Niche market

It can be demoralising to be working away in a niche market and then find your inbox crammed with promotional emails for a new product launching into 'your' market niche. Even worse when there are two coming out at the same time!

After all, you spent all that time on your own market research. All those hours discovering your keywords and then the competition analysis to determine that this niche was one with little competition and high profit potential.

And now you've suddenly got more competition than you expected and what's more, they're ahead of you in the game because their product is launched while you are still developing your own or you just haven't been able to work your blog up the search engine rankings as yet.

So what are you going to do about it? Throw your hands in the air in horror and walk away? I think not.

Niche market potential really comes in two forms. The long lasting one where you are addressing a narrowly focused need of the market that you have found by your diligent market research. Or a new niche market that comes about by fashion or fancy, a trend that develops to reflect maybe some new technology that hits the market place.

Amazon best sellers

Either way, timing is important. In a long lasting niche for you to be the first in that market is a reflection of your diligent market research that has uncovered a potential niche market that others have missed.

Trendy markets are much easier to spot – but may not last long as the fashion wave moves on.  Alternatively, new technology can create a new niche market that is long lasting.

Either way,  they are easy to find with Amazon having a specific link on their home page – or go to www.pulse.ebay.com which Ebay describes as; 'a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay'.

But whether you are working in a long term or a trendy niche you have been putting in the hours to build up your blog with relevant content, methodically making posts and optimising your blog for search engine ranking in order to create your authority in the field – and now you have competition for the top spot. What to do?

Stephen Pierce always refers to the need to watch out for 'where you can win'. Pick your battles and don't go slugging away expending your energy where you cannot win. Yet this is exactly why you put all that time and energy into your market research to find a niche with low levels of competition so you did not have to slug it out and could be the big fish in a small pond. So was all that effort wasted?

No, it wasn't. It looks like your timing might be a bit off in that other marketers have located 'your' niche at least as soon as you did. But you already have lots of hours invested in your project so is there another way to look at this?

That brings us to another of Stephen's bywords, that the ground is constantly shifting and you simply have to adapt. This is the great strength available to independent entrepreneurs, that we can shift direction very quickly.

So the new battleground has an additional competitor within it. What opportunities does that open up to you in addition to whatever threats it might pose? How can you adapt to the shifting ground?

First off, a new arrival gives you something new to write about – just like a new baby in the family. This whole article has been prompted by the appearance in my inbox of an offer from Jeff Johnson for his Traffic Getting SEO Plugin – swiftly followed by another offer from Stephen Pierce for his $997 Blog Income Generation Workshop – for free if I sign up for Jeff Johnson's plugin!

At first I sat and wondered if I was doing the right thing with my time in NicheMarketBlogger. Then as I thought through what the opportunities were I made a few notes and realised I had the framework for new content. So here it is, some thoughts on how to deal with competition in your niche market – all optimised for SE ranking on that subject and adding to the body of content and hopefully useful information on this site.

The next opportunity is for additional income from affiliate sales. You should always try to write with one eye on the commercial potential and if you mention a subject in your blog for which there is a relevant product available then it makes sense to create a dedicated page with a review of that product.

Your new review page should be optimised solely for the product keywords and whenever the subject comes up again in your blog in the future you can link back to the same static page.

This builds up the links to the target review page thereby promoting it and makes it much easier for you to reference the product when writing in future.

The opportunity to rank well and get free traffic is particularly true for new products where you can get a page published early before there are lots of other competing sites and references. You will see me referring to Stephen Pierce's Blog Income Generation Workshop in future. At a price of $997 there is likely to be good affiliate revenue to be made.

Don't forget, it is quite possible for a single page of a website to rank #1 on Google, it doesn't have to be the main index page. So a review page on your blog stands just as good a chance as any other, especially if you use other promotion methods as well.

Having started to at least make reference to their product if not actively promote it then you are clearly going to be talking in some way to your new found friends. In fact, it's difficult to envisage a situation when they should be new-found at all.

After all, you have been participating in this niche market because it is your objective to become a leader within that community. So the probability is that you should have been aware of the new arrivals beforehand.

Aware or not beforehand, you are certainly aware now and new participants means new opportunities for conversation, for commenting, for interviews and webinars, all sorts of mutual content generation and for cross selling.

Notice how many opportunities are coming out of what started as a problem?

SWOT analysis via Wikipedia

Next up is to really dissect the competition. First time round you probably did this looking for ways to promote it. This time its different. It's clinical as you look for ways to better the competition with your own product. A full SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) is called for.

Where is the competing product as good as or even better than yours? What can you do to bring yours up to par or even better it? Does the competing product have weaknesses that you can exploit by making yours so much better in that area.

This is a time for serious consideration of how you will deal with your competitor in future. Are you really competitors or are you complementary? Have you developed a relationship where you can consider teaming up and fine-tuning the content of the two products so they are distinct but complementary and generate even more sales that way.

Competition in your niche market can appear to be unwelcome, especially if you have a great deal of research time ploughed in to your efforts. But the most comforting aspect is that it confirms to you that you are not alone in your opinion of the potential and profitability of the market.

Affiliate marketers frequently seek out markets that have relatively low competition but also have a reasonable level of existing advertisers. The reasoning is that the advertisers would not be continuing to spend money if there was no profit in the niche.

So your apparent competitors can quickly become compatriots as you work together to find way of complementing each other instead of competing in your niche market.

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