Jack of all Niches, Authority of None

Excuse the play of words on the old "Jack of All Trades" phrase, I'll get to my reasoning for it in a moment.

You're working diligently on your IM business through the course offerings here at WA and you have your website up and running live because of your efforts. It's an achievement that you can be very proud of.

It doesn't matter if you are working through a niche that you discovered and want to work on, or if you are going the WA Affiliate Bootcamp route on which to base your business, it is an achievement.

You've probably started marketing your site Socially.
You've probably started writing articles for submission to sites like Street Articles.
You've joined affiliate marketing forums.
You've been busy, for sure.

You may decide to look at your niche very closely, and find yourself going to other sites that may be closely related to your niche.

The first site you hit didn't impress you much, or maybe it did. But then you dug deeper and hit many more niche related sites. Many not only seem to be very informative, but they appear to have "your" niche nailed.

You start to compare your new and fledgling site to these niche sites, that are so robust about their topic, and full of all the bells and whistles that your site seems to lack at the moment. They seem so far ahead of you that all of a sudden you get a little discouraged, and you ask yourself, "How am I going to compete with this?"

Short answer is that you are not going to compete.

You are not going to worry about your "young" site versus their full blown authority sites.

After I built the foundation of my niche site, which is a site to help people find resources to learn to draw, I started to look for other sites that are close to my niche. I'm not a professional artist, graphic designer, or anything like that, but I found that most of the sites that come very close to my niche are run by professional artists, or art teachers, or a combination of both.

My first thought was exactly that, "How the H-E-YOU-KNOW-THE-REST am I going to compete with these people?"

I started to look closer at these websites. The more sites I found, the more I started to notice something--The sites that were being run by Artists, and Teachers were selling their own tutorials. Some used affiliate marketing to help sell their wares.

Since my site is about helping a person start with drawing, who don't want to, or aren't able to try formal methods like art classes or a school setting, it hit me that these sites aren't my competition after all. I started to research these sites about their Affiliate Programs for factors such as legitimacy, quality of tutorials, and reviews from customers that have used the programs, and reviews from other affiliates. I've even downloaded some tutorials to test their product myself.

Now I have an arsenal of other aspects for my site that I am going to incorporate such as reviews of these sites and provide reviews of the tutorials they are selling. There's the opportunity of becoming an affiliate for sites that I view as high quality and have done my due diligence with. To date, there are five sites that I am very impressed with and I will incorporate their offering into my site.

My point to all of this is that our sites are new and we are just beginning. If you do search your niche like this and find sites that seem so far ahead of you, and seem to have lots of momentum in YOUR niche, don't get frustrated or disappointed. Instead, delve deeper into these sites for there may be opportunities there that you might overlook, especially at first. This may even be more prevalent if your niche involves wares that these sites are creating themselves like the art tutorials and books that artists are creating that I can use within my niche.

Associating yourself with these quality sites can only benefit you in the long run. Your reader will appreciate this as well, so maybe you won't be a Jack of All Niches, but by close association to quality sites, your readers will appreciate your Authority in Some.

If you have done some searching into your niche in this manner, what were your first impressions of these sites? Did you get discouraged in any way, or did you view them as competition? Or have you found another opportunity to work with within your niche?