No, I'm Not Filtering My Niches

Me, again. Overnight I realised that my previous entry about scrapbooking as a niche is exactly the opposite of the point meant to be made by the first day of 30DC. I filtered my niche ideas even before we’d gotten to Day 2, where we get to look into research.

So admitting that, I’m not the only one. There’s enough 2 or 3 year 30DC veterans on there who have gone in with their one niche idea already defined. And many others who are asking some gung-ho questions on the forums about whether the ideas we have should be information-service based as we’re not meant to have a product yet. One poor man got shot down a little by a forum admin who informed him in no uncertain terms that we were told not to filter yet (er, like him, I hadn’t actually picked up on that from the videos).

Guilty as charged, then. So, without that knowledge I went ahead last night and thought about (ie filtered) my ideas - and almost discounted scrapbooking as a niche. But that didn’t make me particularly happy.

Overnight, after some interesting discussions with my hubbie, and some even more interesting dreams involving Ed Dale and cohorts, I developed my niche idea which I love. And it’s not even something I’m not doing already, and it involves scrapbooking. So there. Nah, nah-ah (is that how you represent thumbing your nose in words?).

And I developed it, not because of 30DC, but because of one of my other challenges going on - Blog Mastermind. The first week of BM wants me to go out there and make a wordpress blog, off my own domain address. Erm, that insinuates that I have a niche and site name / domain name already in my mind. Yes, that wouldn’t be the case, then.

So, I’m going to put my BM Week 1 exercise on hold for a couple of weeks, while I get into the first couple of days of 30DC, which I hope will sort out this niche thing. And today while I await the Day 2 material of 30DC I will promise myself to not filter out my scrapbooking niche quite so fast.

Most importantly, I have a list of about 8 niches ready to go, and am looking forward to doing the research into them. But I have promised to stay true to my own passions in all of this. Because I’m just not prepared to give up scrapbooking or my creativity elements just because it may not be a good market to make money from. My most important principle is to have fun, and learn, and I guess it always has been. I hope you’re enjoying reading along on this whole ride also.

One final point before I go, though. The forums on 30DC had another post on there, where a person had kindly put up a transcript with time-points through the videos of yesterday. That post got into a discussion between a couple of the 30DC administrators including the official transcriptor for the event. Ed Dale and co are keen to only issue the PDF transcripts after the videos by a few days, and constantly emphasise - as they did on that post - that we are meant to be watching the videos as a totally different dynamic in instruction to that of reading the files. An admin on that post even suggested that while we used to write ebooks as a product, it’s now all about videos and audio delivery with ebook transcripts.

Certainly, that does seem to be the way the previous blog masterminds and internet marketers are going out there. And I do enjoy a good (quick) video available. But as a writer wannabe, and a reading-learner, I’m a little worried about that movement or trend. Because I’m a good example of somebody who can’t be just sat down and told to watch somebody for half an hour of lectures without the thinking time available for me which I can get out of reading and exploring myself. And my other example is the first lesson of today from those forums themselves - it wasn’t just that one person who didn’t pick up on Ed Dale’s suggestion (or insistance) within the one video that we not filter as yet. It was many - including me. In fact, with videos and vidcasts like that, there’s always some communication which goes missing (and many which are more easily identified with visuals, granted). This morning, someone posted a link to another video which isn’t on the 30DC main site as yet - it’s Ed clarifying the no-filter policy until today.

So, I work better with the written word in some respects, and tend to explore that information in my own way. But I do enjoy those videos immensely for the certain Aussie slang which comes through, and the sheer personality of the guy.