Competition Is Killing Your Business
Tim on July 30th, 2008
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Do you feel you can’t build an outstanding business because of all the competition out there? Feel Insignificant beside these massive blogs with thousands of daily readers? The problem is not them, it’s you!
I’ve just started coming to terms with how incredibly different web businesses of today are to businesses in the past. In the world of Web 2.0 no longer are other sites like yours competition, or even enemies, they are pretty much your best allies in your ultimate quest for insane levels of traffic. The reason for this is that the web is now an evolved social network, where thousands of people all over the internet seek out quality information from blogs everywhere, and want the best of all worlds, not just what you have to offer.
Thus I’ve realized that if you give away links to your *competition* (otherwise known as other sites in your niche), and you start telling everyone about great new programs and things you found without wanting anything in return (as in providing non-affiliate links to products), people really start to respect you and keep coming back for more and more.
It’s really counterintuitive isn’t it? Most people have the belief that if they send their traffic to other pages they’ll be lost forever and never come back to hear what THEY have to say. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real truth is that when you give away things of quality people see YOU as the source of amazing information as well as that other blog you just linked them too.
Just look at search engines, they simply provide the information you need and send you on your way in just a few seconds, yet you keep coming back to them again and again, simply because they fill your need. If you fill the needs of your visitors you’ll start to see this too, they start to realize you are doing this for them (not sending them to a random page so you can cash your next big affiliate cheque) and they want to hear what you have to say more and more.
In my life I’ve found the very best knowledge comes from multiple sources. I’ve never had any one person teach me even 10% as well as many teachers put together, because every teacher adds another layer of knowledge you just can’t get from anyone else. Every person on the internet is unique and will explain things in their own way, hence why it’s in their best interest to seek out additional information on a topic they are interested in, and it’s in your best interest to show them where to find that information (because then you’ve just risen that little bit more in their eyes).
Take a look at how many RSS feeds or email lists you are subscribed to right at this moment. Are you subscribed to and only visit one website? If you’re like me you probably aren’t, in fact im willing to bet you have at least 5 RSS or email subscriptions at the moment and you constantly learn from each of these sources.
Getting knowledge from multiple sources is advantageous in a variety of different ways:
- It’s less biased - When you have the opinions of 5 different bloggers on the one topic, it’s very unlikely you’re going to hear a common bias from all of them, and you’ll start to become more open minded, which in turn will empower you to make the right choice.
- It’s more effective - You learn far faster taking in multiple inputs and putting them together, you get the ‘whole picture’ so to speak rather than lots of little pieces.
- You gain more perspective - You can see things from different angles and learn to look at things from different perspectives.
The truth is people will seek out additional information and knowledge on any area of life they would like to improve, and you can either help them with that or try and push against them, trying to force them into buying what you want them to buy and doing what you want them to do. Which do you think is going to lead to more visitor loyalty?
Microsoft started off from the beginning in a competitive mindset, attempting to force customers to use proprietor software, run only their products and use your computer how they want you to use it. This worked great for many years while they held a monopoly over the market.
But then along came Google, the company that wants knowledge to be free, and to help users find what they desire, never being locked into using only *their* products.
Is it any surprise that Microsoft has seen almost zero growth in the past 10 years, while google has become one of the fastest growing companies ever? It’s through this open and transparent nature that Google has collected quite an army of evangelists who use Google products constantly in their life, while Microsoft has only seen a multitude of haters against their company.
The reason businesses used to think of others in their market is competitors is because they sold physical items that you only needed to buy once, there was no need to have two or more, things such as vacuum cleaners, appliances, TV’s etc. There’s little use in directing customers to a competitor if it means you are going to lose a sale.
This has changed in the digital world however as pretty much everything we as bloggers produce (knowledge and information) is unique to us and is free to distribute to as many people as we like.
Nearly every big blog on the internet has gotten that way by working with other blogs. They link to other blogs constantly, they have blog carnivals, competitions and more to help promote other blogs as well as hoping those other blogs will promote them back in return.
By forming bonds with other blogs in your niche you benefit your visitors greatly as they come onto your one site, then see 4 others in a similar field and subscribe to the RSS feeds of all. Then blog readers coming to these other 4 sites all do the same thing and suddenly you have 5 x as many readers.
Everyone benefits from this model, the readers get more quality and informative content, the blogs get more readers, and the advertising companies get more eyeballs, it’s win win win for everyone.
As a personal example of this, my first blog was on dating and I wanted to run it like a business (thinking It’d be somewhat like Double Your Dating). The problem was, I didn’t want to share my customers because I believed “If they go to another dating site, they may only follow them and never come back here”, oh how wrong I was. I never networked with other blogs, I never went into blog carnivals (as then I’d have to link to other blogs) and I didn’t want to ever link to other blog posts as then I may lose that visitor forever. I was deeply rooted in a scarcity mindset and it cost my business dearly. After a year of blogging I was barely getting more than 30 visitors a day.
Why did this happen? The problem is I wanted to run a business, but also have a lot of traffic, and so I tried to mash together a blog and a business which just doesn’t work. A Blog is a social medium, and as such you need to socialize with other people on other blogs, on social networks, on twitter and more. You can make money off a blog, but you can’t run it like traditional business with traditional thinking models of “Everyone else is competition I must eradicate!”.
So embrace the new social medium of the web and start to network with blogs similar to yours. If you have a blog similar to this one, leave me a comment below and I’d love to post a link to you to help you out with traffic (and perhaps you could post a link back to me too). Also start to trackback other blogs in your posts and comment on other blogs regularly, to both provide more and more valuable content, as well as get more and more traffic every day.
Problogger on “When Blog Competition Is good” - http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/04/08/when-blog-competition-is-good/
Dosh Dosh 7 Essential Tips for networking - http://www.doshdosh.com/networking-within-your-blog-niche-tips-for-niche-bloggers/
I seem to be linking to Problogger and Dosh Dosh a lot. If anyone else has any good posts/sites on blog competition being good feel free to tell me about them in the comments, google won’t help me find any 
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