3 Blog Traffic Strategies For a Saturated Niche
So it’s New Year, you’re thinking of starting a new blog but you’re feeling stuck because you’ve done some research and feel that your chosen niche is just too saturated. There’s tons of blogs out there already, all of the good keywords are being ranked for by high authority sites, you’re a complete unknown and you feel as though you just wouldn’t be able to get started. If this is you, then read on!
What is ‘Saturation’?
If you have a sponge and you use it to mop some water there comes a point where the sponge can no longer hold any more water – it has reached saturation point. People use the word saturation in business terms to suggest that the market simply cannot take any more – no more blogs, no more products, no more ideas. But think about that, can that kind of idea really apply to business or creativity of any kind?
Can you imagine if novel writers stopped writing romance novels because there were too many already? Or what if movie makers stopped making cheesy action movies? It just wouldn’t happen would it? It simply does not matter how many have been before, we as consumers always want more and always will want more. The same applies in all areas of business. We want new cars, new clothes, new homes. We want new things to read, new blogs, new websites. This is an ever-changing world, we always want more, there can never be a saturation point!
So forget the idea that a niche can be saturated – it simply can’t happen. But of course there are some very competitive niches where many big blogs have thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of readers, where the search engines are dominated by powerful sites for all the top keywords. For the newcomer this can seem daunting but there are ways to break through!
The Traffic Factor
One of the keys to a successful blog or any kind of website is traffic. Without traffic, no income can be made and many people worry that in a competitive niche, they will never be able to attract the kind of traffic they need to grow their blog. There are other factors too of course, such as the value that you give to your readers but in this post I want to concentrate on traffic strategies that you can employ for your blog even if your niche is very crowded.
1) Blog Commenting
I was recently interviewed by Yaro Starak and in that interview he asked me how I got my blog started and my answer was basically via blog commenting. Over a year ago now I wrote a post which outlined a blog commenting strategy which I urge you to read if you wish to adopt this strategy but first let me tell you why this works so well in a crowded niche.
To comment on blogs, you need blogs to comment on! Sounds obvious and somewhat stupid but for some reason many newbie bloggers see other blogs in their niche as competition – something to be feared when it’s the complete opposite! This blog is in a highly competitive niche and when I started nobody had ever heard of me. I started out just like everybody else with just one subscriber (me) but just look at my stats now – it is possible! And the way I got this off the ground was by commenting on other blogs.
If you are in a competitive niche that is absolutely wonderful because you have all their juicy traffic and subscribers to tap into! One of the main blogs I commented on was Yaro’s and he now has a whopping 50k subscribers! Get your comment near the top and that is thousands of potential eyes on your comment and if you write something insightful, some of those people will click through to your own blog to see what else you have to say.
I won’t say anything else about the strategy because I’ve said it all before but my point is that the more competitive your niche – the more blogs you have to comment on, the bigger they are, the more people are out there just ready to read your comments!
2) Social Media Traffic
Social media is a big topic and I devote many lessons to it in the Bloggers Bible so I can’t cover it all here but the same theory applies – if your niche is competitive it also means more potential eyeballs. In some of the social news sites like Digg it can be very hard to get any real traffic because you have to try to get to the front page which is often impossible without a little leg up from friends which takes work up-front but not all social media is like that.
Take StumbleUpon for instance. Their algorithm will send a small amount of starting traffic to any new page that gets submitted to their database. They don’t care if it comes from a brand new blog or a 10-year old blog. If somebody from those initial visitors likes the page and gives it a thumbs up, it gets some more traffic and so it goes on. StumbleUpon was my number 1 traffic source for this blog for many months in the early days when the blog was brand new and I had very few fans on my account. Just check my archives and look for my earlier stats posts to see.
If you want to know more about driving traffic specifically with StumbleUpon then sign up to my free course, Traffic Rush but don’t forget about all the other social media sources out there – there are lots!
3) Search Engine Traffic
A brand new blog is going to get very little search engine traffic unless it has some very high quality incoming links and I’ll assume that you are not in a position to aquire those. As such search engine traffic seems to be a longer term strategy. Again if you look through the stats posts in my archives you’ll see that the percentage of traffic that has come from search engines from the beginning has risen slowly and steadily from just 2% to almost 40%.
However, there are a lot of myths about search engine traffic and probably the biggest one is that you must rank highly for highly searched terms in order to get lots of traffic. This simply is not true. Of course, if you do manage to do it then great, you’ll get a ton of traffic but it is not necessary.
The vast majority of traffic comes from single-search terms. That means terms that have been typed in just once. For example, due to the popularity of my WordPress ebook, I get a lot of traffic from WordPress-related terms. There are some terms that bring in little chunks of traffic such as “make money with WordPress” has brought in 56 visitors in the last 30 days. 56 is not many and that’s the point. There have been over 1,500 visitors brought in from search terms containing the word ‘WordPress’ in 770 different terms and out of those 770, 609 of them were searched for just once – almost half of the search engine traffic is coming from single search terms.
You don’t need to rank highly for popular keywords to get traffic because people type in the weirdest combination of words all the time and you will capture some of that. As long as you blog about topics that in general get some traffic, then you’ll grab a slice of it over time. And once again the popularity of the niche can help here because whilst all your competitors are sweating over their top rankings you can just keep writing about popular topics and grab all that long tail traffic without any effort.
Conclusion
So there you have it – three strategies for getting blog traffic even in a highly competitive niche. If the fear of high competition was holding you back from starting a new blog, just go get on with it :-)
Want to Make Money Blogging? My free course, The Bloggers Bible contains everything you need to know about building a highly popular and profitable blog from scratch!
Just fill in your email below to get your first lesson immediately:
![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-big2.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su-big2.png){kind=icon}
Lexi
January 14, 2009
A great post, as usual Caroline! These are all good tips. I especially like the third one. I have come to the same conclusion after observing the stats for my blogs. There really is wisdom in aiming for the “low hanging fruit” – just make sure you go for lots of them.
More power to you!