I think I screwed up...

This is really the best way to get good at SEO based marketing.

You'll now have a better understanding of how to size up the competition/challenge in the future (and it's not about how many pages google shows in the results ).

I can't really give you much advice as to whether or not you should 'give up' on the keyword, as I don't know how much SEO work you've put into this.

Assuming I have not done much, or anything at all, what should my next step be? Can I get something clear regarding keywords? Does number of competing sites matter at all? Or is just down to strength of competitors? And whats a good gauge for strength of competitors? Eg. Less than 20 backlinks?

In my opinion, all that matters is the competition. It really doesn't matter how many sites there are, all that matters to me is how tough it will be to crack the top 3. And that depends on what those top 3 sites have going for them SEO-wise.

Regarding number of backlinks: this depends on you. do YOU think it would be tough for YOU to beat 20? IMO, 20 is trivial. "Strength of competitors" is relative to your own abilities. BTW, use yahoo site explorer for checking backlinks, not google.

there's as many different individual approaches to backlinking / SEO as there are people doing it. it sounds like you haven't really tried ANY backlinking/seo yet, so you should not have been so ready to give up I also think you might be over analyzing things a bit.

If I were you, here's what I would be doing.

Go to socialbookmarker.com and bookmark your site and articles using your keywords. To make it quicker, use roboform. Even though you will have to set up accounts at each site, using a combonatin of socialmarker & roboform you could have it all done in less then 30 minutes probably.

tip: I'd also bookmark your various bookmark accounts themself

Submit your rss feed from your articles to various RSS sites. You should be able to search google for a list of these. If your site itself has an rss feed (blog, joomla), then submit that feed as well. If it's a wordpress site, install these plugins:

all-in-one-seo
google xml sitemap
really simple site map
statpress


Do a google search for software that does directory submissions. There's one that has a free version available. The free version only hits low pr directories, but it still generates backlinks that get found by the search engines.

If you're willing to invest some money, you can get software to do things like submit to hundreds of directories, hundreds of article sites, etc. You can also contract out to someone to blog comment, etc.. all great for backlinks.

One last thing: your site might still not make money for you. Not all of them will, so you need to be willing to accept this and be willing to make some more. As a matter of fact, most of my "reviews" don't make much - but about 1 in 10 seem to pull in several grand a month.

good luck

Thanks for the tips Jason. I'm nowhere near giving up.

I would redo keyword research and change the pre-sell page to match your research.