I'm not really writing about 'finding hot niches' today but since Jackie brought it up I want to add one place not included on her list. There is a good possibility many will disagree with me but I want to suggest you look for 'hot niche' ideas by paying attention to television ads.
Yes! You heard me correctly. ;-) And no... I'm not suggesting you should compete with the 'big guys' who can afford TV advertising rates. But think about it...
They've spent tons of money doing the research to find out what people are looking for (or, at the very least they've spent tons of money deciding to convince us we're looking for certain solutions. Heck...until pharmaceutical companies decided to advertise directly to the consumer I just never knew there were quite so many things that could go haywire!)
So, pay attention to what are presumably people's concerns and then zero in on a little subset of that group of people with a product or service that might serve them around the issue.
Okay... got that out of my system. ;-)
I was reading an ebook about building Squidoo lenses and it was talking about getting your lens indexed in search engines. According to this 'expert' it is better to leave links off of your squidoo lens for the first 3 or so days and simply focus on content that uses your keywords. That way, you'll get the best indexing.
Now...I have no idea if this is true or not but I decided that I'd give it a day or two before I included any direct links. Today I did add more content AND one link to my Cards Build Business lens. I will confess to have some doubts about the veracity of this information because I believe it was the same source that suggested simply writing your intro and adding a couple of 'Text modules' to start your lens out.
The thing is... it may simply be outdated information because Squidoo now requires a minimum of 4 modules before even they will add your lens to their files. That was set up in order to discourage those people who were simply using up space over at Squidoo by slapping up a quick, minimal lens simply to ride on the coattails of the highly ranking squidoo pages. That kind of stuff just hurts everybody so I'm very pleased Squidoo responded by setting up some parameter that might help lenses be a synonym for 'quality content'!
What I ended up doing when I started the lens on January 1 was writing the Intro, the two text modules AND I simply added a Guestbook. If you drop by a lens that offers a guest book please take a moment to leave a message... giving feedback is always a valuable exchange and if you happen to be logged in to Squidoo at the time it provides you with a link back to your name and your lenses so it's really a win-win to sign guestbooks!
Yesterday I went in to edit the lens by adding a fun little widget called "Did you Know?" It allows you to rotate through a series of random facts and I really like things that are interactive plus it was a nice fit for my subject matter.
I also added a poll and a couple of new tags. I have learned that the search engines, Google and Yahoo for instance, seem to like a site that is frequently updated. To add something new a few times a week is actually frequent enough... and this can be as small and simple as adding a new tag or two. But when I'm still in the active building phase of a lens I'll usually add at least one section daily.
Today I added another text module which resulted in me having some new tags to add to the lens also. Feel free to hop over there and check out my progress... and hey, while you're there you could leave a note in my guestbook and/or give me a star rating... I haven't yet promoted this lense but I intend to do some of that... tomorrow!
C'ya then...
--Mary K
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