Saturday, August 1, 2009

What's More Important...Demand Or Competition?

This battle will probably go on until the Internet itself burns out like a super nova. What's more important when it comes to picking a niche? Is it the amount of demand for that niche or is it how much competition you're up against? This post is going to try to answer this as objectively as possible. I have no doubt that you will find this fascinating reading.

Let's take a hypothetical example. Let's say that you had a product that could make people fly just by popping a pill. Now, let's suppose that the demand for this product really wasn't that great at all. I mean, how many people would REALLY want to be able to fly on their own? Okay, so demand is very low. However, if you were to go to the Internet to see how many competing sites there were, you'd find that there were absolutely none for the keyword phrase "pill that allows you to fly". With no competition, how many sales do you think you would make? You'd make a sale to everybody who wanted to be able to fly by taking a pill.

Okay, the above example is totally ludicrous but I think you get the point. If the competition is low enough, even if the demand isn't that great, by having a corner on the market, or close to it, you can make quite a few sales. That's why many marketers go after what they call, long tail keywords. These are phrases that don't get many searches each month but have so little competition in the SERPs that the sales are sufficient enough to make going after those phrases worth while.

Having said that, what if you were going after a keyword phrase that had one million competing sites or more? Well, if that keyword phrase got 300,000 searches a month, there is no question that the market is there. The question is, can you take advantage of it? While this may not be as easy as cashing in on the niche with no competition, it can be done. With a little work on SEO, some intense article marketing and even some PPC promotion, you CAN get your piece of the pie. See, with a market that big, no one person can possibly dominate it. Even Google only has a 50% market share as far as people who use their search engine.

So the answer I'm going to give you is this. Depending on how much demand and how little competition, either can be the indicator you want to go off of. Little demand but low competition, go for it. High competition but amazing demand, go for it.

Either way, you really can't lose.

To YOUR Success,


1 comment:

Tim Hillwood said...

I suppose your last line sums it up nicely. It's all about finding one that doesn't have too many fishermen in any one area of water- no matter how big that pond or lake is.

I learned some good stuff about niches at http://leavethejobbehind.com which I consider the most thorough course online. Was there one course that impacted you the most, or was it a number of them that you learned from?