A Hill Too Steep To Climb? Guidance Please

[owen]

I posted the below question for Ed on Challenge TV but I was unable to watch the program and I didn't know that the question and answer section was not going to be recorded so I do not know if my question was covered and answered. So I have posted it here for the Veterans of the challenge and more experienced IM to perhaps give me some guidance please.

"I have found a niche that I am passionate about, I've been looking at it for sometime. It fits all the criteria accept one and that is SEOC which is 42,000. Will the extra 12,000 make it a hill too steep to climb.(The seot is 374)"

Thanks

[Carrie]

Ed did answer that one (he answered all of the questions, I believe).
If I remember right, GuruBob chimed in on this one.
They said it's a grey-area question. The answer depends on your experience.
If you're a flat-out newbie who has never done any online marketing before, then it's best to stay within the Challenge parameters. They were chosen to give a newbie the optimum chance to have a site ranking in the top 10 within the time limits of the Challenge.
But if you have experience doing much of this stuff (building sites, optimizing your pages for SEO, etc) then another 12k pages of competition really isn't going to mean much to you. It *may* take more time for your page to rank, perhaps it won't rank within the Challenge timeframe. Then again, if you know what you're doing, it might shoot right up there.

So basically it's a matter of how comfortable you are with your level of experience. If this is all brand-new to you, put that keyphrase on a backburner to do later, and pick one that's within the guidelines to do now.

[owen]

Thanks Carrie for your reply. I have got a new website up at the moment and through doing the Challenge I realised that I have not targeted the right keywords but I am in the process of amending that side of things. Its a niche I could tackle with another keyword with less competition but it would mean getting another domain name and moving everything over onto the new site. Decisions, decisions onward and upward.

[EdW]

Speaking from personal experience:

When I'm learning something, I purposely go out of my way to find a topic that I know nothing about / have no experience in / am not interested in. I find it helps me focus on learning the method.

When turning that learning into profit in later projects, experience & passion in the market definitely helps.

Having done the challenge last year, my personal advice would be to put anything out of spec with the videos / instructions on the back-burner for now and focus on the parameters in the video. Traffic and competitions numbers are selected at those levels for a reason, and that is to help you succeed. Short term it may feel odd and make no sense, long term it will be in your best interest. Ed & co invest a lot of time and research into choosing those numbers for a reason that may not be 100% clear at the immediate moment.

Every mistake I made in last year's challenge was 100% because I didn't listen to the instructions in the videos. Although I thought I knew better at the time (I didn't), it came back to bite me in the end in the form of having to re-do a lot of my project. (and yes, having too much competition in a niche was one of those many many mistakes...)

[steve holmes]

Some hills just need you to wear bigger boots.

If you feel you are too new, then maybe you can't fill them yet?

If you really are passionate about it and feel you can be a bit of a leader within that niche - I'd say don't let an extra 12,00 put you off if the rest of the required criteria is there.

Steve