If you can break into them, creating a blog in a competitive niche can be extremely rewarding. Competition is a sign of a healthy market – there is money being spent left and right and there are likely a ton of different products to promote.
However, where there is money there are savvy marketers and entrepreneurs looking to collect it. You’ll have a harder time breaking into a competitive niche, but it’s certainly possible. For those looking to build a long-term business, working in a competitive market such as health, wealth, or dating can be a great choice.
Here are 5 easy steps to succeed in a competitive market.
1. Collect Emails
First and foremost, you’ve got to be doing something to retain your visitors. Everything else on this list is pointless if you do not keep your visitors returning over and over again.
Acquiring visitors in competitive niches can be very tough. You probably won’t be ranking high in Google right away. Search engines aren’t going to send you thousands of free visitors. You have to go out and get them on your own. And if you want any chance of making money from these visitors, you’ll have to keep them coming back over and over again.
Collecting your visitors emails is the easiest way to accomplish this. If you use a service like ActiveCampaign, you can set up an autoresponder which will automatically send out pre-written emails at set intervals, which you can use to feature the best posts on your site. You can also send out emails whenever your newest post is published to bring your audience back to you.
See: 25 Guaranteed Ways To Increase Your E-Mail Opt-ins
Every loyal, engaged visitor you retain is another person visiting your site each week.
2. Ignore SEO – Focus On Networking
One of the biggest mistakes newbies can make early on is focusing too much time on SEO. This is ESPECIALLY true when you’re working in a competitive niche, because chances are your blog isn’t going to rank anyway. It’s not your fault – there are plenty of well-established big players already and they’re untouchable for now.
It’s far better to focus on networking with other bloggers in your niche (and since you’re in a competitive one, there will be plenty of others for you to work with.)
Comment on their articles. Send them emails.
Guest post on their site. Take advantage of their established audience, and bring some of their visitors back with you. Retain these visitors by getting them on your email list.
One great thing about networking is that it boosts your search engine rankings anyway. Working with other bloggers will net you the natural, high-quality backlinks that Google loves. Over time, these will add up and you may actually start ranking for some long-tail keywords. And as I’m sure you’re aware, rankings are truly a case of ‘the rich get richer.’ Backlinks lead to more backlinks that you don’t even have to work for – if your high quality content gets ranked, it’ll attract backlinks from sites you’ve never even heard of.
Don’t think of your competition as competitors. You are not working against them. You are working to make the most amount of money possible. Working with other bloggers makes your job a heck of a lot easier.
3. Find Traffic In Different Places
This isn’t 2005. You can’t just put something on the internet and expect people to flock to it, because it simply won’t happen. Again, you’ve got to go out and find your visitors. If you don’t, they may not ever find you.
Don’t just spend your time focusing on one method however. Diversify. Post on relevant forums. Create YouTube videos that link to your site. Go wherever your visitors are, and bring them back with you.
If you’re looking to build traffic to your site, I highly recommend signing up for my 7-day traffic building course. You’ll learn 7 different ways to bring free, long-term traffic to your site and then profit from all of those new visitors. Signing up is free so you’ve got nothing to lose.
Remember, you can’t make money without traffic!
4. Invest in Paid Advertising
One traffic method NOT mentioned in my course is paid advertising. If you’re in a competitive niche and you want to take off, one of the quickest ways to do this is by paying up.
My favorite method is PPC.
More specifically, sending clickers to a squeeze page to collect their email, where you can then direct them to your blog as well as market products to them.
I know parting with your money can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. The key with paid advertising is to get the maximum return possible for your money. As soon as you yield a positive ROI, you can scale it up and boost your profits quickly.
But how do you do this?
You’ll want to determine ASAP how much money you’re making off of your average email subscriber. This can be challenging early on, but it may be worth it to take a loss and jump-start this process.
As soon as you know how much your average subscriber earns you, you must then determine the average cost of acquiring a new subscriber. This will be dependent on the conversion rate of your squeeze page as well as how much you are paying per click.
Let’s say my squeeze page conversion ratio was 33% and I was paying 50 cents per click. That’d average out to $1.50 to acquire an email subscriber.
If I were making an average of $15 per subscriber, than it’d be extremely stupid not to spend more money on that ad campaign, bidding a higher amount per click to acquire new subscribers even faster.
It does take time to yield a profit, and you will have to do a lot of tweaking and testing. However, pay per click advertising is one of the easiest ways to grow your list and your blog audience extremely quickly, because it’s infinitely scalable.
Your competition’s only choice is to pay more.
5. Work Harder Than Your Competition
If you don’t want to pay more, you’ll have to work harder than your competitors.
As mentioned earlier, blogging really is sort of a ‘rich get richer’ system. Authority blogs will get traffic not only from Google, but from satisfied readers sharing their posts, referring their friends, and essentially advertising their blog for free.
You’ve got your work cut out for you, but this is actually a very good thing. It means that if you work hard, YOU can get a slice of the pie. YOU can become the authority.
Here’s the truth. The world’s best bloggers do not know much more than you. There is no super secret knowledge that makes them successful. They have just worked harder and longer.
We are all born knowing absolutely nothing about blogging and marketing. It pisses me off when people say that successful people are born and not made because that’s not true at all. Successful people are successful because they work hard to get to that point.
If you want to be successful, than do it. If you’re not willing to work hard, than don’t bother blogging – because someone else out there is willing to do so and is looking to kick your ass.
Good content is not enough anymore. You’ve got to actively market your articles, or all of your hard work writing them will go to waste.
Conclusion
While competitive niches can be some of the most rewarding to enter into, they also come with the most amount of work. You’ve got to work hard for each and every visitor and then retain them long enough to sell to them.
The money is there for the taking however, and you’ve just learned 5 effective ways to break into a competitive market.
I highly recommend signing up for my traffic building course below, which will go more in-depth on bringing people to your site. If your competitors know this information and you don’t, you’ll be at a huge disadvantage.
Finally, if you have any of your own tips you’d like to share, do us all a favor and leave a comment telling us what you know.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Leave a Reply