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Now playing: Uptown Girl by Billy Joel
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In Part 1 of this series, we talked about whether you should choose something you're passionate about or just go where the money is regardless of your level of interest. Today we'll talk about another beginner worry: the amount of competition.
There's too much competition in the niche I want!
Another problem for beginners is that they're worried that there are too many rivals in their preferred niche. As we've discussed, it's true that there are some niches that are so competitive, a newbie should not even think about trying them. That's a sure recipe for discouragement and failure. These include things like iPods, ringtones, Internet marketing, and weight loss supplements. Once you know what you're doing, you might be able to tackle some of these with a somewhat better chance of success.
But finding a niche you can compete in is often not as hard as you think. As newbies learn how to gauge the level of competition, they can quickly become disheartened by the fact that no matter what topics they think of, there are already too many sites doing the same thing. What they don't always realize is that the number of contending sites does not tell the whole story.
There are ways to analyze competition that will provide more options within your ability than you might expect. We won't go into a lot of detail in this post, but the most important of these, in a nutshell, is the fact that no matter how many thousands—or millions—of sites show up in a search, your competition still stands at only ten. How can that be? Well, if you can do better than just one site out of that top ten, you can take their place, putting you on the first page of results, which should always be your goal. It will then result in you getting the traffic instead of them.
Not to mention the fact that even though Google may show a number like 32,000,000 competing sites for a keyword, only a fraction are actually pursuing the same keywords you are. To find that out, you would normally do a quoted search and then an "allintitle" search in Google, which tells you how many sites have a particular keyword in their page title, showing that they are trying to rank for it. But I recently learned a trick from someone on an Internet marketing forum that reveals how to find what that allintitle number actually is. I've posted it on our Supplementary Student Info page if you want to check it out.
Remember too, this pie is huge beyond our comprehension, so there's a piece for you, too. Just because there are thousands, maybe millions of other Internet marketers, it doesn't mean that any more than maybe 1% stick with it or are able to make a living at it. And now that the world is all connected, there are billions of potential customers out there.
In Part 3, we'll talk about the hesitancy of some to promote a product they haven't used.
I LOVE my “job.” Affiliate marketing takes work, but it doesn’t feel like work.
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