SolveYourProblem
Article Series:
Niche Marketing Opportunities
Want
To Know if a Niche Market is Too Crowded?
by Jeff Cohen
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. # # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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