7 Surefire Business Marketing Tips For A Competitive Market

What if your competitors already achieved top search engine rankings, developed hundreds of pages of content, built massive email lists and dominate the social marketing space…

How can you possibly compete with that?

You can approach competition with two mindsets: fight or flight!  You either give up quickly and move on to another niche (or less competitive keywords) or you decide you are going to take them head on and beat them in the SERP’s using every SEO and social media tool you know.

Either of those positions may end up cheating you of the profits that can be yours.  You’re giving your competition entirely too much credit.  If you are intimidated, they will win.

The truth is saturated, competitive markets generally offer huge opportunities….that’s why so may competitors are in it.  In addition to high demand, there are other advantages to working in competitive markets:

• Higher Ad Revenue
• Higher Adsense Payout
• More Affiliates/Partners to Recruit
• More Affiliate Programs
• More Quality Linking Partners

Let’s take a high level view of seven simple ways you can strategically use competition to your advantage in practically any market or niche…

1. Don’t make the common mistake of looking at the total number of search results for any given keyword phrase as your competitive framework.  You are only ever competing with the top 10 pages that show up in the search results. Period! The trick, instead of trying to get your link on the top ten results (SERP’s) for that keyword or phrase, think about trying to get a link on some, all, or any of the 10 pages already displayed in the results.  Getting a link from these pages will give your website great traffic and high PR value.  Many of them will not be direct competitors, so if you have the right approach, you can work with them.
2. Locate the top bloggers in your niche…study them carefully.  Get their feed and a feeling for the style of writing they like. Once you get a feeling for what they like, write a quality guest post and offer it to them exclusively. Give them a time frame, like 72 hours to respond. If they don’t respond or turn you down, go to the next blogger. Some may feel it makes no sense to add your credibility to another blogger in your nice, Seth Godin had a good post about guest blogging you can check out.
3. Trackbacks are another great way to funnel targeted traffic out of more popular or established blogs to your niche.  You need your own blog of course to employ this strategy.  Most blog platforms automatically publish a link in a preset trackback area, or in the comments area when a link is created from another blog post. So, if you link to my blog post from your blog post, a link to your blog post will show up on mine. Keep an eye on those blogs, specifically for hot topics that you can contribute to the discussion. Create a post on your own blog and link to their post as a reference.
4. The money is in the list but it does not just have to be your own list. Identify quality publishers in your market or niche and keep track of all their publications, subscribe to them (and all their feeds).  Identify what content they like and write something for them and see if they will publish it. Case studies, interviews and product reviews are always a good place to start.
5. Identify non-competitive businesses in your market and find ways to partner with them.  Offer their customers a special coupon code and make the code unique to that audience so they feel like it is a special opporutnity.
6. Friend your competitors in their social networks and get involved in their communities.  Don’t be obnoxious, just get visibility to your target audience.  You will also become known to your competitive friends and perhaps think about partnering for future products or services.
7. Many niches and markets have aggressive affiliates.  Identify who they are and leverage thier networks to jump start your business and break though the crowd.

Competitive markets are more of a challenge but the rewards are also bigger if you succeed.  Create a process, have patience and don’t give up!