When you are starting a new blog it can be very difficult for you when you are either doing it for the first time or you have entered a crowded and competitive niche. Even those who already have their blogs set up complain about not being able to attract enough traffic as they would like when they have a lot of competition.
If you are facing the same issue, then there is a fair chance that your blog needs some fixing in its marketing strategy.
You should remember that getting a lot of traffic to your brand new website in a highly competitive niche can be a very difficult task. As there are already so many people fighting for the same keyword and so many sites that are already ranking in the search engines for that keyword. It may prove to be a nightmare for you to position yourself among them.
Search Engine Optimization is widely used concept and is a very common way for website and blog promotion. But there is a problem with SEO; high competition niche makes SEO a nerve breaking way for blog promotion.
The reason is that search engine results have a very narrow window to be visited by the subscribers. People barely visit the initial two or three pages and the results displayed over them, so if your blog gets to that mark, then there is a fair chance of a lot of traffic. But in tough competition niches, it is almost impossible to find a place in even the first ten pages of a search engine result.
A Simple Case Study
The niche that I blog about – small online businesses and internet marketing is also a very competitive niche. One of the keywords that I want my site to rank for is ‘internet marketing’. Now it’s a very competitive keyword and there are giants that are already sitting on the first few pages of Google for that keyword. Look at the SEO Competition report by Market Samurai for the keyword ‘internet marketing’ below:
Note: If you are not familiar with Market Samurai, it’s a keyword analysis tool that I use for all my keyword research. I find it very useful as it saves me a lot of time and energy. I highly recommend you to go and check it out. If you download your copy of Market Samurai from this link, you’ll get a free trial for a period of 14-days (at the time when I published this post).
You can see all the reds and oranges and a very few greens. Reds and oranges show the difficulty of competition. For example if I wish to get to the top of search engine I’ll need to get more BLP (backlinks to my post page) and PR (pagerank) than the first result i.e. Wikipedia. That’s about 60,000 backlinks and pagerank greater than 6.
Even if I manage to get so many links back to my blog (which is practically impossible!) and also got a pagerank greater than Wikipedia, can you imagine how much time it will take? And even if I invested so much time, there’s still no guarantee that my blog will rank for that keyword. There are almost 200 parameters that Google checks for ranking a page in the SERPs. And if I waste so much time in building links then when will I write content and what about other keywords?
So for me SEO = Waste of time and money for highly competitive niches.
So should you forget about entering a highly competitive niche? Absolutely not. We both know that if there’s so much competition there must be a lot of money involved. And there’s nothing bad in getting a slice of the big pie. After all we all are here to do business and make money online.
You should forget SEO and rather concentrate on other sources of traffic that you can easily get. Below are the top six other ways you can get traffic to your blog and position your blog in a highly competitive niche.
Ways To Gain Traffic To Your Blog In Highly Competitive Niche:
There are some other marketing means for blogs that are way more effective and easier than SEO. If you are a victim of low traffic to your blog and are in a highly competitive niche, here are some marketing strategies you should try.
1. Network With Other Bloggers:
Find bloggers and network with them. Send them an email and introduce yourself and your blog. Meeting new bloggers over certain platforms can increase the traffic to a great deal. This way bloggers can share your links, talk about you on their blogs and help you in building authority.
2. Guest Blogging:
If your blog has not been appreciated with the help of SEO then you must do guest blogging. Guest blogging means to write and publish articles on someone else’s blog in exchange with a link back to your website.
Guest blogging can increase traffic by three means to your blog; one is that when you meet other bloggers it results in mutual value building for each other’s blog. The second way in which guest blogging can increase traffic is that blog you post on already have an audience that you can send to your site through the link you put in your bio. The third way is that through guest posting you can build visitor’s trust in you and your brand.
3. Social Media:
You can use the social media to attract a lot of traffic to your blog. You can share your blog’s content over Facebook, Twitter and Google+ so that people can visit back to your site from there.
4. Blog Commenting:
Blog commenting is one of the best ways when it comes to promotion of your blog. Search blogs in your niche that already have a good audience. When you put a comment on these blogs with a link back to your blog you can drive traffic back to your blog.
5. Forum Posting:
Forum posting can also help you drive traffic back to your website. Register to the top forums in your niche and put a signature with a link back to your blog in your profile. This way whenever you post something or reply to an answer, people will see the link in your signature and visit your blog. This is a very old yet effective way of generating traffic to your blog.
6. Post Advertisement On Other Blogs:
It is yet another way to market your blog and help it stand out in the competition. If you are a blog owner and you have got some money in your wallet then this is the way you can go. Although it costs you money but it is highly effective. It can bring a great deal of highly targeted traffic to your blog.
Driving Traffic To Your Blog Won’t Be Enough
Traffic from all these sources will be temporary and won’t last forever. You’ll see spikes of visitors to your site that’ll go down soon. So you should know how to retain the traffic that comes to your blog. And you can do this by…
Converting your visitors into subscribers.
The best way to retain your traffic is to set up various mediums that will turn your visitors into subscribers and bring traffic to your blog automatically as soon as you publish your post.
To do this you can set up an account with Feedburner (free) and start collecting email addresses of the people that visit your blog. This will act as an email feed and the subscribers will get notified with a mail whenever you post a new article on your blog driving traffic back to your site on an autopilot.
You can also create profiles for your blog on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and connect them with your blog’s feed. In this way not only you will be able to build your community but your followers will know whenever you post something new, driving traffic back to your blog.
Have a look at the “Subscribe to FREE email updates” box on the right sidebar. It has helped me build a large community around my blog and now I don’t need to promote my individual blog posts. Whenever I post something new, all my subscribers get to know about it.
Bottom Line
Follow the different ways given above to drive traffic to your site and convert those visitors into subscriber or followers.
Have questions? Suggestions? Doubts? Or just want a link back to your website? Leave a comment in the box given below…
