On Crowded Niches
There are dozens of crowded niches out there, some with millions of blogs in each; terms that collectively drive millions of visitors each year to the page that rank the best for those terms. While it is undeniable that entering crowded niches is a bad thing, there are some different points of views that you have to look at when you start your new blog.
A niche, or the category, is the area that your blog is in, whether it be blogging tips, like this blog, or any other category. It is necessary to define the niche that you are in before you even purchase your domain or register a blog name. You want to target your site to outrank the other sites in your niche; resulting in an increase in traffic and visitors that regard you as more ‘powerful’ than others.
The Positives
- Entering a crowded niche means that it is already extremely popular means that there is already a strong base for you to build your brand upon. You won’t need to establish a whole new market in order to permeate to the top of an area that doesn’t have many resources, or visitors, for that matter.
- Ideas will be more widespread, appearing throughout blogs, the media, and other areas, in which you’ll be able to form posts around. It is much easier to create content when the ideas are free-flowing, meaning you won’t have to scramble each day to send out a ‘draft’ post that readers don’t want to read.
- In a market where there are many people, there are advertisers, marketers, and sub-niches to follow. Take this example – you have a blog about blogging, but you want to further target your blog, so you can maintain your current blog, yet branch out into a distinct category (should your domain/branding also permit), such as blog design or other aspects. This means that you’ll have a larger target audience even if the niche is extremely large.
- Again, niches were meant to be crowded, or there would be no common interests among people. Where people need to have knowledge, there is also a niche, no matter how small or large.
The Negatives
- When you introduce a new blog into a crowded niche, with the “authorities” already at the top of search engine results and the views of their readers, you’ll find it extremely difficult to build your brand. It’ll take a lot of determination and previous knowledge before you’ll be able to make any dent in the traffic of others. In other words, all blogs share a percentage of a pie chart (with the largest blogs each controlling up to one percent of this), so if you are able to draw in a few thousand visitors each month, you’ll theoretically be drawing traffic away from those blogs.
- It is often much more difficult to be unique in a niche with a million or so other bloggers blogging about what you are interested in. You have to define who (and what) you are. You can’t take the same approach as anyone else, or you’ll simply go down as someone who is looking to duplicate the results of others.
- When advertisers look for sites to advertise on, they’ll first start with the established, highly trafficked, and community-drive/subscriber sites, those that have naturally high search engine results. From there, many will work their way down until they reach your blog, if at any point. For this reason, you will likely be better off starting in a niche that you enjoy, love, and are willing to write about on a daily basis. Of course, if you are simply looking to build a community, this statement also holds true.
- One of the main reasons crowded niches burst is rather simple. With their expanded growth, people give up and leave – going onto bigger and better things. It may not be quite so obvious, but there is extreme pressure among these sites to maintain their current “status” among the other blogs, in a virtual ranking system, based off a number of factories – including, but not limited to subscriber counts, visitors/page views, Alexa/Compete/Quantcast rankings, and search engine rankings. Unless you maintain your position, you won’t be able to sustain the traffic and every other element crucial to your blog.
Conclusion
In any case, a niche is a niche. There’s nothing you can do about it, whether it is crowded or not, whether there are authority bloggers ruling the traffic and reaping the profits that you want to capture. Invest time in learning how niches operate, then you’ll be able to further explore how you can operate within the most super-saturated categories, in a way “gaming” everyone into thinking that you’re the best in your niche — a topic I explored more in-depth in previous posts.
Is the niche that your blog in crowded and over-saturated? Would you have entered a different niche had you known that it would be easier (or more difficult – entering a less-crowded niche) if you chose to enter a less-crowded niche)?
