Highly competitive popular niche or micro niche that has little competition?

[Ram8349]

Popular niche obviously have more people, but due to competition, it is hard to get a slice of that large pie as you just start from scratch. But if you are successful, the amount of traffic can be amazing.

 

Micro niches have very few fans, but it can also have very few competitors. It is easier to be one of the top dogs, but the amount of traffic won't be amazing since it is "micro" after all.

 

Which one do you think can do better if you start from scratch?

[Rayru18]

In my opinion if you can work out a really nice place to attract traffic from a "micro" niche then you would have a better chance of success. Like you say, popular niches have a lot of people therefor there will be a ton of places where that people can scatter around, leaving just a bunch of small groups available to grab for traffic; in the end they might even be an equal or similar amounts of traffic.

 

To be honest the real answer, I think would be, depends on how much time you plan to wait before you say "This is my peak"...with a popular niche and a lot of time in your hands and dedication you can slowly become one of the tops, but starting up, it will be harder since there are already some services on top, that have been there for years and will be hard to bring down.

 

But as you say for the "micro", it's easier to get to the top quick, and will, most likely, be way faster than what it does to get there with a popular niche. Yes, it might be a small amount of traffic, but considering that the niche isn't really that popular you wouldn't have to worry about competition as much, and might be able to secure and lock that traffic to you; whereas with popular niches people will usually just jump from one service to another, and it will be harder to secure the traffic for your own.

[Victor Leigh]

Popular niche obviously have more people, but due to competition, it is hard to get a slice of that large pie as you just start from scratch. But if you are successful, the amount of traffic can be amazing.

 

Micro niches have very few fans, but it can also have very few competitors. It is easier to be one of the top dogs, but the amount of traffic won't be amazing since it is "micro" after all.

 

Which one do you think can do better if you start from scratch?

 

It depends on what you consider to be a fair amount of traffic. For example, there was one keyword that I checked on. It had only about 1 million searches per month. That works out to about 35K searches per day. If I can get 1% of that traffic to my site, I would get 350 hits. That is not exactly a small number expecially when you consider that it's very targetted traffic.

 

I think it's well worth working on micro niches because of the focus. The main aim is to get buying visitors not passer-bys.

[bryce12]

Personally I would go for the bigger niche. The simple reason is that bigger niches can make you big money if you do things right. As far as micro niches are concerned, we have already seen that Google Penguin has devalued them a bit so I won't be surprised if Google stops ranking them high in the future.

[Victor Leigh]

Personally I would go for the bigger niche. The simple reason is that bigger niches can make you big money if you do things right. As far as micro niches are concerned, we have already seen that Google Penguin has devalued them a bit so I won't be surprised if Google stops ranking them high in the future.

 

I don't understand why Google has devalued micro niches. Is it because of the content? I would think that any micro niche with unique quality content will still rank high any search.

[Nathan]

I don't understand why Google has devalued micro niches. Is it because of the content? I would think that any micro niche with unique quality content will still rank high any search.

 

Well a lot of them are not good content, just a few 500 seo keyword packed articles that help no one, but make it to page one of Google. After the Panda and Penguin updates it put them where they should be at the end of the result list as they are not good content.

[Victor Leigh]

I see. So the problem is not with the micro niche concept then. As usual bad content is put where it should have been thrown in the first place - the trash can. So the future still looks look for micro niches then. After all, if the target is only 100usd per month per micro niche, it's not an impossible dream. Right?

[Nathan]

I see. So the problem is not with the micro niche concept then. As usual bad content is put where it should have been thrown in the first place - the trash can. So the future still looks look for micro niches then. After all, if the target is only 100usd per month per micro niche, it's not an impossible dream. Right?

Nope not impossible at all.

[Ram8349]

Personally I would go for the bigger niche. The simple reason is that bigger niches can make you big money if you do things right. As far as micro niches are concerned, we have already seen that Google Penguin has devalued them a bit so I won't be surprised if Google stops ranking them high in the future.

 

I don't think those sites were hit because they are micro niche. It must be other reasons such as poor content, over SEO(ed).

 

I see. So the problem is not with the micro niche concept then. As usual bad content is put where it should have been thrown in the first place - the trash can. So the future still looks look for micro niches then. After all, if the target is only 100usd per month per micro niche, it's not an impossible dream. Right?

If a niche's maxiumal protentional is only $100 per month, I see no future in it. I am not one of those people who want to run 50 different sites at the same time. I'd rather run 1~2, maybe 3 max sites with high protential and a very bright future to further develop the market.

[SpikeTheLobster]

I don't think it's necessarily one or the other. I've been looking at this a bit recently and there's such a huge range of possibilities that it's mind-boggling. A micro-niche is generally considered to be a site that gets 1,000 keyword searches a month. That's tiny. But then, they're competing against maybe 300,000 pages, each of which only has 10-30 backlinks.

 

A bigger niche might target 350,000 searches a month but be up against 3,000,000 Google results, each with a hundred backlinks. That's *significantly* harder to make a dent in!

 

Ideally, of course, you want a niche with a million searches a month and two competitors, both of whom are running a single non-SEO'd web page on a free provider.

 

Personally - failing the ideal setup - I'd go for something a bit bigger than a micro-niche but not as big as a highly-competitive subject. I'd want something I know I can make a dent in without spending ridiculous amounts of cash on advertising and SEO services but which would bring in a fair return.

[themonk3y]

I would say you need to go with the niche you are more passionate about. Starting a micro niche website or a website in a competitive popular niche doe not makes much of a difference. If you are creating it because you are passionate about it and not because of the money then there is a high chance of being successful. As revenue from the website wont demoralize you and you will continuously come up with new stuff to talk about.

 

On the other hand a popular niche could be also narrowed down to a micro niche. For example WordPress could be narrowed down and WordPress themes which can be further narrowed down to fashion WordPress themes. Instead of going with a bigger niche you should try narrowing down your interest in the niche which will eventually result in a micro niche.

[razelia]

I run three websites, all of which are micro niches with very little competition. And even if there is competition, we tend to crush them in our path hahahaha -cough-

 

Um, anyway, what I like about micro niches though is that your focus is also on that single micro niche, so you don't really have to research so extensively as compared as to when you have a wide range site. It'd also be great to pick a micro niche that actually has a big following but does not have an actual website that specifically gathers it. This usually applies well to video game niches that have no fansites but has a strong following as seen in maybe social networks (FB fanpages, groups, etc.). They you can really take advantage of affiliate programs and whatnot through them.

[Rainman]

I think it would depend on the micro-niche website. If you choose a micro-niche that interests only a few people who are very wealthy then I suppose you can make a decent amount of cash from that site. However if it's the sort of micro-niche where you'll simply trying out your luck, it would be much better to go for a popular niche and compete against the others because there you are at least guaranteed some amount of success if you're very good at what you do.

[jaymish]

Interesting dilemma. I personally prefer micro-niches because it's much easier to carry out SEO. I would advise a person new to marketing, starts out here,as they build their confidence and learn a few skills and tricks they can move to popular niches. Working online has a learning curve that puts many off and many give-up. It's important to feel like your getting somewhere. Even getting one or two views without conversion is a good start. Popular niches are for the professionals.Just saying!

[jaybee]

What you're doing is extremely acceptable and also appropriate. If you'll live in my country, people will really love you because most of the people in my country do not credit sources especially with photos and articles. Some people in my country download photos from sites and use it for anything and they don't ask for the owner's permission. Also with music, we don't buy any license for our music, we just download randomly from downloading sites and I know it's illegal so I somehow go to Spotify and buy a premium subscription so that my music is licensed.