What is a good way to determine if a niche is less competitive? How can one determine if less people are promoting it?
when you do keyword research with adwords external keyword tool, it shows the level of competition. you can have some idea there. another way of easily doing is by installing SEO for firefox and doing a google search for your keywrods. yuo see how many search results are there which is one indicator. another thing to look for is by measuring the backlinks your top 10 competitors have. more backlinks the competitors have, more competitive is it and SEO for firefox plugin will show the backlinks including the PR of the pages of your competitors all in one place. lot of other measures to consider but these 2 would be good enough for starters.
If you think you can not succeed in IM niche you are wrong! I see you probably think it's too competitive! But it's the biggest and hottest niche and more than 150K people are entering this niche every week. Dont you think you can find them and offer them something they want? I think no matter your competition is you should begin with competitive niches. Because you can learn easily how your competitors are making money.
I'd tend to agree with jk, you really want to look at the chosen keywords in google, look down the first page and look for information on how many backlinks each of them have (Yahoo Site Explorer) as well as the pagerank of each of them. By doing this you'll get a pretty decent idea of the competition for those keywords.