Amazon Affiliates: Is it a Mistake to Focus on Competitive Niches and Products?

Amazon products are a good idea but
you should definitely check how much competition there is.

If a market is saturated it's probably not the best idea to enter that
market especially if you are just starting out.

It is much better to find a sub market or sub niche that is not
completely saturated.

You do want some competition but you do not want saturation.

Before Penguin, I did quite well in competitive niches so I think you should pursue them. Although it's harder rank for such niches, as the demand for products is higher it means you'll likely do better than more obscure niches.

When you say manual traffic. Are you referring to things like guest posting and video?

Thanks for your replies so far.
Yes, by manual I mean to promote my site via Yahoo Answers, forum posting and so on.

I'm thinking that the moral of the story here is this: If someone is to promote manually (as described above) then competition is almost irrelevant. Competition matters ONLY when someone plans to depend primarily on SEO.

At least this is what I keep telling myself, but I would love more counter arguments before taking on such a long journey. Why is this a "long journey?" Because my niche will be in general tech/hardware, so new reviews will never stop being published...

Thanks!

I don't believe any market is ever saturated. There might be a lot of competition but even then there are people ranking #1 in that market. You could argue building a new gas station is a saturated market yet they keep building them. Sometimes they build them on all 4 corners of an intersection and they all get traffic. When you enter a market you choose how hard you hustle to get ranked highly.

Why don't you set yourself up in such a way that you can go either way.

I do think tight niches are the way to go for the record, but at the same time everybody's promotional style is different so it doesn't hurt to test things for yourself. So, why don't you hedge your bets like this.

Start your site in the general tech/hardware category, but drill down and pick one sub-niche to focus on to begin with.

Put your plan of manually generated traffic into action but just with this one smaller subset niche only.

Then when you feel you have that first subset niche nailed, add a second. Keep going with this until you see a dip in performance, i.e. amount of earnings for the amount of time you're putting in.

If you see a dip, then you know you need to scale back and stay focused on your smaller niches. If you never see a dip, then you know you can keep going as wide as you want.

By taking this approach, you'll also be more likely to have a successful broad niche site in the end anyway, as you'll be getting yourself established and building traffic in a less challenging way.

The only downside is you'd still need to have a domain that would work for your broad category even if you end up staying niche focused.

However in my experience with a great permalink, content and on page SEO you can kick butt with traffic even if you are missing the keyword rich domain.

my advise: competitive niche means ther's money to be made .
I run a travel site in a VERY competitive niche ...but i'm doing ok .
I would look for KW with 10 / 100 search a months as secondary KW and then marketing them , while having competitive KW as the main one .
Can you imagine 20 KW with low search toghetr how much money they potentially generate? and if you get into Google first page for such "low" KW with the time you are going to see results on more competitive KW too.
Your manual traffic generation is the best go on , build pages for the low competition Kw.
Sub niche are to consider , but don't be afraid just do it !
Good luck nad remember 20 KW with 50 dayly search add to 1000 search a day ...not bad!
Frank Moreno

Go for a very low competition keyword on your niche.

If you ask me...Unless I am very good in SEO and marketing (which I am not) ... I don't think I should go to a too tough keyword.........

The site wont come in page 1 in Google and hence no sale ....

My opinions

No ... but it's typically a big mistake to focus on competitive marketing methods.

I don't really believe in saturation, and am not really concerned about competition, with my own two Amazon-specific sites, because I'm not trying to attract any SEO traffic to either of them.

High competition shouldn't prevent you from creating Amazon review sites. If products are being advertised a lot in a market, it means that money is being made by people. You can make some of that money too. Your difference should be with the marketing. Drive paid traffic through different methods, and find the ones that give you a positive ROI. It's easier to sell a product that already gets a lot of sales than it is to sell a product that gets no sales. A product that is popularly branded in the marketplace is a benefit.

I'd say go for it. It's your passion, so you're most likely going to be able to stick with it. Even if you're not seeing initial success. That said, I'd spend some time on the side going after less competitive products and niches. You'll get some sales and, more importantly, experience.

You guys rock, thanks for taking the time to reply
SEO has been drilled into our heads so much that we often forget it's NOT the only way to drive traffic to a site. Sure, SEO and good keywords are undeniably great, but these are also not the only things out there.

I'll perform more research and go from there.

Thanks!

Elvis

I've had more success going after big niches with best selling items and large volume of sales. The thing is, for all there is more competition, it stands to reason that there are also more keywords, more products and more buyers in the bigger niches; so bigger more popular niches aren't always necessarily more difficult to rank and sell in then smaller, more obscure ones.

There's no substitute for a hot product, good keyword research and quality content.

Hope this helps.

"Is it a Mistake to Focus on Competitive Niches and Products?"

Yes, it is - if you enter a competitive niche or promote a product with high competition and don't know how to outrank your competition.

Sometimes. Even in a saturated market, it's sometimes very easy to locate low-competition products to promote.

My Amazon sites rely almost entirely on SEO and I do well.

I prefer to target niches that consist of lots of individual low-competition products. That said, I'm involved in some very high-competition niches and still do well.