The Squidoo List Plan Part Two - Creating a Free Product

Time to look at the next stage in my Squidoo List Plan. To recap, the plan involves using Squidoo to generate a list to sell products. So far I have chosen a niche. The next stage is to create something of value to entice people to sign up to my subscriber list. I have no experience of this as such, but I do have experience of subscribing to other people's list. What I know is that the lists I subscribe to are those that offer an enticing free product, and those that I stay subscribed to are those that live up to the hype.

So, what I need to do is create an e-book to give away. This needs to be of a good standard so that my subscribers will consider me to be an expert in my chosen niche. However, should I make it extensive enough for it to be good enough to be a paid for product? Actually, I'm not sure about that. I suppose what I don't want to do is use up everything I know about the niche so as to rule out the possibility of creating a product to sell in the future.

To the technicalities - the e-book I am creating should be in a PDF format, but how can this be done without purchasing some software to create such files? Well, quite easily actually. All you need is Open Office which can be downloaded for free. This offers a range of applications including a word processor, a spreadsheet application, an application for presentations and one for drawing. All of these are compatible with Microsoft Office. Why would you want this? Well, all the applications have this handy little button:

This simply saves a copy of your work as a PDF document. Easy!




I am quite slow at writing and I am working on some other projects, so it may be a little while before my next instalment.

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.