Day 7 – ok so the ad builder in Market Samurai rocks. Very cool and the integration with WPD is cool too. I was however a happy little bunny when I noticed it integrates with my self hosted wordpress blogs & quickly used it to build a nice widget for one of them too. Cool.
I was less thrilled when I discovered that my chosen theme didn’t display my ad properly in my WPD blog. The sidebar was too narrow
I quickly tried a couple of other recommended themes and both of them had adsense enabled & no quick way to turn it off. Undaunted I quickly nipped into the admin area used Get Themes and installed a favourite theme (Arclite – very nice flexible theme, lots of options) and everything is hunky dory again.
Only thing is it’s really tempting to sidestep WPD & just do it all myself now. Hmm. Must resist!
Oh and I watched the Q&A session from last night. Poor old Marty got cut off by Ed when he was in full on question answering mode. I almost felt sorry for him, well except it was quite funny ;-P He kept his cool though (is this the same guy from last year??) and got into the chat & helped out there so good on him!

Day 6 – done and dusted. Such a relief to be getting into the writing phase. This is my comfort zone and soo much easier than the market research for me!!
So far today I set up WordPress Direct to post to my new site, rattled off a reasonable blog post and got it online. Strange to be using the WordPress Direct interface rather than MarsEdit but for the duration of the challenge I’ll stick with it.
Have to say WordPress Direct was stunningly fast to set up and I managed to resist logging into the WordPress admin area to check out which plug-ins etc were loaded. LOL

Hmm – as that’s Day 6 up to date and it’s only Thursday evening I might just have earned Friday morning off! w00t! Wonder what Day 7 will bring? I’m guessing build your own ad inside Market Samurai and post it straight into your sidebar widget.
Am I the only one that hears a male Geordie voice saying “Day 7″ ( a la Big Brother !)

Day 5 – completed. Domain bought, (got green-grommets .com with one hyphen) already had hosting, first 350 word article written.
In reserve I have a lovely rainy day niche that will be a great winter project. It’s a local UK one & doesn’t really meet the criteria as it’s a little competitive but worth it in the longer term, I think.
Day 6!

So to finish off Day 4 (which I’ve decided doesn’t end till the Day 5 training appears!) I went to look for another micro-niche. Hard. Shut my eyes and all I see are pink and orange grids or likely looking phrases that vanish when I put in the criteria.
Last night on 30 DC TV gurubob said it was worth spending a day working through as many as 40 niches to find what he called a ’slam-dunk’ and Caro kindly stuck an example of the matrix up in the chat.
It was awesome. Very little domain age, low page ranks (many 0) few back links to pages, some of the links to domains were orange, nothing in the directories, a tiny bit of on page optimisation.
This is the holy grail. It’s what we should be hoping for to have the best chance of success. My current micro-niche choice isn’t in the same league.
Brent said that sometimes you settle for ‘good enough’ but the guru didn’t agree at all. He wants us to keep at it till we find a sea of green, with commercial potential as well. And he says that’s what Market Samurai is designed to do! So that’s what we have to do!
Lots of new people in the chat last night hadn’t a clue what was going on & Ed did one of his ‘outburst’ at them. Asking them what they were even doing there if they’d not understood & applied the stuff from the videos.
He’s even posted a video about it this morning.
Still I found the analysis of the matrices very helpful. Worth staying up to 2:30 am? Not so sure.

Day 4 update – one micro niche passing all tests so far. It’s got some good affiliate products too, so I’m on course so far. I’d like to have at least one more as back up.
The new module in MS is very cool, can see we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do.

Progress at last – or really watch the videos first!

Feeling a might sheepish as I re-watched the videos and spotted I’d made a couple of mistakes. well, they were more like erroneous assumptions. Nah, they were quite straight forward mistakes
Anyhoo the upshot of this is I re-examined one of my doomed micro-niches and it’s OK. The numbers aren’t stunning but it’s worth hanging on to. It’s got 3 related phrases that meet the criteria. I am mildly hopeful.
The other thing I did was have one of those Columbo moments.
“Oh, just one more thing, did you check out the other possible niches from the theme list first, BEFORE you trashed the project?”
“No, officer I did not do that.”
Runs off to do just that………

Two possible microniches, but jumping ahead, as I’ve used MS before, the competition matrices look too fierce for both of them. Wasted 20 mins reassuring myself that a recent niche met the criteria – it did
Going to the shops in search of BBQ supplies and some inspiration.

First 2 ideas bit the dust – back to the drawing board as I don’t fancy the chances of my other ideas either. Hmm

Ok so now I have, ooh, 14 niche ideas. I know he said 7 but I’ve played this game before and the more you have at the start the easier it is. There have been some interesting suggestions for where to find good niches on twitter. My favourites so far have been dummies.com (http://www.dummies.com/store.html) and a more internalized one.
I think it’s important this year to pick ideas that I’m really interested in, especially as Ed is talking about market leadership etc. Anyway, last year I chose one niche that didn’t interest me much and it was a bit of a disaster. Mostly as I got bored stiff with writing about it. Lesson learned!
So this year I sat down and looked at a list of 20 things I like to do, or would like to be able to do, that I’d made for a Wishcraft book exercise & used them as a starting point.

Ok here goes 7 ideas for niche markets – no pre-judging!