Do I even have a chance? 🥴

We debated this a lot too as we're also in a crowded space, in the end we decided to just write about whatever we wanted, and occasionally sprinkle in product/company specific stuff. It's actually worked quite well so far, our first blog post even hit the first page on HN and has brought us lots of customers ever since, even though it was nothing to do with our product. I wrote about the rationale for our approach on IH here.

The idea really was to just get into the habit of writing stuff for the joy of it, assuming that we probably have some similar interests with our target audience anyway, so we don't necessarily have to explicitly talk about our product. Right now I'm writing our second post about text-to-image tools, and we're an analytics company 😅

Do direct sales. DM warm prospects would be my poison of choice.

SEO is a long game, you won't see any results quickly

Hey Bruno! Keep at it. I'm in a similar boat. Highly competitive seo space (finance/budgeting). Struggling to gain traction anywhere. A big part is definitely lack of content and awareness.

What chargirl007 is saying is sort of how I've began approaching it without realizing it. I'm deciding to pick a different channel and going to post content there. Plus after reading this I realize I could try and find some keywords that are being missed. Just today I noticed some keywords I could try to create content around both on a blog and Twitter.

Basically, let's do some research and really focus in on some niche. Good luck to you.

Hey Bruno! Don't be upset. Just remember, everyone can be saying the same thing, but no one can say it like YOU. So finding your genuine, authentic voice, and throwing your energy into education your market will keep you from comparing what you're writing to others.

But, enough of the motivation, I think you can approach this from different angles.

I would write down all the "cliches or what-everyone-already-knows" on a sheet of paper...as many as you can think of, then ask yourself, what DON'T people know that has not been mentioned?

If you can't think of anything, perhaps you need to approach your topic from a different perspective.

Sometimes it helps to look at other industries...for inspiration. So, while my industry is branding and marketing, I can look at, for example, engineering, and see what from other industries (that makes sense) that I can adapt to mine.

The other option is to explore other marketing channels. Turn what everyone is blogging about into video (long or short form), infographics, email newsletter series, etc.

I hope this helps!

I think you just have to post it without analysing much. I too did the same mistake thinking no one will look into the article, but within 3 days I got 6k views.

I am experiencing this myself - and I think best way to do is is to narrow down your target audience, imagine what they would look like - what they are interested in - get to the point where you can be in their shoes, imagine then - how would you want to be reached? What way can you gain benefit by providing benefit?
That, I think, is more valuable than worrying about keywords.

I believe most of us, if not all, have this "competition phobia" where we fear competition and spend a lot of time "spying" on them while ignoring our main challenge, which is solving a real problem differently so our [happy] users can "feel" our value proposition, which, in return, could lead to opening an unthought-of new growth channel called "Word of Mouth".

So, while struggling to grow through SEO is not the end of the world, you should give it a shot because who knows what will happen?

Good luck,

It's always worth putting the time and effort into writing articles for your blog. I know it seems discouraging at first because there are plenty of results currently ranking for your targeted keywords, however slowly but surely with quality content, your blog will start ranking and hopefully start generating leads.

Good luck!

There has to be some kind of gap in the market you can compete in and build your name. A crowded market hardly means that it's completely tapped.

You can look at reviews to get a sense of any opportunities. Then craft your unique value proposition using reviews to meet the demands of that segment.

Then, hit the ground running w/marketing. Content creation should be a part of every online business' customer acquisition strategy. That's a long game but in some cases is all you need (in my first startup, I blogged exclusively until the site had over 700K unique visitors per year, then supplemented with paid ads).

Paid ads might be a good way forward for you in a crowded space as well. Some of the review sites (like Capterra) let you do PPC so that's one option if you don't want to go the Google route. I had success with Google (wrote about it here) where I was able to get $10 for every $1 spent in advertising with simple tactics.

Most of all, don't get discouraged. Consistency wins the day!