My Niche Is Too Competitive

“What if my niche is very competitive”

I was chatting with an Internet newbie at a recent mastermind meeting and he asked me the question that concerns lots of people – the niche that I want to market to is very competitive but that’s where my expertise is so what can I do.

This is becoming an increasingly common situation as more people come online and those that have been online for a while become more established. My suggestion to him is the one that I use myself to break into a competitive market.

Firstly, you shouldn’t avoid a market just because it’s competitive. My view is that when you’re niche marketing it’s important to start with a market and then identify niches within it that you can target. In my friend’s case his market was physical therapy which is very competitive. My suggestion is to start with keyword research within that market gradually drilling down until you find a long tail keyword (4 or more word phrase)that gets a lot less searches but is also a lot less competitive and that you will be able to rank for more easily.

You can use the Google keyword suggestion tool for this (just search in Google for it and it will be the first or second result) or another tool that I came across recently that is very good at letting you drill down is http://ubersuggest.org/

Whatever keyword tool you use your goal is to find a keyword phrase that not many people are searching for. I suggest 1000 to 2000 exact match global monthly searches is about the level of volume you’re looking for. The next thing to do is to create, or get created, a free report around that phrase, make a squeeze page for it asking people to join your list in exchange for the free report.

This will provide you a list of people that you can now market your competitive product to on the grounds that anyone interested in your sub-niche will be interested in your main product. This is a marketing method that get’s you into competitive niches via the back door.

The other good benefit of starting with a big market that you enter via the ‘less competitive long tail’ back door is that you have much more opportunity to now cross sell products to different sub-groups within that market.