“7 Reasons Why Competition is Good” plus 1 more

Posted: 03 Nov 2011 01:00 PM PDT

This guest post is by Sean Houser of StartByDoing.com.

I hear a lot of talk directed at new bloggers. Things like, “Stay out of competitive niche markets when you’re blogging. Find smaller, less competitive niches, it’s easier to establish yourself and make money.”

Image copyright Jeanne Hatch - Fotolia.com

While it is fair to say that going into a competitive niche market and trying to establish yourself as a go-to source certainly won’t be a cake walk, it’s also important to note that trying to establish yourself in a niche with little competition has its own set of challenges.

Let’s put it this way: would you rather work a year straight on a blog knowing that there’s no ceiling on the amount of income you can generate? Or would you rather work a year straight knowing the best you can possibly do, no matter how hard you work, is $2,000 per month?

Small niche markets have income ceilings—there’s only so much money you can make. Also, don’t forget the fact that a lot of smaller niche markets have high levels of competition anyway, since a lot of “experts” always recommend finding smaller, less competitive niches.

So, in a lot of scenarios when you’re working with smaller niche markets, you’re still looking at an uphill struggle when, ultimately, there’s a lot less money to go around anyway.

Don’t get me wrong: I think working in smaller markets can be a good thing provided you budget your time against the income potential of the niche appropriately. Don’t spend tons of time on a niche that doesn’t provide a lot of earning potential.

Now that we’ve got that out the way, let’s talk about the reasons why going into a competitive niche is a good thing—especially when it comes to blogging and content marketing.

1. Lots of competition means there’s lots to write about

The worst-case scenario for a blogger is realizing that there’s very little if anything to write about in their niche. Especially after buying a domain name and setting up your website!

If there are 50 different blogs in the same niche, and they all have unique and compelling content, that’s a good sign that you can set up a website in this market and have a lot of options when it comes to writing content.

Do a little research when you first enter into a new niche market. Scope out the top ten or 15 blogs in the niche, and make sure they’re consistently putting out unique content, not just rehashing ideas off of each other.

2. More competition means more idea sources

It’s always a good idea to study your competition. Study how they get their backlinks, and how they first promoted their website when they were just getting started.

The good thing about competition is that you can look to them for inspiration for new post ideas. The more competition, the more resources you have to use for new content ideas.

3. More competition means more channels for your content

More players in one market means more online real estate to post your content on. Work to have your guest posts featured on as many of these sites as possible, and you’ll receive more traffic without having to rely solely on Google.

4. More business models to follow

If there was only one site in your niche that got most of the traffic, and you weren’t sure what worked well for monetization in that niche, you would only have one site to use as a reference.

On the flip-side, when there’s lots of competition, you have more people trying different things to monetize their visitors, and more ideas for you to use to monetize your own blog traffic.

5. More opportunities to partner and mastermind with top players

If you can find a way to connect with one of the top bloggers in your market, you have a major resource for information that’s proven—no guess-work required! You actually have someone to talk to who already went through everything you’re going through.

The key point here is to learn from those who have already been through all the ups and downs of blogging and still found success. You can model your blog after that success.

6. More competition means more opinions and points of view

Common knowledge isn’t always a good thing. It can sometimes be bad information and therefore detrimental to your long-term success. The good thing about competitive markets is that people are always questioning the common knowledge in that niche.

Sometimes people question common knowledge just to get attention. But other times it’s actually a valid point that proves common knowledge to be wrong or at least not 100% right.

As an example, if the “common knowledge” on all of the blogging forums was to build backlinks to your blog a certain way, you may believe that strategy to be the best way. However, if one blogger came out with a case study where s/he found that backlink strategy A is ten times more powerful than “common knowledge” backlink strategy B, that would be extremely helpful since you wouldn’t be wasting your time on a weak link building strategy.

By questioning common knowledge and finding out what really works, you will only be working on strategies that created the biggest results for your time spent. This is why many different opinions can be a good thing (provided there is some form of proof to the claims being made).

7. Competition forces you to be the best you can be

Competition pushes you to be more creative and innovate, and to truly master your skill set. A lack of competition may lead to your skills getting stale or hitting a plateau.

Competition sharpens your skills and ultimately helps you achieve long-term success, especially if you jump into a smaller niche down the line, and you’re dealing with marketers and bloggers with lesser skills and knowledge.

Other reasons

There are three other reasons why a competitive niche is a good choice:

A competitive niche is a proven money-maker. A niche with a lot of competition almost always means there’s a lot of money to be made. Don’t waste your time on markets that haven’t been proven to turn a large profit.
A competitive niche has proven traffic volumes. If you’re researching a new niche and you see a lot of bloggers with tens of thousands of RSS subscribers and high Alexa rankings (under 30,000) then you’re dealing with a market that has a lot of traffic to go around—always a good thing!
A competitive niche has proven long-term stability. If you’re researching a competitive niche and you see people with five- or ten-year-old blogs that are still going strong, and still growing steadily in terms of traffic and RSS subscribers, that’s a good sign that you’re dealing with a long-term, stable niche.

There you have it! There are many reasons why dealing with competitive markets is a good choice even for new bloggers. What others can you add? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Sean Houser runs an expert marketing blog over at StartByDoing.com. To read more of Sean’s blog posts subscribe to his RSS Feed or just visit his blog.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

7 Reasons Why Competition is Good

From 8 Million to 500,000 on Alexa, Fast!

