Tips for competing in a very competitive niche market...

Question - I'm in a very competitive niche but I have a unique perspective that I think will set me apart. Could you give me any suggestions on how to get the most out of my web marketing?

Answer - Great to hear from you, thanks for getting in touch.

You are right, yours is a very competitive niche and I'd imagine that bidding on keywords or building a site around the 'logical' keyword choices would be very difficult and/or expensive. Competing head on in that big pool of switched on competitors would be a recipe for disaster using Solo Build It or anything else.

That's the bad news. 

The good news is that by using a properly set up content website as a lead generation and personal branding tool, and focusing on capturing your visitors name and email address in exchange for a Report targeted at your customers needs, is the absolute best way of generating a consistent stream of new clients.

The first step is to brand yourself as THE expert in your local city and/or state when it comes to helping business owners get on top of their debt (a growing problem in the US right now with the sub-prime fiasco evolving into something very bad and not looking like going away any time soon) and then once you have the system in place and you own your local area, you can then go for larger markets if you need to.

You do this by creating a free report that gives business owners something that they can use to immediately get started on relieving their debt problems. Once they see how good your free stuff is, you offer to help them with more advanced/difficult strategies as their personal advisor and consultant.

Once you have the lead capture system in place, you can do all sorts of paid advertising both online (Google Adwords, Yahoo search, banners, industry mailing lists, etc) and offline (business journals, trade magazines, industry associations, etc.) for quick results and drive everyone to a targeted landing page on your site where you offer the free report. 

Then you follow up and start building a relationship with your subscribers using email and regularly offering a free consultation where you can start a personal dialogue with your prospects. Many of them will eventually become clients and some will also refer other business owners to you as well if you ask them for referrals.

I have students doing this in several markets and it has worked for all of them. The only difference is the topic of the report, that's it.

Solo Build It does have a learning curve and the standard templates are only OK. Having said that, the backend of Solo Build It leaves GoDaddy for dead (since they don't do anything but host the site for you :)

You can have somebody create a great looking Solo Build It template for you for a few dollars once you get going so it matches your image perfectly, so the look and feel can be changed any time.

Here's a template we had developed for a new travel site we are working on -

http://www.travel-angels-network.com 

I just uploaded this to the site and it's perfect for what we wanted. Cost about a hundred bucks. 

The most important thing to remember is that it's what you say, not what your site looks like that gets the customers. Most people get totally hung up on what their site looks like when an ordinary site that contains the solution to your readers problem will be much more successful that a wonderful looking site that is filled with boring text, flashing graphics and other crap.

I've yet to find a niche that the Solo Build It content building process and tools can't help to dominate as long as it's set up correctly, you niche it down into a small sub-section of the market first, and you focus on generating leads. I'm sure it can do the same for you.

Hope this helps...