If you intend to build a blog around your newly-discovered niche, you must ensure that it is deep enough, so that you don't exhaust its potential after 2 days of blogging.
I've recently started using a new tool to very quickly explore various knowledge sources in order to assess whether there is enough content to sustain my blogging in any given niche. Plus, I've discovered quite a few novel ideas and angles for my niches the same way.
The tool in fact is not new - it's the A9 search engine provided by Amazon. But in a market dominated by Google and Yahoo, one's not too likely to test another search engine without a good reason.
All goodies in one place
Well, one feature of A9 really makes it stand out of the crowd. You can select from hundreds of different specialized search engines (many of them focused on single sites) and combine them all on a very convenient, Ajax-driven page, in a column layout. This way, you get all the most important information at a glance.
In my setup I have six columns (I've selected the smallest font size in preferences to fit more content on the screen). These columns include: web search (results provided by Windows Live, enhanced by Alexa statistics), books (from Amazon), news (Windows Live), blogs (IceRocket Blog Search), Wikipedia and About.
When I do a search on any potential niche, I can immediately see the number of results in each category and the actual content from some of them (like Wikipedia).
For example, I like book results a lot. If I discover that there are dozens or even hundreds of books on a given subject, it's usually a good indicator that I will not run out of things to write about.
Wikipedia results allow you to get immediate overview of the information that is relevant to your niche. About is equally useful in this field. This is particularly handy if you're not an expert in that niche.
The interface is very clean, you can easily resize column widths, and the server responses are generally quite prompt. At least, it's many times faster than browsing to all of these sites one by one.
So, give it a try.
Here's a screenshot of my set-up:
Technorati Tags: A9, research, niche, internet marketing
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