There are many keywords and phrases that have had huge competition for a long while, so you've got Buckley's chance of ranking highly for them and there's no point in trying. However, if you just add the name of a country after them, as so many people do when Googling, ranking highly becomes a whole lot easier.

Here's an example. Some months back I started building a basic "make money from home" site around a domain I'd bought ages ago -- originally to promote a particular real estate affiliate program. It's "oz-income.net". It's not a great domain name for the subject, but it's not the worst, either.

I did next to no keyword research, and just wrote some pages that I thought were appropriate and relevant to the subject of making a supplementary income from home in this country. I've been pretty busy so they're all quite basic, and I haven't even written meta-descriptions for them yet. I have been building links, though, mostly with articles and lots of blog comments.

Anyway the traffic is trickling in and gradually increasing. And the main domain is already on the bottom of page one (and sometimes the top of page two) for searches for "make money from home Australia".

So, that's definitely something to think about if you have a website or blog in a very competitive niche. Just tailor it more towards Aussies, include the country name in your page titles and it should help quite a bit.