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How do you know if a niche is very jaded or has excessive competition?

by Cual
5 replies
I have an English teaching business. In the last few years I've gradually built a fairly basic but professional looking Drupal website and made a few YouTube videos which haven't reached great numbers of viewers (just 1000 or so each vid) but have received excellent feedback (good portion of likes and positive comments).

Basically, people like the stuff, but there's not much of it and it's not really spreading around.

Now the long term idea, if I kept working with this, would be to build up a large audience, and then start producing some e-products. However, I can see the work involved there is going to be mountainous.

So before I start heavily getting into internet marketing with this business I have to ask myself how jaded or saturated is this market online? The reason being that a good friend of mine who knows his shit recently took a moment to tell me that he thinks the competition is stiff and there's lots of it, and in his opinion I should just use this as an opportunity to pick up video making and blog writing skills while I think on a new idea/niche.

What do you guys reckon?
#competition #excessive #jaded #niche
  • Profile picture of the author Quoia
    A quick way to see how saturated your chosen niche is, is to do a search online and see how many matching commercial sites come up. It doesn't necessarily mean there is no opportunity there, but that it will likely take longer to gain traction. Have you explored drilling down to a smaller user group, perhaps approaching learning centers or schools local to you to see if they would be interested in a teaching product you could provide? Look at your big competitors (Rosetta, etc.) see where they fail and see if you can fill a gap as a small competitor. Just my $.5 cents.
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      When you say you have an "English teaching business", what exactly do you mean?

      > English as a second language?
      > High school English to reluctant school children?
      > Conversational English for tourists?
      > Something else?

      What's the mother language? Does it use the English alphabet?

      Sorry I have more questions than answers, but if we're going to offer real advice, more information would be helpful.
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      • Profile picture of the author Quoia
        I heard a good interview today that made me think of your question again. I've sent you a PM
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        • Profile picture of the author Cual
          Overall it seems the advice is to carve out a sub-genre. This makes me think I should actually be working on a new and more unique future business while I do that. A quick google search, even on the local country google in Spanish, reveals a lot of commercial links. Mainly pretty shittly looking but nonetheless they are there.

          Quoia,

          Cheers for the input man. Pretty solid info. I think anything I'll be doing will be far from the realm of Rosetta Stone (which as an experienced language learning, I don't believe is effective anyway).

          I didn't get your PM by the way...?

          RLF,

          Again thanks. More or less confirming the same ideas.

          John,

          We teach English to Spanish speakers. Sometimes I teach kids, but only for extra cash. The area I'm really interested in is taking someone from a basic level of English to conversationally advanced (and beyond).

          I also do a lot of official exam preparation - FCE, CAE, CPE, etc.

          I'm a native speaker from the UK and I've been doing this for some years.

          Thanks again.

          Cual
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  • Profile picture of the author Stuart Walker
    Have a look on google and see what your competition is like, are there tons of other people doing the same as you (I suspect there are)? That doesn't mean however there's no point, you can still carve out your own sub-niche if you offer something special or that other websites do not. Do you target specific keywords? If you do check what the competition is like (Google Keyword tool and Traffic Travis free edition would be enough).

    Try and work out what is different and unique about your way of doing things and really capitalise on that, make sure to push home the benefits of it when marketing your products.
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