How to Tell if a Niche is Too Crowded

How to Tell if a Niche is Too Crowded

Many people make the mistake of choosing a highly competitive niche and developing a business idea around it, only to find that the market segment is so inundated and crowded with competitors that it's virtually impossible for a new comer to make any money at all. Many new comers start off by choosing a niche that is far too broad and as a result far too crowded. If you're thinking of building a niche marketing website, a quick check using any online keyword research tool will tell you if this is the case.

Even if you get there first and discover a unique tight niche and create products and services to offer your customers, the existing internet marketers will notice you have discovered a profitable market segment, and you will soon find yourself having to compete with them. In no time at all when someone searches for a keyword similar to yours, they'll be amazed to find that there are so many other websites serving the same customers.

Before you start building a niche website, doing a little keyword research using an online keyword utility will return the number of web pages with a similar theme and which contain roughly the same content, this number being an indication of the competition you are facing. Bear in mind that even if the niche is narrow and tightly focused, it will start to become crowded even if only two or three new businesses start working on the same niche.

Unfortunately the plain truth is if you dominate a profitable niche market you will not be able to keep it a secret for long. No niche can be kept in absolute secrecy forever: there are too many smart people out there on the internet who all want to get their hands on a slice of the pie.

To keep your niche market profitable you need a constant stream of ready to buy customers, and one way to do this is to capitalize on search engine traffic. Use a good quality keyword research utility to uncover all the different words and phrases people use when searching for information on the internet. Next you create web pages which are optimized for these terms (known as keywords).

A point to bear in mind is some keyword research tools use the data from pay per click search engines to calculate the number of searches conducted for a given keyword, and this figure is not that realistic. Keyword research utilities such as WordTracker use data from the major metacrawlers like Dogpile to calculate very realistic keyword search statistics, and will give you the number of times any given keyword or phrase was searched for during the previous three months and a predicted count for the next 24 hours.

Each of these keyword research utilities maintains a very powerful database of raw data for your subsequent research. If the niche is starting to get too big, then the number of searches on your keywords will be in the thousands. Careful analysis will also reveal the number of websites in the niche, which will be a large number if your niche is crowded.

You can also use pay per click search engines to drive traffic to your website, but it's worth remembering that popular keywords are expensive. If the niche is profitable, your competitors will be prepared to pay hefty sums to buy those keywords. The only way you are going to get cheap pay per click traffic is by finding keywords which your competitors aren't using. Unfortunately these little known keywords won't be popular so you'll need to find a lot of them to get a reasonable amount of traffic to your niche site.

As your niche gets more and more crowded with new competitors these pay per click keywords will become progressively more expensive. There will be those new competitors who understand the value of keyword research and will discover the same keywords you are using. This will reduce the traffic to your website and so reduce the amount of money you can make.

A point will be reached when the niche becomes so competitive it is no longer profitable, and you will either have to abandon the niche or discover new methods of getting customers to your website.

Explode Your Website Traffic With Simple Niche Articles

Explode Your Website Traffic With Simple Niche Articles

For your internet business to be successful, you need to get large amounts of targeted traffic to your website, and internet marketers have found some pretty ingenious ways of driving targeted traffic to their websites, including pay-per-click campaigns, SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing and ezine advertising. Many marketers, however, have neglected a simple top quality method of driving traffic to their sites: writing short 400 word articles and submitting them so they appear all over the internet.

Don't be mislead into thinking this is a waste of time, having your articles appear on lots of different websites helps you in two major ways:

1) Each article provides a link back to your website. If the content of the article matches the content of the web page you set the article link to, the search engines will deem this a relevant link. The more relevant links you get to your website, the higher it will be ranked in the search engines. The higher your site is ranked in the search engines, the more traffic you will receive.

2) People who use the search engines are looking for information, and if they come across one of your articles, and while reading the article find the content interesting and helpful, they will be inclined click on the link to your website so they can continue their research. The more places you can find to display your articles, the more people will find and read them and the more traffic you will get to your website.

What should your articles consist of? Nothing fancy, each article should be around 400 words long and contain just enough content to:

- Give the reader some useful information.

- Interest an ezine editor enough to want to publish your article.

- Get the readers interest raised to the point they want to click on the link to your website to get more information.

Your article could be:

- One or two tips lifted from the info product you are selling from your website.

- Paraphrased information from a particular web page you would like the reader to visit.

- A review of a product you would like the reader to purchase. The link in a review would point to your affiliate page via a link tracker, or to a page on your website where you offer more details.

