The Fair is in Town!

September 24, 2007 Filed Under: Niche Markets

I love the fair. Every year, I wait like a kid before Christmas for this week to come!I’m a sucker for carnival food, funnel cake, turkey legs, 10 gallon cups of lemonade, dippin’ dots, fried snickers, fried twinkies, fresh corn on the cob….. yes I said corn on the cob, twinkies and funnel cakes don’t provide my daily recommended servings of vegetables.

Needless to say I don’t eat for at least a full 24 hours before the fair comes so I’m as excited as a school kid and a little weak on Sept 20 but that all changes on the 21st!

Aside from the fair food, it’s the games that keep me awake at night in anticipation.

I’m a competitive person, that is a bit of an understatement…. I’m a super competitive person. I hate losing and I always want to do my best.

So every year, the carnival game owners taunt and tempt me with their huge prizes, complicated games and smooth talking style.

It’s like they are challenging my man-hood, I won’t stand for that. What they don’t know is that I put games like theirs out of business. I’ve been banned from 3 fairs across the country for dominating the carnival games. You know the “one win per day” rule…. they wrote that because of me.

I specialize in the most difficult games where they tease you by “showing you how easy it is” by doing it first then piling up your money up as you try to repeat what they did. The debunk the idea of all games being a scam (some are) then rely on your ineptitude and competitive nature to fork over 20 dollar bill after 20 dollar bill trying to defend your manhood.

I love the challenge, and I love the competition so I study them as they show me exactly how to win then I simply repeat exactly what they did… granted it may take me more than one try but once I get it…. it’s game over for them!

Last year, I won a mini-chopper, a 6 foot stuffed horse, an XBox 360 and that was just one day! Unfortunately the mid-south fair has allowed the game owners to make their own rules and now they only allow you to win once for the entire duration of the fair.

Oh well, no more bankrupting the evil game owners who prey on the innocent fair patrons. Now I simply win presents for friends and family but I still get a thrill from the competition.

During the Thirty Day Challenge, competition was a huge issue. They laid out strict requirements that your niche must have less than 25K competing pages.

Did you ever wonder why that number? Why not 30? or even 40? What is so special about 25K?

Nothing, in fact it’s WRONG!

By giving us an exact number it made it easier for them to explain the system. I applaud them for that. 25K wasn’t arbitrary it was tested and confirmed. Therefore it was a good benchmark for them to use, I don’t fault them for using it.

However, as always I encourage you to think critically. What did the 25K represent?

With less than 25K pages, we can assume that our competition wasn’t very strong.

It was really about quality and NOT quantity. They quantified the strength of our competition by assigning a number (25K) to the relative strength of the competition in that market.

What if we were to stick to a pure quality measurement. With all of the SEO tools, we can easily see the quality of our competition.

Take this niche for example: Gun Broker

54K competitors, a definite NO-GO for the Thirty-Day Challenge!
But lets take a closer look at the QUALITY of the competition.

While the quantity is too high, it is very apparent that the quality is low. I consider the Thirty Day Challenge Techniques my PR3 killer. You can successfully compete with PR3 and below sites but that is about it.

Oh, did you notice who was #4? That’s right, a fellow Thirty Day Challenge competitor has cracked the top 10 of a niche market that has a competition level of 2x the recommended amount.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not betraying a fellow internet marketer by giving away his niche. While he has made it to #4, he has not found a way to monetize so he has thrown in the towel. I am taking it over as a project to test strategies and give you reports. I trust you, my readers, not to be deceitful and steal ideas each other, especially not mine since I am going out of my way to give you tips and advice to make YOU successful. Also, notice how lame my post title is…. I don’t want traffic from blogrush, I want to give these tips to those who deserve them……you!

So there it is, I love competition and I’m not afraid of it. I simply evaluate the quality of my competition before making a decision.

See you at the fair!

Think Critically~

Powered by ScribeFire.

I hope you enjoyed the post and don't forget to sign up for my RSS feed.


Comments

3 Responses to “The Fair is in Town!”

  1. Thorsten on February 6th, 2008 8:04 am

    Great post, as usual.

    You should consider evaluating further on the topic of what hitting broad match results’ first page does to your traffic vs. exact match first page.

    I think a lot of the thirty day challengers put, like me, a lot of effort into a niche where they may have had a chance to rank high for exact match, but had no chance to get even close to the top 10 for broad match, resulting in literally no direct traffic from the search engines by the means of this key word.

    If the top ten is full of years old sites with pr 4+, a few hundred Yahoo Page links and title- and Content-Body optimisation for your phrase, your chances are really, really slim to break into this.

    That’s my personal experience at least.

  2. Sean on February 6th, 2008 8:05 am

    Mike,

    Where’d ya go, man?

  3. Rick Marnon, Howell on February 6th, 2008 8:06 am

    where did you go,,, this was a pretty in depth post, so i cant see why you would have just abandoned it,,,

Reactions From Other Bloggers

Leave a Reply