Guitar Niche - Is There Any Hope?

There is hope in almost any niche. As long as people are searching for it in their thousands every month,there is hope. What you need is to know your angle of domination and then you have found your own oil well. Once again there is hope for EVERY niche that gets thousands of monthly visitors

By the looks of your post, you've already talked yourself out of this.

What do the guitar sites making it have in common? I'd bet they've all built a community around their specialty. You mention awsome content. Do it. That's a great place to start. Then get some more awesome content from other writers. I'm talking about syndicated content. And then paste up some awesome videos by people making videos. And credit the producer.

You should also start going to some of the guitar authority sites and comment on posts. Of course, I'm talking relevant, valuable comments. Start building up your backlinks this way by commenting on the most exclusive sites out there.

And after you have all that going on, get started building a list with some type of guitar freebie. It might be something you put together. How about the top 10 rock guitars of all times, complete with pictures, descriptions and the guitar player most noted to have used that ax. That's just off the top of my head. You could probably come up with something better to use as a list building teaser.

It always comes back to awesome content. And regardless of what anyone says, you can use syndicated content without upsetting the search engines. Besides, when your goal is to create a community, your traffic starts to come from word of mouth and legitimate backlinks.

All of this represents work. But it's not hard and it doesn't take long before you've got a real following and people are comfortable buying stuff you recommend. Do this right and you can eventually make part of the site a membership deal. There are lots of possibilities. What I've described is a legit business model that lots of successful marketers use. There are many on this forum doing just that.

BTW, this little community-building plan works for EVERY market and niche, not just guitars.

Diversify into guitar equipment, amps,effects pedals,multi effects racks, write about what gear the pros use, how to get their sound/tone etc. write it, they will come.

If you have no interest in your prospective customers then there is no point. Move on.

When it come to the guitar niche you can forget about ranking for any real KW's..

You should try other methods other than SEO for google to attract customers..

Video marketing would probably be your best method as music can easily go viral especially if you are doing tutorial videos.

Fergal

So there are thousands of high ranking sites?

What do these sites need? Content, of course.

Why not contact the site owners and offer free guitar tutorial videos and articles. In exchange, you request that you can place a CTA in the video and a link below.

This link goes through to a lead capture form.

Suddenly, you're piggybacking off the success of everyone else.

I was looking at starting an amazon site for music gear and found guitar brands and makes to have relatively low competition in the serp's, particularly newer models.

That may be an idea for you use for this site instead of abandoning it completely. There is some work, some writing, some minimal backlinking.

Some warriors offer free/paid advice here, but the gist is targetting brands and model #'s even though it appears there's no traffic in google. They still seem to get traffic.

Haven't tried it myself, but since you have the domain, wouldn't hurt to try ranking a few posts this way.

Hope that helps.

Hmm tough niche to get into. I brought a guitar online and I got a good price because everyone is trying to outdo each other.

I play quite a bit of guitar and I have toyed with the idea of entering the niche and trying to make some money from it. But i am yet to come up with a new angle to do so.

How much time are you spending in promoting your website? This could be a great niche if you are putting the time in.

You are seeing it the wrong way. There are 101 guitar websites out there. Don't see them as competition. See them as publishers.

Can you place your ad on their websites?

1. Create a product that can be sold over $50.

2. Your goal is to bring in 1 sale for every $45 you spend in advertising.

3. The pool of websites where you can advertise is huge. So you can be choosy in selecting where you run your ads. Become an expert in ad conversions and you'll leave all the other guitar websites in the dust.

My husband owns a guitar site and we did have a hard time getting a lot of visitors at first. Competition was stiff (still is!) so we decided to drop major SEO efforts and focus on online and offline social networking.

He got his former bandmates to create content and video tutorials for the site. He made sure their names and faces were on there, and asked them to share what they've contributed to other friends.

He asked people to send in photos/videos of their bands/gigs. It took off from there. It really took time and effort but it all paid off. Goodluck!

It really depends. The guitar tabs niche is pretty impossible to match at the moment, but if you thought outside the box and maybe did a site about effects pedals or a certain brand of guitar?

Go local. Post a classified and find someone who wants to teach people guitar. This can be someone anywhere in the world so do keyword research and find a city where you can compete in Google. Then sprinkle the site with that city and convert the main page to a sales page for guitar lessons from that guy. You get a percentage of the teaching revenue. Re-invest the money in product development. While you're at it, get some writers to write up some articles. I think going local and getting other people to do the work solves both of your major problems (too much competition, no passion).

I've been in various music niches for the last 12 years so let my divulge a piece of wisdom for you.

You know how to play guitar correct? You also know there are LOTS of people who want to learn guitar. Your problem right now is competition. So how you do squash this problem?

I'd say simple. Think outside the box here. Do NOT target the "guitar" niche. Target smaller more isolated music niches like the trance niche. Its the niche I've sold various sample packs in. The way I did it was I created the packs first.

Then I went onto trance forums. I made the best sound synthesis tutorial I could, creating sounds nobody knew how to make. Then I also linked a few of my tracks.

People loved the tutorials, would hear my music and ask "where did you get the other sounds?". At which point I'd link them to ebay.

But you can get A LOT done on music forums alone. You can even buy ads on the forums once you've built up a good following.