You don't even have to write your own articles... You can pay a ghost writer to write them for you. To do this, visit websites like Elance.com where you can list details of the articles you want written and find people who are interested in writing them for you. Make it quite clear to the person who writes your articles that you keep the copyright.

Once you have your article ready for distribution, you need to submit to as many places as possible, including these three places:

1. Article Directories. After a quick content check, the directories will then publish your article instantly, and once you submit your content to one of these directories it will begin to be republished all over the internet. People are constantly on the lookout for quality articles, and you can allow them the rights to re-use yours as long as they leave intact the link back to your website contained in the bio at the bottom of the article. Anyone who wants to visit your site can do so by clicking on this link.

2. Ezine Editors. Submitting your articles to popular ezines related to your niche website will get you lots of well-targeted traffic. Many ezines desperately need new good quality content. If you submit an article for publication in one, you will get a lot of publicity in return. Having hundreds or even better, thousands of people reading your articles is always a good way to increase your website traffic.

3. Your Own Article Directory. Many webmasters and ezine publishers don't know that article directories exist. After reading one of your articles they will visit your website and you should prominently display a link to your own articles. The link must make the reader aware that you content is free for use in any website or ezine. For example, use the wording "Get Free Content For Your Ezine" in a link in a very noticeable place on your website.

An Introduction to Niche Marketing

What's all this hubbub about niche marketing? Why is every successful marketer preaching niche marketing as being vital to your profitability as a marketer online or offline?

In answer to that, let's paint a little picture... Imagine you have an idea for a great product, an idea so great you decide to turn it into a product and sell it. You're going to make millions so you labor away hour after hour creating a masterpiece, well... It’s a masterpiece in your eyes.

Hours of feverish activity, a month goes past, then another, and finally the great day arrives when you launch your product. You have a superb product and the best sales website on the internet. Another month goes buy, then two and... Not one sale!

In desperation you hire an experienced marketer for their advice, but what they tell you, crushes you...

"You don't stand a snowballs chance in hell of making any sales!"

You see you have picked a massive market to sell to; you are competing against big established suppliers who are seen as experts. The market trusts them because they are well known and have great reputations. It's David against Goliath only David forgot his sling.

If this has happened to you, you're not alone. This little scenario plays itself out day after day. Each month thousands of people find themselves in this situation.

Doesn't it infuriate you to see others seemingly doing exactly what you did, but they make money? From their product launch they bank the profits. Want to know what they did differently?

They found a niche market, created a product specifically for it and they sell that product to that niche only. Don't make the mistake of thinking niche marketing is something new, savvy marketers have always sold to niches. It's only recently that niche marketing has been so heavily publicized.

Niche marketing is the process of finding small profitable segments of a much larger market and involves a lot more effort. Established suppliers to larger markets are usually not prepared to spend this time and effort required to seek out smaller segments, leaving them ripe for the picking.

One way of explaining the niche marketing concept is to picture a tree - it has a big trunk which leads to branches leading to even smaller branches and finally tiny twigs. Take the topic of fishing which can be likened to the trunk of the tree having branches leading away from it including:

- Deep Sea Fishing

- Salt Water Fishing

- Game Fishing

- Fresh Water Fishing

The smaller branches leading from Fresh Water Fishing include:

- Fishing Baits

- Bass fishing

- Fly Fishing

The tiny twigs leading from Fly Fishing include:

- Trout Fishing

- Steelhead Fishing

- Fly Tying



This is a good example of niche marketing because people who fish tend to be nuts about the subject. Drill all the way down to the tiny segment of Steelhead fishing and there are still avid enthusiasts who will go to any expense to catch the "big one", including buying books or e-books.

One point worth noting is that any book or e-book on Steelhead Fishing had better be full of useful advice (i.e. the advice works), so you had better be an expert and know what you're talking about if you intend to write one...

Finding niche markets is not as easy or obvious as you might think. Sitting down with a piece of paper and drawing a tree listing all your ideas is NOT the way to go. You are listing your ideas... your ideas won't sell!

You need to find what your potential customers want, and to do this you need to conduct some research, here are a few ideas to get you started:

1) Visit a few online forums related to your interests. Take note of the questions people are asking and how many times similar questions are asked.

2) Visit a few book stores and go to the magazine section. Take note of the types of magazines on sale. Ask the sales assistant which magazines sell the most.

3) Take a look on eBay and spend some time going through the categories related to your interest. Take note of popular items and how often they sell.

By finding a small segment of a much larger market in which people are actively buying, and where there are not too many competitors, is the best chance you have of making money from selling your own product.