Fighting your way through a competitive niche vs. finding untapped ones

I agree.

Specifically, the difficulty with selection is that there may be an approximate overall correlation between low competition and the risk of low returns (for quite a variety of reasons).

I sometimes find it helpful for these purposes to "think offline", forget about what other marketers are doing and looking at and producing, and take on board concepts of "niche potential" from non-internet sources, as part of the formula.

Niche-selection and product-selection are a very time-consuming aspect of my business.

You can also use the brute force method... say where you use articles and produce so much quality content on a topic that you naturally rank for a lot of long-tail keywords.

This takes longer but if you actually crank out that quality content, once you hit critical mass (necessary for the SE rankings), it will convert like crazy too.

Not easy, but that's what will keep your competitors from doing it

Willie

I'm starting to see currently my strong point in this arena is writing articles and other related stuff like that. I wrote a couple recently and found I can prob write one (300 word) with edits in about 20 mins. Not that I say if that is good or not as I don't have anything else to go by but my point is that is a breeze and I can do it on 'autopilot'

Now anything can become easy once you internalize it and it's on autopilot (I used to hate writing) so I'm sure the niche hunting stuff could be learned and mastered but I'm wondering- is it realistic financially to outsource all the niche and kw related stuff so I could be free to focus on my strong points? Maybe for the short term...how much would it cost to outsource the whole SEO/kw stuff for one niche?

I'm thinking there are disadvantages and advantages to outsourcing it.

Advantage short term is obviously I can work on my strong points but therein also lies the disadvantage- as niche/SEO stuff is a crucial part of of IM is this burying my head in the sands to some degree? I'm willing to accept a long learning curve so long as it proves fruitful sooner or later.

Having said that I am am getting a bit impatient to earn at least a cent from this internet stuff to keep me motivated- though it doesn't matter as I am going to keep at it till I earn sooner or later as this is the best show in town as far as I can see currently.

I have been all out on the research and the instrumental factors (i.e. article marketing seems to require many different cogs to be in place and working in unison before the machine starts to produce cash ) which means that I have not spent time on more immediate things I could have been doing to make money for instance fiverr and elance etc. as people have suggested.

I suppose this is a time management query- where would my time be best spent at this point?

I'm thinking- 80% on research and implementation of the IM stuff and 20% article writing/service offering skills to turn a profit in the short term.

Alternatively if it is financially realistic I could outsource the SEO/kw stuff while I'm still learning that stuff while writing articles for my OWN business which may offer the best of both worlds and also have the upshot that I am providing content for my own business in the process. Still maybe do some of the offering services for immediate earners.

As SEO/kw stuff is such an instrumental part of IM I'm wondering if wanting to outsource that stuff is asking a bit much/unrealistic financially as it will be a high demand/cost thing- hence my query really.

THOUGHTS!?

In the end, what were all looking for is traffic. If you do your keyword research and come up with a lot of competition, I would look for a longer-tail keyword until I got the competition down to a manageable level that will bring me traffic.

If you stumple onto a niche that doesn't have a lot of traffic it could be an untapped niche, then again it could just been something that isn't workable.

First thing I would do is go to Twitter Search and type in your keyword, using the filters "-http -www ?." Filtering out the 'http' and 'www' will get ride of all the marketers and adding the '?' will pull up anyone asking questions regarding those keywords. If people are asking questions in your keywords, then their looking for solutions.

Now there's more tools and techniques to try, but most of the ones I use are paid tools so that would come later, after you're making some money to expand your toolkit.

Hope this helps just a little to further narrow down whether you should test a niche or not.

I go with what ever works. It is very pretty simple you know what you are good at and what you are not good at and at times you can't even do what you are good at because you have many other stuff to do. So it all comes down to the individual . As for me I always do everything myself. from niche selection to keyword SEO and article writing. Why well because I have the time and ability to do it.

And to answer your question, most often than not I go for an offline niche selection rather than an online research. And once I have decided on where I want to focus my attention I do what it takes to get the job done.