Some people think that having competition is a bad thing. But the truth is, if you don’t have competition you may not actually even have an audience at all. The other truth is that if there is competition, someone else has already proven the niche works to earn money. Right? Therefore, there are numerous reasons you need to know your competition.
- You’ll Know That Money Is Available to Be Made — When you study your competition and find out that they’re earning money and are profitable, that is a good sign that you’re on the right track with the niche you’ve picked. If you don’t find anyone, it may not be a good niche.
- You’ll Get Insight into Whether There Are Enough Ideal Audience Members — As mentioned, if there isn’t any competition there may not be enough audience members to earn a profit. But if your competition is earning a profit, that means you can too. You just need to figure out how they do things and then do it a little differently.
- You Can Learn Your Advantages and Disadvantages — Sign up for your competition’s newsletters, buy their products, and learn how they do things. Follow them on social. Then make a note of how you do things better, and how you are disadvantaged and maybe either do things worse or don’t yet have the technology to do things how they do them.
- You Will Learn More about Your Marketplace — When you follow your competition, you will also have an opportunity to observe your audience and the marketplace your audience enjoys hanging out in. This is a great way to gain an understanding of where to put your content, what they want, and how they like it presented.
- You’ll Get More Insight about Your Audience — Even if all you do is join your audience’s Facebook groups and observe the conversations, you’re going to gain so much insight into your audience. What questions do they ask? What problems do they have? What solutions do they seem to respond most to?
- Design a Better Plan for Reaching Your Audience — When you observe how your successful competition is getting things done, you can notice what they do well and what they do poorly and perfect both so that you stand out against the competition.
- Discover Where Your Competition Goes — Where is your competition placing ads? Where do they put their content? What social media do they pay most attention to? That’s likely where you need to be too.
- Use Your Competition as a Complement — Even though you want to stand out from your competitors, you can also use your competition as a complement. For example, let’s say your competitor sells business-focused content and you do too. Why not create content that adds to the usefulness of your competitor’s content instead of creating the same content? Then you can technically promote theirs as an affiliate with yours as an upsell or bonus.
The competition you have is not your enemy. In fact, you may find that in your niche you can work with your competition to reach even more people. And your competition can use you to reach more people too. You’ll find that if you work together with people, it’s very profitable for both of you. The thing to remember most is that competition is good. Competition fuels ingenuity and makes everyone better.