There are millions of blogs across the internet and blogs are being created constantly by people who are interested in being able to earn money online. With all of these presences the competition in major niches such as "make money online" or "internet marketing" is quite overwhelming. The only people who should consider joining these niches are those who have extensive experience with running an online business and these people need to be willing to spend countless hours working on content and marketing. If you don’t have hours every single day to work on your online business a better option would be finding a niche which has a decent sized audience and is not overly competitive. With this lack of competition you will find it much easier to rank well for keywords, but if you begin ranking first you will not get the same traffic as keywords in a competitive niche. Even though the traffic may be less for many of the terms it is still possible to make quite a bit of money with targeting these less competitive niches.

There are several ways you can find out how competitive certain niches are. One search I have found particularly useful when finding the competition within a niche is an inanchor Google search. When you do this search Google will bring up the number of websites that have built links for that specific term. Look through the top ten after you do a search to find the number of links these websites have built. The tool that I use when checking the number of backlinks of competition is Yahoo’s site explorer. To use this tool go to Yahoo and search for "link:competitorsURL" and Yahoo will bring up the site explorer which will tell you the number of backlinks and number of pages indexed. Here you can gain a general idea of how many links it will take to rank well within the major search engines.

Now that you have some idea of the competition of a certain term the next step is checking to see how much traffic that term is getting. To check the term within a niche go to Google and search for "Google Adwords Keyword Tool". This tool will allow you to type in any given term for any niche and find out the amount of monthly traffic the term gets. One great aspect of this tool is it will also show you related terms and the corresponding traffic the related terms get. In other words if you type in "make money online" this tool will also show you the amount of monthly traffic for make money online free, earn money online, make money fast, and other top words within the niche. You can use the tools and searches in the above paragraph to find out tough the competition is for these terms. Quickly you should realize that the competition will increase with the amount of traffic the terms are getting. One tip I would like to share with new bloggers or webmasters is when you are trying to decide on what terms you would like to optimize for start with low competition then once you have reached the top of Google you can move onto higher competition keywords.