Here is a fact. There are MANY trance producers who are experts at sound synthesis/mastering (trance is one of the hardest genres to mix imo). On the technical side of things they usually know how to tweak the hell out of synths and its what they spend a lot of their time on.

STILL, many of these producers have NO IDEA how to play the guitar. If you could make a few tutorials, but make the tutorials relevant to trance, you could target a more isolated niche.

I would do this not by playing a guitar on video, and not even using a guitar at all. Instead, work with the tools they use (regular sequencers & synths). SHOW THEM how to use a synth, to play a hot guitar riff. You already KNOW what makes a guitar riff sound organic and groovey. I could even help you if you don't know anything about using synths.

But my point is I think you should just get creative. For the longest time I've known how to play piano, so I use my midi sequencer to play guitar riffs on piano. This is how most trance artists play "guitar" in their tracks. Problem is I don't know how to play a guitar, so I've always had a problem making it sound organic or like a real person played the riff.

LOTS of trance producers would be interested in this because I've seen the question asked a hundred times on tranceaddict alone. "How to make a natural sounding guitar sound" etc etc.

Just some food for thought.

Good luck! - Red

You can try country songwriting keywords , I might be shooting myself in the foot, but there's a lot in the general vicinity low com, high traffic, country music in general is low comp high traffic.

You could put some long tails in there. country videos , ect, You could try some angles with that way. Guitars instructions are tuff to go for there's a million of them. If your not a guitar player then i would see a lot of roadblocks.
Low
1,900
880
$1.10

[blues licks]
Low
4,400
1,300
$0.92

These aren't the greatest, at least there low, add some content , videos on licks ect. clickbank on guitar books, amazon. There not a big money makers on low end products, but you could build on it.

Just brain storming, zero in and attack on the low comps would be one of my first course to try and some of the other suggestions. You better love the music muse to hang with her. If your a guitar player you'll know what i mean.

There is always hope every BIG niche has micro niches. You should specialize in one of these that is not as full as the others. Just guitar learning or learn to play the guitar will not do it unless you spend lots on adwords and even that could get you traffic that is not interested in buying.

I would suggest checking micro niches using Market Samurai or Traffic Travis and concentrating on the ones you can that are not flooded.

I am a musician and a business owner and operate several IM sites (including a set of music-oriented blogs), my blunt suggestions are:

1. Musicians are a close-knit group that can smell "fake passion" a mile away...if you don't love this niche then stop wasting everyone's time (most of all your own)

2. Musicians flock to video content...I know any time I want to learn a new song, network, learn about a new piece of equipment, etc... I look to YouTube first and drill out to websites based on what I see on YouTube. Videos are critical to marketing to this crowd

3. Pofiles and interviews...musicians all have their mentors and study them...if you can run regular interviews, profiles or research on various mentors - this will attract traffic.

Jeff

There are a lot of guitar related keywords. The ones that might bring in a lot of visitors are extremely competitive like you said, but there are so many guitar related keywords that have almost no competition at all! I don't know how you do your keywords research. I have compiled a database of 34 million keywords including 400,000 how-to keywords, so I can easily find them. If you go to adwords keyword tool and type 'how' you get 16 results, so yes it might be difficult to find or come up with good keywords using google's tool. I am looking at my database right now: We found 889 how-to keywords containing the phrase guitar

Guitar - How-to Keywords

I am about to shoot some music videos and guitar lessons next week. I'd like to take a look at your site and maybe partner with you.

Hmm let's put it this way, I want to learn how a riff is done or maybe how some part of a song is played and I land on your site.

If you don't have a video showing me how to do it chances are, I'm going to leave the site in just a few seconds.

Information has to be provided in full and fast so if you like music or musical touches or just enjoy an instrument here and there, I'm sorry but that's definitely not going to cut it.

This is just a real case scenario for a visitor.

It would be a lot easier for you to switch to something you're more passionate about or at least something that won't limit yourself for not being able to create the proper content pertinent to that niche.

If you can create awesome written content, just be aware that there is already a sea of books from Berklee, Musician's Institute, free backing tracks and only God knows how many more free resources.

This niche is about videos and doing them yourself or your friends or people that can be constantly creating content. If you don't have that then I think it's going to be very hard to create an authority site around guitars.

Hope that helps.

This is one of those hands on niches. You can write to your hearts desire about why you should build a house, but when are you going to show us HOW to do it?

Point is, this niche needs instructors. But I will say that it's massive and that there are many sub genres of music, techniques, categories, etc...

If you can't teach guitar to the level expected of your audience (or run out of lessons), there is always equipment. You can position yourself as an equipment guru. You can review pedals, write articles about getting a good tone for metal/country/blues/etc and promote products through amazon or a listing found in CJ.com

This is the problem that a lot of people run into.

However you can enter any niche no matter how competitive.

Here are some tips:

Don't write your content for the search engines - write for people!

Make sure you include some awesome information that guitar players will find useful and engaging. Again this is the most important part - to many people write 300 word articles pumped full of keywords and think that will get them #1 on Google.

You don't want to be #1 on Goolge - be #1 in your niche!

Again seek out authority blogs and websites and show the awesome content you have and offer to write a guest post.

Contact some of the top people in your niche on Twitter.

Frequent some forums in the niche with a sig link to the awesome info.

If you can get your information on authority sites OR if it is really good to go viral then you won't need to worry about Google.

Funny thing is by doing the above I BET you rank higher too!

Hope this helps?

Chris