With just a little of my time catching up on recent news and some patience I’ve discovered what could be a profitable niche for any marketer.

College Shopping - With many students returning to college after the break and with the enrollment of fresh students comes consumer spending. Think about what college students are likely to buy. Books, Stationary, Laptops are the obvious choices but thinking outside the square many college students are making purchases for their dorm rooms such as furniture, decor and storage options.

Research from the American National Retail Association reports that students and their parents spent $36.6 billion on back-to-college merchandise in 2006. A third of this was spent on electronics including, PC’s, TV’s, iPods and kitchen appliances (coffee machines, popcorn makers etc) and $3.82 billion was spent on dorm furnishings.

Now, look at listing #5 - this is important - it shows that someone has posted a Question on Yahoo Answers. This shows there is a demand for dorm room furniture. After visiting Yahoo Answers I did a search for “dorm furniture” and found some great questions. College students are looking for funky, unique, trendy and cheap. Some of the sites people were referred onto are Freecycle, Teens Themes & SFCC.

I urge you to look at Teensthemes.com as it is a very well presented website and packed full of affiliate links. If you check out the links you can trace them back to various affiliate programs. That’s your homework!

The SFCC site provides a list of essentials that College students will require for living in dorms. Again, research the items on this list and find affiliate programs to match.

Now, I’m going to hold your hand and go one step further in helping you. If you refer back to Yahoo Answers and do some more research you’ll find many other questions relating to dorm life. Some are …um…quite unusual Now, if you’re quite savvy you may start a website that caters to College Students offering advice, tips, best places to find books, furniture etc, ideas for activities - make this a one-stop website for college students. As your popularity grows your site will attract more traffic.

Send press releases to High Schools, Colleges and local coffee shops to promote your site.

Other advertisements you may consider for your site can include, internet access plans, cheap mobile phones, fancy dress costumes (yep, there’s an affiliate program out there for this!)

Now I’ve given you some free golden information - what you do next is up to you!