice.

Take notes and keep your eyes peeled…and vice versa

If you feel that you’ve found a Hot Market to promote an item to - make sure there’s a product behind it - if not, create it yourself.

Obviously, you can do everything in reverse and find a Product FIRST - and then do your research using these same tools. Hungry crowds is what matters here. If the market isn’t hot - you won’t make as much money as you might like to believe.

I’ve found products, and even Niches, just by skimming through CJ.com or Clickbank.com Categories just to see what’s going on…

Again, keep your eyes open - mind open - and TAKE NOTES!

Good luck!