The Squidoo List Plan (Part One) - Choosing a Niche

This is the first part of my plan for building a subscriber list primarily using Squidoo. The first stage here is choose which niche I intend to concentrate on. My theory is that I should choose a broad niche that allows for me to write a large amount of varied content. Within this broad niche there should be scope to be able to able to focus on a series of sub-niches. By sub-niche I mean a smaller area within my main niche. For example, if my niche was dog training (it isn't by the way), then a sub niche could be training Jack Russells.

The main criteria though, is that it must be something that I am passionate about and have some degree of knowledge. From experience, I find it difficult, and actually quite tedious, to write stuff about things I have no interest in and no knowledge about. The plan here is to concentrate on just the one niche where I can relatively easily come up with new content on a regular basis without having to struggle with researching the niche and being held back by boredom.

More importantly though, you need to ask yourself whether anybody else is interested in your niche. There are number of different ways of testing this. Perhaps the first place to start is to look at search volumes by using Google Trends.  Don't just test out your main niche though - try out some sub niches. For the niche that I am considering the I can see that for the main niche and related sub-niches there was a negligible search volume prior to 2007, and then it has steadily increased from there. The fact that the volume has continued to grow suggests to me that it is not a passing fad, but here to stay.

Other places to look are your local magazine stockist (either online or offline) and look at whether they stock publications that are related to your niche. If there are one or more magazines either directly or indirectly related to your chosen niche then this is clearly a good sign.

Another place to consider is Amazon. A number of issues to consider here. Firstly are there books on sale relating to your chosen niche - specifically recent publications. In my chosen niche there have been several books published this year that are directly related, and hundreds more that are indirectly related. A final point to consider is are there products on sale (and more to the point are they selling) that relate directly or indirectly to your niche. The number of reviews on a particular product gives some indication of how well a product is selling.

So, now I have chosen my niche and I am ready to progress to the next stage.