Niche Selection

Late this spring, I helped a friend create a web page within a very competitive area. We grabbed the domain a longtail URL using the old Google Keyword Tool (yes, it's gone, I noticed this just today) showed a significant monthly volume, but with high competition. We launched the page without any video and to this day, our URL has not shown up on the front page of Google.

In contrast, our smaller niche business, Cinema 4D Models (c4d3dmodels.com) is doing exceptionally well. I attribute this to the fact that the C4D site is a smaller niche with far less competition. Additionally, we have used many videos to promote each URL we own with targeted landing pages and video.

My conclusion is this: achieving good page rank inside competitive categories is not only difficult and time consuming, but without a persistent and well-rounded marketing effort, may prove to be more frustrating than profitable.  If you're trying to rank in a competitive category and don't have time to create videos and perform all the due diligence I've written about in this blog, you may be better off buying your traffic by launching a press release.  I've never done this, so I can't vouch for it, but for $300, it may do more for your page rank than spending thirty hours of your time trying to build traffic in your off hours.