Posted: 03 Nov 2011 07:09 AM PDT

This guest post is by Chuck Rylant of ChuckRylant.com.

The goal was to find a single resource—a roadmap or blueprint—to take my blog with minimal traffic and turn it into something significant. I was a few months away from launching a book and needed a platform to make it happen.

The problem was not insufficient information; the problem was too much information. The Internet is full of advice ranging in price from free to six figures, promising the answer. I did not want to become a professional blogger, but I wanted to learn enough to build my blog into something that could be taken seriously.

I decided to pick one product and stick to it. That worked, and it's continuing to work. With a publishing schedule producing only three to four posts each month, here’s what I did to bring my blog, which was ranked at 8 million, to less than 500k on Alexa, fast.

31 Days to Build a Better Blog

There were many tactics that worked well, but instead of listing everything, here are the main points that likely led to the majority of results.

First I bought 31 Days to Build a Better Blog and decided to follow it exactly, even when there were times I thought the advice wouldn't matter much. It turned out that those things mattered most.

For example, one of the steps was to create an “elevator pitch” for my blog. This did not result in a measurable or immediate boost in traffic. It was also difficult and boring to create. However, it turned out to be one of the most important steps.

Creating that elevator pitch forced me to concentrate on my audience and get clear about my message. It took me a week of brainstorming, writing, and editing, but that allowed me to be very precise with every message I write not only on my blog, but also in social media, guest posts, and comments on other blogs.

Analytics

There are several ways to measure blog success, and their appropriateness varies with your goals. My intent was to promote my book, but because it wasn't for sale while I was building my platform, book sales would not work as a metric.

Instead, I needed data that I could measure to see results and keep motivated. I used Alexa to give me an arbitrary "score" and Google Analytics to measure actual traffic. I also used email opt-ins and the RSS feed as measures of my success.

Comments

I began commenting on several blogs. Initially I commented on any blog I could find, and paid extra attention on “do-follow” blogs—those that do not use the “no-follow” tag to prevent search engines from following comment links.

After a month of reviewing the analytics, I discovered something very important about commenting. It's difficult to track the exact SEO benefit of each comment, but my best traffic has come from my most thought-out comments on other blogs.

I did not plan this, but when I ignored whether a blog was a do-follow or not, and instead commented when I was passionate about a topic, my visitors from those blogs spent on average four or five minutes on my on my site. That is a very long time on a website—especially when compared to traffic from other sources, which averages well under a minute.

Email list

Before beginning 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, I had an opt-in box on my blog that was connected to the RSS feed through Aweber. It offered nothing more than "Join to get the latest update." As per the advice in 31 Days, I did two things that dramatically increased traffic to my blog.

First, I added a free PDF report bonus for those who subscribed to my RSS feed. It wasn't a great bonus, but it was something that I had already written, and I wanted to get started rather than waiting. It’s easy to invent ways to procrastinate instead of moving forward.

Second, I added a pop-up box with the offer and opt-in box. Before the pop-up box, the subscriber-to-visitor ratio was .4%. I created a split test of the pop-up box with and without the PDF report bonus. Without the bonus, the ratio jumped to 2.9%, but with the bonus, it climbed all the way to 4.6%.

This was an important discovery. Not only have I grown my email list, but these people also receive an email every time I publish a new post, which brings traffic back to the blog and is often re-tweeted by subscribers.

Frequency

Daily posts are usually the standard in the blog world. I struggled with this approach for two reasons. First, I did not want blogging to become my primary pass time, yet I wanted to write longer and more in-depth magazine style posts. Second, my goal was to build an email list and I felt that daily emails were too frequent for my market, and would lead to a high unsubscribe rate.

Without testing, I have no way to verify this, but it really doesn't matter because I do not want to write a blog post every day. Instead I committed to three to four posts per month, and I publicly promised this in my elevator pitch. Although infrequent, this consistency greatly improved my product over the random and infrequent posts in the past.

Cross-promotion

Finally, I took a macro perspective to posting and used all forms of media to cross-promote the others. I realized there was some overlap between blog readers, email subscribers, social media, and even my occasional in-person speaking gig; however, the overlap was small. Instead of assuming readers would see my message across all media, I assumed the opposite.

By cross-promoting my messages, I’ve grown all lists and increased readership. For example, I have messages that only go to my email subscribers. Occasionally, I refer my email subscribers to a blog post or a message posted on Facebook. This gets my viewers more engaged across different media and has been very effective at spreading my message.

In the end…

I'm continually learning and improving my blog. I did not set out to be a professional blogger, but that doesn't mean I didn't want to learn and use the tools that professional bloggers use.

My little success in a short time came down to one thing—following a clear and concise roadmap.

Before starting this plan, I was jumping all over the place and chasing the next bright, shiny object instead of consistently implementing the steps most likely to create the greatest results. Perhaps you’ve experienced that too. I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

Chuck Rylant helps entrepreneurs manage their personal finances. He is also the author of How to be Rich: The Couple's Guide to a Rich Life Without Worrying About Money.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

From 8 Million to 500,000 on Alexa, Fast!