Often the definition of a niche or microniche, even a nanoniche is quoted as being down to the size of search engine keyword activity within a subject area. However the choice of a ‘useful’ or ‘meaningful’ niche, microniche and nanoniche is really down to the size of information that can be put together to sufficiently cover this area for the satisfaction of the browser. The question comes down to how it can be covered sufficiently in the time available to you as a self-publisher.
What are attractive to the self-publishers on the Internet are microniches and the opportunities they have for both the creator and the browser. If done properly they can become a valuable source of information for the user. However, the challenge is that the information needed doesn’t come just from one place; it must come from many diverse sources on the Internet.
This is where you definitely need a form of automation. Not in the type of automation that spinners of content enjoy, just setting up the parameters and keywords and having a push button site. These sites are very often focused on the very low hanging fruit of long tail keywords and try to enter less competitive areas.
For a useful microniche site to appear on the Internet however you actually want the best, most accurate information appearing that is consistently useful to the browser. A microniche still means that the information to be pulled together isn’t impossibly large if done manually, in fact a microniche definition could be a size of the market that one person could cover by themselves efficiently just with the resource of time of just a few hours a day (just as an example). If you do happen to try this with a typical microniche site without any tools at your disposal then you will see how quickly you can become inundated with information. You would need to drill down even further to find a manageable niche with only enough information that can be manually handled. Right now we are talking about what could be considered as nanoniches. The problem then for the creator is that the nanoniche rarely ever brings in traffic.
So the key element to all this for me is to make the gathering, sorting and production of the information that achieves the ideal of a purposeful site much faster and easier. The human intervention then will be mostly about design, improvement and possibly social context, not manual update, search and gather.