Originally Posted by bluefox

I think the reason why most people fail if that they don’t do any market, keyword, traffic and competition research.

When I first started building blogs I just would come up with a great idea for a blog, come up with a great sounding domain and site title, write some killer content and wait for the masses to arrive at my site.

Well of course I know now that it doesn’t quite work like that.

Without any doubt the research phase is the most important, in fact around 95% of my ideas get knocked on the head during the research phase due to there being not enough traffic for that niche or too much competition.

If you are going to enter into a niche that’s hugely competitive you have to have some rather innovative traffic generation strategies and not rely on the search engines for traffic.

That said, I see a lot of people target hugely competitive niches on broad keywords and expect to instantly lay claim to a lion’s share of that markets’ traffic.

For anyone that is new to internet marketing, really the reverse is true. You should target really obscure niches that no-one has heard about so there is little if any competition. Then see if there is acceptable traffic, and then target that niche or sub niche or ‘micro niche’ as some marketers call them.

It’s not unusual to find such small specialized niches, build a website and get on the first page of Google results within a month. Once you have a top position in that niche look for another micro niche to dominate. Then after you have dominated a handful of really small niches and you have developed a feel on the whole process, you can then look for slightly harder, larger niches to dominate and build yourself up as you go along, learn and become better at all the disciplines and skills of internet marketing.

I’m no boxer, so you’re not about to see me jump into the ring with ‘Iron Mike’ for my first bout. Yet that’s what a lot of people new to internet marketing go and do.