This guest post was written by Chris. Chris runs his own blog at http://www.TheMoneyac.com where he provides tips on blogging, internet marketing, affiliate marketing and website flipping. If you enjoyed this post be sure to visit his blog.
Debate: Niches Without Competition vs Niches With Competition
As Internet marketers and affiliate marketers we are trying to find and dominate different kinds of niches, we are trying to find our own secret and golden “eggs”. We tend to look for hot, new upcoming trends, niches that have buyers, etc. Along with these requirements we are also looking for niches with low or no competition, but are these niches really that good? Let’s analyze this for a minute, and see the advantages and disadvantages. At the end of the post I would like to hear your thoughts and your opinion about it.
Niches Without Competition
This is what every beginner is trying to find. Most of the beginners are afraid of competition or even low competition. I also was trying to find these kinds of niches, but I burnt myself heavily with this. What does a niche without any competition say? It shows us two possible outcomes:
a) The niche indeed is golden, and nobody has found it – this could be your own little goldmine.
b) Many people before you have tried to pursue this niche, but without any results they have left it standing there. Basically the niche isn’t worth your money or time.
I have found many niches with no competition, and I must say that in 98% cases I have just wasted my time and/or money. Only around 2% of the niches were profitable and are still profitable for me, and they’re my “goldmines”.
Then again if you have found a niche with no competition you have some hard work in front of you. You got to analyze the people in this niche – are they buyers, do they have a problem or maybe they’re just freebie or info seekers (I call them AdSense clickers). You got to visit forums (if the niche has any), you got analyze the people, and if you’re an affiliate marketer you need to find worthy products to promote.
Again, at the same time this could be your advantage. If nobody has touched the niche and there are no affiliate products – you got this great chance to make an expert out of yourself. You start a blog, you provide guides, tips and information to these people, after a time you will become expert of the niche, or so called “Guru” (this happens automatically – you brand yourself). This gives you a very comfortable position – if people trust you, they believe what you say, if they believe what you say, they most likely will buy stuff from you, and if you’ll make your own product (for example an eBook about dog grooming), they will buy it, as you’re the expert, the guru of the niche. But this requires for you to write quality content and it requires you to have some knowledge in the niche. But if you have some money then you can always buy the content, and still become the expert without any special expertise about the topic. With the right attitude and hard (sometimes smart) work you can make hell a lot of money in niches without competition.
Niches With Competition
Niches with competition are quite a different thing. If in the niches that have no competition you can easily become the expert, but in niches with competition there could already be experts and gurus (Just look at Weight Loss or Make Money Online niche).
To become an expert in a niche with competition could be hard – sometimes even close to impossible if some guy with Doctor’s degree is the leading expert in the niche – you have barely any chance to compete with him/her. But again, there are some advantages. You can take the advantage of the competition. Your competitors have already analyzed these people, and if the niche is with competition this means there is some money to make. You can just look at your competition and carefully analyze them and see what they do. They have already made the whole research for you; all you got to do is to make your own special twist. Niches with competition most likely will have already some affiliate products to promote and you can make money.
My Personal Advice
Since I am doing niche marketing for quite of a time, I can give you these two very essential tips:
If you’re trying to make money in a niche with competition I recommend you to stay mostly “under the radar”. If the niche already has some big Guru or expert, I recommend you just to do some clean affiliate marketing, don’t try to make the expert out of yourself. If, for example, the Guru of Weight Loss Niche is some guy with doctor’s degree and with 20 years of experience in weight loss, then don’t even try to waste your time to become the expert of the niche. Just do affiliate marketing silently and without additional “noise” and you’ll make money.
If the niche has no competition and you see that the niche is profitable I totally recommend you to make the Guru or expert out of yourself in the niche. It’s not going to be hard, and you can make truckloads of money if you’re “The One”. This will also discourage other niche marketers to pursue this niche, as the niche has already an expert that people trust.
As you can see the discussion could go endless – there are many factors involved, when you will have some experience in niche marketing you mostly will “feel” what should you do. The special “gut feeling” only comes with time.
Remember - It’s always easier to have a slice of the pie than bake your own, but sometimes it’s better and easier to bake your own pie.
I would like to hear your opinion about niches with and without competition. How do you look at them? Do you pursue niches with competition? Or you better take the risk and go only for the no competition niches? Share your thoughts!
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almost anyone can rank on a nitch with no competition… its finding and ranking for those highly competitive terms that is difficult.
I agree with everything you said and I too have had both bad and good luck with low competition niches. The lucky ones were for niches that were difficult to monetize and that is the only reason that I can find for the low competition. But they were hot products, got to Page 1 of SERPS in like 3 weeks and it’s selling like hotcakes, wish all campaigns were that nice!
JR @ Internet Marketing ´s last blog ..Crucial Making Money Online, Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Lessons Learned in 2009
Now what you’re looking for are results that have more than 1000 searches per month and then look to see how much competition there is. Bear in mind that the competition indicated is for Adwords/Paid Advertising on Google and doesn’t relate to the organic searches…I’ll come to that in a bit.
Chris , excellent article but your websites not working =/
That is undisputed that the professional research paper writing service will perform the best custom writing for people which don’t operate the writing technique. That would be the most simple way for them, I do guess!
really excellent! gonna take hours to go through. thanks!
“Just do affiliate marketing silently and without additional “noise” and you’ll make money.”
Can you elaborate on this in a future article? I am new to affiliate marketing and would love to do it “silently”. Thanks – Joe
Joe – best broadband deals´s last blog ..juegos de poker gratis
very good and useful thoughts regarding the competition vs niche competition. according to me i will go where there is niche competition it will increase the value and quality.
I think a little competition is a good thing,, least you know you not trying to make money from a dead niche
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This is great advice, thanks for sharing it. There aren’t many niches out there with no competition, but there are some with less competition than others. The less competition ones are hard to find but once you find it, its worth it.
I think that stands quite right. If you are able to find out such less competition niches them they will be very good to gain some more benefit to the site, but its not so easy.
Count me as one who has found a niche with little to no competition. It’s a specific type of computer technology blog and it’s making a ton of money because my only competition would be Wikipedia.
I still, however, think that with the great content I syndicate and the links I build that I would dominate even medium competitors. Perhaps not larger competitors. (I’m but one simple man!)
Niches with little or no competition are great to find, but you generally need to find a lot of them to match a larger and more profitable niche. Trying to build an authority site in a competitive niche takes work and a good deal of time but the rewards can be far greater.
Saving Money´s last blog ..Expensive HDMI Video Cables Are A Rip Off
This is great advice. It’s not so easy to find less competition since everyone is in the home business in these days. But you have a point.
This article has really started me thinking. So far I suppose I’ve taken the ‘happy medium’ route in terms of my own affiliate marketing strategy. Choosing areas that have some competition, but that aren’t as heavily dominated as the big topics such as weight loss and making money online as mentioned in this post.
I’m still a relative newbie to the arena, but I’m starting to see some fruition from this strategy. I think that I’ll stick to it until I have built up a bit of an income and then potentially try finding some more obscure niches, and even some of the more popular ones.
Thanks so much for this, it’s helped me to think about where would be best to target my efforts in the future.
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