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Ever find a niche that you think could be profitable, only to abandon it because you feel as if you would have no idea how to approach marketing it? I know I’ve gotten overwhelmed at times when thinking up a big new project to sink my teeth into, but ideas are just ideas, and it can be quite difficult to put them into action without knowing the outcome.

What a lot of people forget though is that there may already be many others succeeding in these “mysterious” niches, so why not see how they are doing so! Your future competitors can give you a lot of inspiration, and you can not only get ideas from them on how to market products, but you may even think of ways to do it better!

Are Your Competitors Succeeding?

There are a few ways to measure the general performance of a website. First, if they are promoting a product using Clickbank, or any affiliate network which shows product sales performance, then this could give you a hint. If someone is promoting a product with good sales figures (gravity for Clickbank), then there is a chance they are getting a piece of that pie. Of course, if they are promoting something with super low performance, than that definitively shows that they aren’t selling much, or anything at all.

Have they been around for a while? Are they spending a lot of money promoting? Do they have a nice, frequently updated site? Does their site receive a lot of traffic? Do they rank for many competitive search terms? etc. etc.

Some of these questions are a little tougher to answer than others, and will vary by niche. One of the best ways to figure out if a site is succeeding is through the use of PPC spying. That’s because with PPC, it is almost guaranteed that if someone is paying for ads for any lengthy period of time, they must be making money. (Unless they are just throwing money away :P)

My favorite tool for spying on my competitors’ ad spending is Hexatrack, since it not only allows you to see how long ads are running, but also which keywords they are bidding on per ad group. I’ll be reviewing this service in detail in the next couple of days. Point is though, if they are spending money, they should be making money.

Marketing: How are they driving traffic?

Try and figure out what they are focusing on to drive traffic to their sites. Basically, it comes down to natural or paid traffic.

Natural Traffic: This is all about SEO, and getting ranked in the search engines. Chances are, if someone is concentrating more on getting natural traffic, then their sites will be highly optimized, and frequently updated. Successful sites like these will be seen as an authority, and will be very difficult to compete with. On the other hand, you can learn a lot from these guys, and while it can take a LOT more work to become an authority, it could be well worth it, but it is a long term investment.

Paid Traffic: You’ll probably only find sites focusing on this by looking through paid search results, since most of the time they consist of simpler landing and squeeze pages which will not rank well for any search terms. You have to make sure that they are making money though before seeing them as future competition you can learn from, as many people will run crap campaigns and bail out as soon as they lose money. Using Hexatrack as I mentionned above to keep track of which ads run consistently is the best way to gauge profitability.

Content: What/How do they sell?

Authority sites focusing on natural search traffic have a pretty simple goal: provide as much valuable web content as possible. Monetizing can be done in a lot of different ways here, but for affiliate marketing, using your authority to recommend products is the way to go. See how others do it in your niche, and test out variations of these methods.

Now, with a paid traffic site, you are dealing with single serve visitors. That means you get your visitors to ACT right away, but how? Well, see how your competitors are doing it!

There are a few basic “templates” for landing pages, see which are common among your competitors. Are review pages popular, and if so, what products are they promoting? Are squeeze pages the norm? A mix of both?

Seeing squeeze pages asking for a name and email is quite common, but you may be thinking, how could I make money building a list? Here’s a good idea, sign up to your competitors lists! Read their messages, see how often they are communicating, what their selling patterns are, what kind of content they provide, what tone they use, etc.

I’m definitely not saying to copy them in any of the above; I’m just saying see how they do it, and take notes. What do you like, what don’t you like? Shape your own strategy from this, and you could become the new top dog!

So remember, when starting out in a new niche, or even when working on an existing niche, watch what your competitors are up to. You can learn a lot from their successes, and from their mistakes.

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