Using Competition To Your Advantage!

Learn Internet Marketing > Weekly Tips > SSWT 12/28/04

"Using Competition To Your Advantage"

In our last two issues, we've talked about Creating Affiliate Sites, and specifically how to move from idea, to research, to competition analysis.

If you missed the last two issues, you can view them here:

12/15: Creating Affiliate-Based Websites

12/21: Keyword Research & Competition Analysis

Using Competition To Your Advantage...

In the Dec. 15th Issue, I told you "Competition is GOOD!"

Often, when people think of a great idea for a website - or any type of business, they are immediately put off by the amount of competition. DO NOT let that deter you. Today, I'll show you how you can use "competition" to your advantage!

First, I would like to share with you an exclusive article that I wrote for Alice Seba of Internet Based Moms. In this article (short, and easy to read), I shared some of the reasons why you DO NOT want to choose a super-micro-niche market and create a website or a product, with no known competitors in sight:

www.internetbasedmoms.com/internet-marketing/competition.html

Now that you understand the IMPORTANCE of Competition, let's go over some of the ways that you can easily and quickly capitalize on it:

1) CONTENT

Your competitors offer Articles and/or RSS Feeds that you can re-publish on your website to use as relevant content. When creating an Affiliate Site, creating the content is usually the most difficult part of the project. However, in a 'competitive industry', there is generally plenty of good quality content already available for you to use!

On the flip side, if creating content comes easy for you, you will be able to easily find relevant websites or newsletters that would like to re-publish your articles or RSS Feeds! This could help you to reach your targeted market, capitalizing on your competitor's marketing efforts, and also help you to gain Inbound Links to your website.

2) ADSENSE

If you have competitors, they are probably advertising via Google Adwords. This is GOOD NEWS for you, as you can earn commission from click-through's to their site from yours, by using Google Adsense!

The more competition the better, as this drives up bid prices... increasing the commission that you earn through Adsense ;)

3) LINKS

Competing or similar websites are a perfect candidate for relevant Link Exchanges! If there were NO websites on your topic, it would be very difficult (practically impossible!) to gain "relevant" Inbound Links to your website ;)

Now, why in the world would a "competitor" want to link to you? Simple: Because they need Inbound Links, too! Most webmasters are happy to add a link to your site from theirs, as long as it benefits them in some way.

Whether you purchase the link, give them an affiliate link to use (if you offer an affiliate program), or offer to link back to them in exchange... You will generally find that most webmasters are very easy to work with.

In a "competitive" industry, you will also find a good number of Directories and Blogs on your topic... which are great sources for even more Inbound Links.

*(more on this in the next section, titled "Link Strategy")

4) PARTNERSHIPS

A partnership, or joint venture, is any relationship which benefits both parties. For example, you may want to co-publish a book (or even a newsletter) with another expert in your industry. By doing this, you are offering your own visitors & subscribers more value... and you are gaining additional exposure through the marketing efforts of your partner. This scenario adds value for everyone involved!

To give you another example, let's take two webmasters - one who has created a Tupperware website to promote her Tupperware business, and one who has created a Recipe website. Both of them receive a decent amount of traffic, one capitalizing on product sales, the other on Adsense revenue or third-party promotions.

By exchanging links throughout each of their sites, in relevant locations, they could both easily double their website traffic through referrals!

There are a number of ways that you can turn a "competitor" into a "partner". With a bit of creativity, you should be able to come up with a number of ideas that would be both beneficial and profitable!

5) AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

A lot of competitors means a lot of products. And products usually come with Affiliate Programs ;)

The fact that there are a number of "competing" products means that you can offer your visitors more options. Even if you have your own product or service to offer, Affiliate Programs can easily be used to make backend sales!

In the case that your website is based solely on Affiliate Programs (you don’t have your own product/service to offer), it is good to have a wide variety of programs to choose from, and to promote.

You DO NOT want to "put all of your eggs in one basket", so to speak. Offering products from a variety of merchants will mean that you have more options to offer your visitors... and also means that you stand less of a chance of "losing everything" should just one of your affiliate relationships be terminated.

And yes - that happens.

If you had ZERO competition, there would be no merchants - and no affiliate programs - to work with. In a market like this, you would literally have to create every single product (from scratch) that you ever offered to your visitors or subscribers!

Link Strategy - Tips For Gaining Inbound Links!

You don’t just want to gain Inbound Links, you want to gain QUALITY Inbound Links. This is *important* because it reflects on the "reputation" of your website, and will also affect your search engine rankings ;)

- Defining "Quality" -

A quality link is one that comes from a relevant source, and points to your web page (a specific, relevant page on your site), using the keywords for that page in the "anchor text". While Anchor Text is not necessary, it does help to enhance your Link Reputation in addition to your Link Popularity.

