How’s The Competition Making Money Online?
In the niche we chose for this example, we decided to market a “website builder product”.
The first thing we want to do is look for competition in the “website builder software” marketplace.
These are the people we’ll need to study and learn from. If done right, the competition will teach you how to effectively compete with them and market your product. Personally, for starters, I would perform a keyword search to see how they are performing in the search engines for relevant terms.
One reason why I would perform a keyword search for “website builder” is to get a glimpse at who is ranking on page 1 and 2 of the search engines for that term. These businesses are likely to dominate (on the web) in that “space”.
This is the competition you’ll need to learn from.
The Competitive Need To Know
When you’re entering a market on the web that’s already covered by other affiliate marketers, and dedicated businesses, there a few things you need to know and embrace prior to moving into their space and staking out a territorial claim of your own. We listed a few rhetorical questions that should get you thinking in the right direction.
- How are their sites designed?
- Seek out the online competition. Perform a full cavity web search.
- How are they marketing their website and relevant pages?
- Do they have a blog, a forum?
- Do they implement social networking? How do they manage it?
- What products do they sell, how do they market them?
- Are the products their own? Are they affiliate marketing?
- How is their content generated? In house or user generated?
- Can we determine their online market share?
These are important questions to ask yourself when researching our competition. If you can answer some of these questions it will help you out in the long run.
I’m always sure to perform link popularity checks on my competition to see their past promotional efforts and to see what they did to achieve a high back-link count. I also try to figure out the tactic they may have used to get the back-links in the first place.
Be creative with your implementation of competitive scrutiny. If you can find out who is making the money online, you only need to find out the how, and the why afterwards. You must understand how and why they have achieved their online market share, what they do to maintain it, and how you can duplicate or learn from the strategy.
Researching your competition does not mean mimicking competitors or to not be original. The spirit of competitive research, in the way I’m articulating it, is to steer clear of going the route of reinventing the wheel.
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