Every money making opportunity that you see boils down to one common thing: idea. As you know the best ideas pay. The most creative ideas pay.

The best thing about ideas is it's free and everybody has the capability to think of ideas.

In order to be creative and innovative about ideas, you have to have knowledge. Knowledge is important. You need to know thousands of things to be creative.

Below are steps that you can take to come up with profitable innovative ideas:

1) Read and study as many things as possible about your industry or product. You need to investigate specific information of what you are going to sell. For example, if you want to be involved in real estate, you study everything about the subject matter in details. If you want to start a business, you have to know what's going on in your industry, what sells and at what price, etc.

2) Improve general knowledge. Don't limit yourself to only learn about things in your own industry. Learn as many topics as possible from other industries. It can be any topic. This enables you to think out of your own industry.

3) Mix and match ideas from cross industry. Once you investigate and research enough, your mind is the storehouse of all the ideas you have studied. And this is the main source to your creative ideas. All the knowledge you have learned so far is the raw materials to produce new ideas.

4) Thinking of raw idea. After you have done your study, think hard about the solutions you want to your problem. Then stop and relax. Get a cup of coffee or go for a movie. Do something relaxing and let your subconscious mind work for you. The idea or solution will come to you at a much unexpected moment. For me, ideas always come to me before I sleep. My mind will be bombarded with ideas that I can't stop.

5) Refine your raw idea until it's up to your satisfaction. You can always do your own research on the raw idea by asking questions to target market to test the feasibility of the idea and how to improve the idea further.

Basically new idea is a combination of old ideas. You need to have enough old ideas to come up with new ideas. That's why constant reading and observation are important.

Sometimes when someone has launched a new product, you would say, "Hey! I thought about that before. That's my idea." You might have had thought about the idea but you didn't capitalize on it. Someone has done it before you.

It's always good that you have an ideas book. Whenever you think of a good idea, write it down. You can always work on it or improve it later. Bring along the ideas book wherever you go. It doesn't need to be fancy. It can be a normal pocket-sized spiral notebook.

With the method outlined above, I hope that you will be the next person who makes fortunes with unprecedented ideas that people can never think of.

Abel Cheng is publisher of Abel Cheng's Business Diary, a free publication that provides unorthodox home and small business success tips, tools and resources. Get instant access to his publication at http://www.abelcheng.com/diary.html