Don't Abandon Your Competitive Niche - Just Use A Drill!

Marketing advice is all about finding a niche with little competition. The gurus are telling us to use keyword tracking tools to plumb the gold that nobody has ever plumbed before, and to build up your business around a series of micro-niches. This may be good advice for a beginner who is just starting out on the web. But it runs counter to my thinking for a couple of reasons. The irony here is the very gurus who are telling you to go out and dig up micro-niches, build dozens of differently themed sites, and maintain many different types of readers, are not doing that themselves. No, they are competing in the tough field of affiliate marketing!

I have always done the best with niches that I am familiar with. For one thing, I need to establish myself as an authority and produce good content in order to convince people to trust me. I have used my own expertise, past job experience, and hobbies to successfully pull in readers and then to actually sell them something. I am not familiar with the mating habits of hedgehogs so that would not be a good niche for me.

My experience has been on the financial and programming side of things. And, believe me, those categories are competitive. However those categories are also brimming with active surfers looking for topics like insurance, credit, programming scripts, and, of course, selling on line. When I do attract the right surfers, they do read my content, contact me, join my communities, and even make me some money. That is because I am engaged in active markets, and I work very hard to establish myself as a credible source of information!

However, it is very difficult for a one person business like mine to compete with obvious keywords on search engines or pay per click traffic. Bids for terms like insurance are often priced higher than the amount I can even make on one sale! I may be the best search engine optimizer on earth, but somebody's got an older domain with more back links that will rank higher for obvious keywords than mine.

So what am I saying? Am I telling you that I agree with the micro-niche advice? No, that's not what I'm saying. I really believe that you need to find something you are interested in because that's what you will immersed in. You need to find a topic that you have experience with because you cannot set yourself up as a credible source if you all you can do is cut and paste a Wikipedia article! What I am saying is that you stick to the main niche or category that you know how to sell, and you attract visitors with a sideways or novel approach to that topic.

I could go broke and crazy trying to compete for a term like free health insurance quotes. But I can bring in traffic when I publish content about different types of health insurance like HSA's or Mini Med Plans. I am telling you this because I know that I can establish myself as a credible source for these types of websites, and if you happen to be able to, then lets exchange links! Don't abandon your niche, just drill down into it!

Marilyn has been quietly marketing online for seven years. She produces websites based on her past experience as a financial professional and software developer. Marilyn believes that credible, high quality content that a broad range of people are actually looking for is the key to success. Establishing a community of readers is a great help too!

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