Often the definition of a niche or micro-niche, even a nano-niche, is cited as something that boils down to the size of search engine keyword activity within a subject area. However, the choice of a ‘useful’ or ‘meaningful’ niche, micro-niche and nano-niche really comes down to the size of information that can be gathered to sufficiently cover this area to the satisfaction of the browser. The question comes down to how you can cover enough in the time available to you as a self-publisher.

What is attractive to self-publishers on the Internet are the micro-niches and the opportunities they offer for both the creator and the search engine. If done correctly, they can become a valuable source of information for the user. However, the challenge is that the necessary information does not come from one place; it must come from many different sources on the Internet.

This is where you definitely need a form of automation. Not the kind of automation that content spinners enjoy, just setting up the parameters and keywords and having a button site. These sites very often focus on long tail keywords and try to get into less competitive areas.

However, for a useful micro-niche site to appear on the Internet, you really want the best and most accurate information to appear that is consistently useful to the browser. A micro-niche still means that the information to be gathered is not impossibly large if done manually, in fact, a definition of a micro-niche could be a size of the market that one person could cover on their own efficiently with just the resource of the time of a few hours a day (for example only).

If you try this with a typical micro-niche site without any tools at your disposal, you’ll see how quickly you can be swamped with information. You would have to dig even deeper to find a manageable niche with just enough information that can be manually handled. Right now we are talking about what could be considered as nanoniches. So the problem for the creator is that the nanoniche rarely generates traffic.

So for me, the key element of all of this is to make the collection, sorting, and production of the information that achieves the ideal of a useful site much faster and easier. So human intervention will be primarily focused on design, enhancement, and possibly social context, not manual updating, searching, and gathering.