It’s obvious that few bloggers take time to do Competitive Research especially with saturated niches like “how to make money online.” It shows vulnerability for some of the most popular blogs, leaving many long-term keyword phrases available.
It’s not surprising bloggers neglect, Competition Research, even totally ignored by the so-called “experts”, given that they rarely do keyword or niche investigation themselves. That’s not their strategy, so when you do Competitive Research, you suddenly jump ahead of so-called, highly competitive all bloggers.
Unlike other industries, Competitive Research in the online world has an unbelievable amount of data readily available, free as well as on a fee base. Literally, you can find out just about anything you could ask, however understanding some data comes with a learning curve.
The simplest strategy for competitive research is to start with doing a search on Google, for terms related to your niche. Chances are, sites like Wikipedia and about.com will come up in the results.
For now, we want to look for sites that are specifically targeting your niche. That means that you want to look past Wikipedia, about.com and the likes, forcing you to go several pages deep in the search results.
Bloggers often look for untapped niches, allowing them to profit from an untapped niche. That’s difficult to do, as there are likely hundreds of thousands of people who dabble into blogging.
Instead of searching for untapped markets, I prefer to jump into highly competitive markets. My goal is to create rich content that covers the niche completely and gives me the authority to compete with the best blogs where I know significant interest already exists, and it’s easier selling to a market that is already interested in buying.
Many tools cost money, such as SEOMOZ, one of the most well-known SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools. They have a 30-day, free trial at the time of writing this, which I highly recommend using. The site has so much information; you can’t possibly leverage all of it, but if used, is a great investment.
Later, when we start blogging, I will suggest using ScribeSEO to help you perfect your posts. This tool has features to point out sites that are competitive, but could be turned into supporting tools.
Many competitive sites are willing to exchange links, which might prove beneficial to both of you, and others are willing to give links unconditionally, which is even better. I will talk more about that in the future, when we work on link building.