Reader Question: Should I Stop If There’s Competition?

Reader Question: Should I Stop If There’s Competition?

Everyone is ticking along with the niche site challenge. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve personally got myself out of the planning stage and into the writing stage. Other guys are coming up with breakthroughs in their thinking and having some great ideas.

Justin posted the following comment on this article about judging the competitiveness of a niche market:

“Hey Jamie,

Continuing on with the niche site challenge, I came across a niche site that was basically doing *exactly* what I wanted to do. It was the first result on page 2 of Google for a search of ” reviews”.

Genesis framework, good reviews of various products in the niche, different versions of the products, solid keyword usage, some how-to articles, etc.

Set up and run in a textbook manner.

My question to you — when you see a site like that (but only one, or maybe even two) do you continue with the niche?

Seeing as my site would essentially be an almost carbon copy of that site, without even having to read any of their reviews or sales letters.

Thanks!”

I replied quickly, but then realised I had a lot more to say about the comment than I thought.

Firstly, I’ll address why I’m bouncing ideas around in this topic when I’ve already written about whether a niche market is competitive a few times. The answer is that this is a specific question about a specific scenario.

In most niches, you’ll be competing against someone who isn’t doing the same thing as you: you’re specifically following a niche site building guide and you’re mostly competing against random sites and sites where your product/niche isn’t direct competition.

The question here is, “What do you do if there’s someone already trying to do what you’re doing?”

In this case, Justin identifies the following:

• Genesis framework (As in, the WordPress theme)
• Solid reviews
• Strong Keyword planning
• How-to articles

In my short reply, I said that it’s hard to say without seeing the site itself. The reason I said this is because If you look around the site, there will be mistakes. Every site can be improved upon. However, it’s a question of whether you have the skills/budget/time to compete, and whether it’s worth it to you if you do.

Also, because this is based on your skill, it’s impossible to say. There are some times when I see a niche and know by looking at the sites that I’m not good enough; perfect copy, perfect images, perfect optimisation and a social media profile to match. Other guys will look at those same sites and think, “Yeah… I can compete and win!”

Some things to think about:

• Are the sales letters/product reviews really that good? If they’re not, you can do better. Think about the constituent parts of a sales letter here: Can you do better headlines? Can you write better meta-descriptions? Can you write better calls-to-action? Any of these things can increase your readership thus make your site “better” and “better performing.”
• Does it have images? (I’m a fine one to talk because I’m terrible for adding images to articles.) Images are indicators of a better site.
• Is the design solid? If it uses a premium WordPress theme, then it’ll only look mediocre at worst, but does it look like a shady site? If it has no links between pages, no header image/logo and no navigation, then you can do better.
• Does it look like a niche site? With a niche site, you’re looking to put the minimum effort in for maximum reward. However a reader shouldn’t be able to click on your site and know that.
• Have they missed products/markets/questions out? You won’t be the only one writing an affiliate review of your product, but you might be the only one who addresses a particular audience of the product

Now, naturally, all of those answers (plus some others you’ll think of that I won’t have) could be “yes” and you could have a competitive site which is going to be hard to dethrone.

This isn’t THE END though.

Justin asks, “What if there’s only one of them?”

There are billions of web pages out there – if you’re competing with one site, it’s probably not going to be a problem.

However, we don’t want to just compete though. We want to win. (If you decide you can compete; if there are hundreds of perfectly optimised sites, you’re probably best off not competing and going onto different products.)

Let’s assume there are a handful of niche sites that are going after our market. Let’s assume we really love the niche and we can bring our personal experience into it. There’s another factor we haven’t taken into account, and it revolves around a point I’ve made above:

• Does it look like a niche site? With a niche site, you’re looking to put the minimum effort in for maximum reward. However a reader shouldn’t be able to click on your site and know that.

You want to put the minimum effort in necessary. However, if you’re in a bit of competition, you’ll need to put more effort in. That said the effort you put in doesn’t have to be world-beating – you just have to create more of an authority site than the other sales-letter based niches you’re competing against.

Here’s a single easy factor that most niche sites don’t take into account: Traffic sources.

Competition for Traffic: Find A Different Source

The best niche site I’ve ever seen gets that title because when I found it, I didn’t even realise it was a niche site. It looked and felt like a business.

A lot of this was down to the fact I found it on Twitter, and then I went through and it had a Facebook profile, a “latest comments” section and an Instagram account.

It had a great SEO profile, to be sure. Most niche sites do. What separated it from those though was that it was also drawing in traffic like me: from other sources.

Now, you might think, “That’s too much work for a little niche site.”

I only realised it was a little niche site after hopping around for a little while. The comments were legitimate, but there was something interesting about the Facebook likes: there were thousands… and a lot from India.

The Instagram photos were the featured images of the articles.

The twitter account consisted of links to the articles, Instagram images and retweets about when other people had mentioned the site.

In short… the whole thing was automated. It was perfectly elegant and non-spammy. The site looked great and as far as I was aware the comments all seemed legitimate.

However, the effort taken was just a little bit more – enough for the site to draw in a few readers from other sources using the work you’d already done as re-purposed content then setting up an automation system to deliver it to the various different profiles.

That little bit of effort was all it took to have a little niche site that looked like a full blown authority site. Of course, the knock-on effect will have been that more readers and greater engagement will have helped the site in terms of SEO, so it’s all feeding into that one thing.

That’s a simple way to gain traffic and get your site above a solid niche competitor though. Add in other little things like posting on a related forum a couple of times a week and you’re well on your way to out-competing other niche sites with not much more effort.

I realise I’ve gone way off-topic here and this article is a bit fluid in terms of structure, rhyme or reason, but just a little thinking about this sort of thing will get you past the competition in nearly all cases.

(P.S. Sorry Justin for stealing your questions and turning them into articles. Hope it helps!)

(P.P.S. If anyone else wants their questions stolen and turned into articles, then drop in some comments. I quite like doing reader-based content.)