How to Dominate Your Niche Competitors

Competitors for your online business exist in many forms. Some compete with you for web traffic by occupying prime spots in search engines for specific keywords. Others utilize the same business model and promote their sites in the same channels for market-share.

Most competitor’s goals are the same: To outsell their rivals by winning over a large portion of the specific target market.

They will often do this by undercutting your prices and producing similar products/services to compete with your business. Learning how to manage the competition will help you to make more money from your businesses and websites.

9 Ways to Dominate Competitors in Your Niche

Here’s a collection of several strategic methods you can use to deal with competitors within your niche. Do note that they should be implemented within a framework which tracks and measures your performance in relation to specific competitors.

1. Focus on Building a Reputation. While products can easily be replicated, a strong reputation or brand is nearly impossible to appropriate without much effort. Brand your website consistently and focus on satisfying your customers or site visitors by generously offering support and free information.




2. Increase Your Product Value. This two step process involves either improving the quality of your product and selling it at the competitor’s price or reducing the price of your product while keeping it at the same quality level. This can be used to counter surges in popularity for specific competitor products.




3. Develop Retention Equity. Retaining first-time and regular customers is very important for market-share growth. The best way to do this is to make it difficult for customers to switch to a competitor. This can be achieved by offering specific unique features or benefits that your competitors do not offer. Loyalty-programs with attractive advantages can be implemented alongside your product or service offerings.




4. Target a Sub-Niche. When your niche is overrun by strong competitors, it might be easier to target a sub-niche exclusively to capture a larger share of a targeted market. By breaking your flagship site into several sub-niches, you are deepening your brand’s reach within the overall field.




5. Establish a Community. One way to build customer loyalty is to encourage interaction between customers through an open community. This can take the form of a forum, blog or social network. Communities are a public front for your community and can address customer or visitor concerns. Communities help your business develop excellent visibility on search engines as well.




6. Optimize Your Product Launches. Product or site launches are a great opportunity to distinguish your website or product from a competitor. Make your pricing cheaper or similar to your competitor and aim to secure first time customers with an attractive initial promotional package. You can also seek objective reviews to demonstrate how it is different or superior to a competitor’s product.




7. Celebrate Your Competitors. Create an industry-specific ranking or awards list to attract attention to your own brand or product. Two specific examples come to mind: Scott And’s list of Top 150 Marketing blogs, which evolved from a personal list to one jointly hosted by Advertising Age, a respected marketing/advertising publication.

   Another example is SEOMoz’s Web 2.0 Awards, which has brought a lot of publicity to their business brand. The awards also received over 100K in backlinks and continue to bring them a fair amount of targeted search traffic. While the companies listed aren’t competitors, this example demonstrates how an awards list can be used for branding purposes.

8. Perform On-going Competitor Analysis. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor helps you to measure your own performance and success. You can learn a lot from how competitors operate and apply these techniques to your businesses in other industries or niches as well.

   On-going competitor analysis simply means keeping conceptual and metric-based tabs on your competitor’s business and website. What are they planning for next month? How did their new product perform in the market?




9. Collaborate on Joint Projects. Competitors can become allies when you seek to dominate a specific industry. Large scale project collaborations can grow your business or website considerably because they allow you to combine marketing resources and brand power.

   A loyal customer of your competitor isn’t likely to purchase your product but a collaboration of some sort will encourage support for joint projects that will pull in new customers for both businesses. A simpler form of collaboration between webmasters can take the form of a basic banner exchange.

It is always important to note that your most powerful competitor might be the limitations posed by your own product, website or brand. Be sure to keep an eye on your target market’s needs/interests and focus on effectively communicating the value of your business.

The customer trust and reputation you’ve acquired is a necessary foundation you need to successfully compete in any niche.

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