Eclectic niche
As we discuss planning a sales strategy for 2011, we must understand the idea of how small a niche must be to perform the way we want for our Squidoo lenses and affiliate marketing.
I think that understanding how narrow a niche must be is one of the most fundamental lessons any lensmaster must learn, and for some reason, one of the most difficult to internalize. We seem to fight this concept as being opposite to any instincts or common sense that we have learned previously, but I am going to tell you, that once you understand how narrow to make your lens topics, you will be thrilled at the results.
December and January our lens project is all about creating a lens using the niche concept much, much better.
To help you keep the niche idea in focus, here is the definition of the word niche from Dictionary.com, as it pertains to our usage:
a distinct segment of a market.
However, a niche market is defined as:
This is a much better definition for us to work with as Squidoo lensmasters because it better defines what we need to do to create lenses that will be found by searchers on the search engines.
It is the people who search on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing that drive the way we need to write our lenses to get more traffic and sales. We need to be able to step into their shoes, and drop all of our assumptions about how we think people search for our topic. We need to instead use the data we find from our research to create an article that will succeed in connecting with those people who are looking for what we have to offer. Because even if a hundred people search for our topic today, and every single one of them lands on our lens, we will only get clickthroughs from a small percentage, and of those clickthroughs only about 1% to 4% will buy from us on a typical day. And we all know that the reality is that our competition will get some of those people that search to their pages.
So the narrower and more focused we can make our topics, the better suited the material will be for someone who is searching for that topic. A better match, you might say. That means when they get there, they will be in the right place to begin with.
So how small should your niche be? As small as you can make it.
Photo credit: Gruenmann
About lakeerieartists
I agree with you. On my Squidoo Tips lens, I wrote about my big lensbuilding mistake from my early days– making too broad and too long lenses. Now I think in terms of lens series. What clump of lenses can I make, each very niche and focused, but related to several others? Then I interlink those lenses together. This works really well.
Good to see you here, Jimmie.
Yes, this seems to be a lesson that we all have to learn. Hopefully, we can get some of the newer lensmasters there faster.
Welcome Jimmie
Oh yes, I know what you mean about making lenses too broad and too long. I can think of several lenses (and more) where if I was doing them again, I would make several lenses where I only made one.
Well, we all know that was a hard lesson for me to wrap my brain around (as Paula said, it seemed to go against all my training). Now that I understand, it make perfect sense and I am seeing results.
I am working quite a bit right now and am missing my creative time. Glad to say I will be off work Sunday and Monday and able to research and create some more lenses within one of my niches. (Also need to work on my 2011 plan.)