Link Popularity is the number of links pointing to your web page. Link Reputation is more to do with the quality and value of those links.

For example, you could link to my website by adding the following URL to one of your web pages:

http://www.SelfStartersWeeklyTips.com/

OR - you could link to my site using Anchor Text, which means that you link to descriptive text about the web page, such as:

Learn Internet Marketing

The HTML code for that would be:

<a href="http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/">Learn Internet Marketing</a>

By doing this, you are telling your visitors what the page you are linking to is *about*... and the search engine spiders are also able to determine what that page is about.

And you want the search engines to KNOW that your page is about _______ (enter your Primary Keyword Phrase). So in the example above, we are telling them that the main page of the SSWT site is about "free internet business and web marketing tips".

The more Inbound Links that you can gain with Anchor Text, the more likely YOUR page is to come up in the top ten results on the major search engines when someone types that text into the search box ;)

That said, you don’t just want Inbound Links from anywhere and everywhere. Again, quality - or relevancy - is very important. A link to my main page (about web marketing tips) from a web page about tractors, would not carry as much weight with the search engines as a link to my page from another page about web marketing, or marketing tips. Obviously, from a visitor standpoint, it would make more sense as well.

Your main goal with your Link Strategy is to place links where they make the most sense - where they are most relevant, and most likely to reach your targeted market. THIS is what will also please the search engines.

- Gaining New Inbound Links -

Before you begin seeking out Link Partners, or submitting links to your web pages to various directories or web pages, you want to make sure that each of the pages in your website has a "Primary Keyword Phrase". This is the search term or keyword phrase that you are optimizing that page for, or hope to gain good rankings for in the major search engines.

Your keyword phrases should be different on each page of your site - more general on the main page, and getting more and more specific as you surf deeper into your website. This way, each of your web pages may rank well for a different term, giving you more opportunity to invite visitors into your site from the major search engines.

It wouldn’t make sense to optimize ALL of your web pages for the same search term, as the search engines will only show 2 pages from each domain in their results.

Moving along...

It's generally easiest to begin with the main page of your website. Using my own as an example again, I can take the keyword phrase "internet business" and plug that into the search box at Yahoo.com:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=internet+business

Using this method insures that the search engines would find these web pages relevant to your own. Obviously, if they rank well for your Primary Keyword Phrase, the content is similar or on the same topic.

Click through the top 10 or 20 results and look for Link Exchange or Submissions. You may find that they exchange links, accept "suggestions", accept articles or testimonials, etc. You don’t just have to limit yourself to Link Exchanges ;)

When it comes to Link Exchanges, I suggest that you place links to reciprocating web pages in relevant places on your own web pages - not just on a "catch all" links page that you add on to your web site for this purpose.

For example, you may add a small block below or beside your usual navigation on each page with the header "Similar Sites" or "Other Resources" and list a few of the best sources there for your visitors.

If you DO place all of your outbound links on one page, instead of just calling it "Link Partners" or "Links", get creative and title it something like "Other ____ Websites" or "Resources for Further Research" etc.

Once you have exhausted the first 1-3 pages of results for potential link placement, you can go back to the beginning of these search results and look at the Inbound Links for each of these sites.

Why? Because this may show you some GREAT sources for Inbound Links that are obviously willing to link to web pages that are similar to yours.

Here's what you do:

Look at the URL for each of the results. Then, in the Yahoo search box, type "link:URL". For example to see the backward links for my site, you would type:

link:http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com

Now you have a list of web pages that may potentially link to YOUR web page! Go through these and look for ways to submit your link, your testimonial, your article, etc.

Then, simply repeat the process for every page of your website.

You can also do a search using any of these types of queries:

PMK+submit
PMK+"add link"
PMK+directory

... Where "PMK" is YOUR Primary Keyword Phrase (if more than one word, put it in quotes). This will help you to find websites that accept submissions, links, or directories on your topic.

That's it for this week. If you have questions, hit Reply
- or meet us on the SSWT Discussion Forum!

Have a Super-Profitable Week!!

Lynn Terry, Site Admin
Lynn@SelfStartersWeeklyTips.com

p.s. Paul Short, Willie Crawford, Michel Fortin, Sharon & Roy Montero, Mike Merz and Becky Hagel make up the Panel of Advisors at Turning Ideas Into Dollars!, along with myself, and my partner Andre Chaperon.

If you would like to work one-on-one with ME, and with my own personal mentors in business, Turning Ideas Into Dollars is the place to be!