How To Grow Your Online Presence By Copying Your Competitors

We here at BlogTipsandTricks.com are glad to bring to you our newest guest poster Adam with Digivate.com. He’s an expert in online business and has a lot to bring to the blogging community… Take it away Adam…
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In business the theory is pretty simple; if you are, in some way, better than your competition, you should win some custom… Obviously there’s more to it than that, but basically you have to out compete your competition.

In the old-days, this meant being higher quality, cheaper or faster etc…
 

But when it comes to online marketing, whether you are running a business or growing a blog it is often simply a case of having a better, more visible, more usable website.

Essentially, if you are easier to find than your competition,
that can be a large part of the battle
 

Copying But Improving

Of course, there is one simple way to be better than your competition; copy them and then improve upon that blueprint.

Over 97% of the value of an innovation will go to imitators… Imitate but improve.

This is a surprisingly under-utilized strategy in the online world, but there really are plenty of ways to track your competition and learn from them. Here are just a few:
Building The Best Links
Need links for your SEO campaign? Of course you do. Building quality links is a vital part of SEO, which is a vital part of making your blog / website more visible to your potential customers.
Don’t limit your view of who your competitors actually are though. In SEO terms, your biggest competition is the website that is ranking for the term you want to rank for. So rather than blindly building links, have a look at how your competition is doing it.
One easy strategy is to use opensiteexplorer.org. Get a list of your competitor’s backlinks; in particular you want to download a list of linking domains:

This is (mostly) all of the websites that are linking to that competitor

Now head over to linkdetective.com to analyze those links. This will give you a handy breakdown of what types of sites are linking in

• Blogs
• News sites
• Article directories
• etc…

Once you have your list, you can filter out the low quality sites and then go and attempt to get links from the best sites.
Building The Best Content
They say content is king – which is pretty cliché and grossly overused, but never-the-less, if your web pages don’t actually deserve to rank for your target keywords then you have an uphill struggle on your hands.
Again, Google the phrase you want to target and check out the pages that are already at the top. Look for ideas; what information are they giving away, what handy tools do they have and what are they missing.
Now run the same analysis on your own page. Page title’s and meta tags are important, but not as important as the actual quality of the page, so ask yourself whether your page is honestly better than your competitors’ pages.
Social Media Strategy
Now try having a look at your competitors who are selling similar products to you. Start by having a look around on their site to see if they are using any social media:

• Do they have a Twitter account?
• Are they on Facebook?
• Do they have a blog and if so, is it active?

Try not to dwell too much on what a specific competitor is doing. It is more helpful to look at which platforms appear to be most popular within your niche. If you notice that Twitter is barely being used, that may be a sign that it is not particularly profitable. Alternatively, maybe it is being used, but no-one seems to have much of a following.
Of course, it could also be a sign that there is a gap in your market, for someone who can use Twitter successfully – in which case, ask yourself whether you are the one who can do so.
Any time you see a competitor failing to use a platform effectively, ask yourself what they are doing wrong. And if you see a competitor with a very large following, take tips from them and try to emulate their formula.
Summary
The reality, you’ll soon realize, is that the internet makes business much more transparent. It is strange that so few businesses use this to their advantage, but by becoming an effective internet detective, you can always keep one step ahead – and your competition will be left wondering how you’re doing it!
About The Author
If you want more information about internet marketing, please check out the Digivate blog. My name is Adam by the way – I work at Digivate. Here’s a recent post from our blog about online vs traditional media marketing.

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