Doesn’t matter what “make money online business” you are doing, there is always someone out there doing the same thing as you do. Knowing your competitors and outperform them is one of the most important survival skills to your online business. Make money online can be fun and can also be difficult and time consuming. Without knowing your competitors, you won’t stay in the game for too long.
For the past few years, I have been dealing with online business from small to large corporation. Blogging was not very popular things in the early 2000. E-commerce and online advertisement was still not very success. Making money online is also not very easy. Now. Many businesses are moving forward and include a blog as one of their marketing tools. If you run an online business, most likely you will end up a blog as well. , which allows you to tell your customer about new stuff or new business plan or new product on your business blog. So your readers get informed about your new business news. So do your competitors.
So how can blog help your outperform your competitors?
- Find your competitors - Most small and medium size company don’t make top news, so they won’t be listed on Google News. Use the regular search will just bring you tons keywords related to your make money online business. So Google blog is the best way to find anything related to your competitors and find any blogs that mentioned about your competitors.
- Google Alerts – Google Alert is one of the best tools to find anything you are interested. Simply set the keywords you want to find and get email when the keywords are found by Google. You will receive news, web site, social network profile updated, blog post and anything related to the keywords you set. It finds a lot of stuff for you.
- Subscribe to your competitors RSS Feed – Once you find your competitors blog or the blog mentioned about your competitors. You need to subscribe to them. So you have chance to know what your competitor are up to.
- Google Reader and BlogLines – Google Reader and Bloglines.com provides the best options for viewers to subscribe RSS feed. You can easily search keywords from and within the subscription. Take myself for example. I have subscribed over 300 RSS feeds. I can’t read them all. So I set the search criteria and find what I am really looking for. It saves times!
- Join social network and forum – Many social networks are now supporting members with their either free blog or discussion forum. Many business owners also join them to exchange thoughts or use them as marketing tools. Knowing what your competitors is doing will help you prevent the mistake that they made or you should not made.
All above means are just about finding your competitors. How about actually outperform you competitors.
- Change your business plan accordingly - You just know that you competitors opened new lines of products on their web site. You just realized that they will be directly head-on competing to your business. Now you need to change your marketing strategies and sales approach to beat them while they are just entering to the new product lines. Beside all those marketing push methods, you need to write up blog post to promote your products. Not just on your own blog. You need to communicate with all your social network friends. Make buzz on their blog as well.
- Get your blog on top of your competitors’ – This is very important. Many your competitors are doing exactly the same you are doing to find their competitors. You need to get your blog post found on top of their. So people will find you before find others. Find out what keywords were used by their blog post or news. Do the same, but do it wisely. It’s not very difficult to get your blog post out pace their.
- Don’t be afraid of making comments on your competitor’s blog – Exchange thought sometimes increase your business productivities. Post your question on your competitors’ blog and social with them. Include your business name and let them know you are competing with them. Just remember don’t make them feel offensive. It’s not easy, but it’s not that hard either.
- Closely Watch their growth – Even thought I don’t believe Alexa Traffic Ranking. I use them as some indicator to find out how my competitors grow. By looking at their Alexa traffic ranking, I can tell how much rough traffic they are getting by comparing with my. I can definitely know if I am far ahead or way behind them.
This is based on my personal experience dealing with my competitors. It works for me. I hope it works for you too.
Do you have any other survival skills to share with me?
Great post. How do you recommend out ranking them in search?
Good tips, but don’t spend too much time worrying about what your competitors are doing. I think it’s best to spend most of your time focusing on customers. When you’re focusing on your competitors, you’re taking your attention away from your customers (and potential customers), and your competitor may be watching them instead of you!
Know your competitors, yes, but don’t let it distract you from knowing yourself and your customers.
@dcr:
That’s right. Thank you for your comments. In the large online store, there are a new type of tasks called “competition management”, which will help the marketing director to adjust their sales strategies. It’s an uncommon job, but it does help the company knowing their competitors.
I agree with dcr sometimes its best to focus on what your doing yourself rather than your competitors. But also is useful to know what they are upto as they get on something before you.
@Marc Eilbeck:
Thank you for stopping by. In the fast changing Internet business, knowing your enemy will help you out pace them. Of course, don’t lose focus on your core business.