When you start to consider blogging for your business one of the best things to do is to find out what the competition is blogging about. I talk to my clients about the necessity to begin blogging about their business because their competition is doing it. This is when the lights start to go off on how important it is to start a business blog to keep up with the competition. There are three very important reasons for this.
1. Your competition is establishing itself as an authority in your niche. When potential clients are searching for information about your niche they are finding your competition and reading about how they are capable of filling their needs.
2. Through blogging and good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your competition is ranking above any web presence you might have. A blog provides the easiest way to add content and connect with your niche. The various media possibilities available today can make your blogging dynamic and a lot of fun. You can connect with you niche through written content, video blogging and audio files. The video and audio can allow you to do interviews with experts in your niche to help you add incredible and valuable content for your visitors.
3. The better you get at optimizing your posts and your site the better your search results will be. The better your search results are the more traffic and the more traffic the more leads you will receive. These leads are coming from organic searches, meaning you are not paying for advertising. This is the beauty of business blogging. The work you put in now will continue to pay off for a very long time – for FREE.
To determine what your competition is doing with their blogs is extremely easy. Here are a couple of secret spy tips to help you find out exactly what they are up to.
If you type in "google blog search" into a search tool you will find the Google Blog Search Tool.
It will look like this.
At this point just type in the niche name you are researching. The results you receive will consist of relevant, niche similar blogs.
Analyze The Competition
Take some time and click on some of the links that catch your attention. Look at the layout of the blog site and what categories they are using. What are the articles about? Are they using a lot of pictures, videos, audio files. Analyze the site and look at some other ones. This will give you a great insight to what the competition is doing in the blogging world. There are some advanced things you will do but we will get into those in a later lesson. Right now just read some articles and look around at how and what they are doing.
A Different Search Will Reveal Additional Sites To Analyze
The other search you will do is to just go to your favorite search engine. It does not have to be Google, in fact I would suggest using a couple of different ones. The search you will put into the search engine is "your niche blog". In other words if your niche is Chiroprator, you put "chiropractor blog" , with the quotation marks into the search box. Hit return and continue the research.
Take Notes – This Process Will Be Invaluable As You Build You Blog
Take some notes while you are doing this. Write down what you are thinking as you go through the blogs. Both good stuff and bad stuff. It is important to write it down because you will forget your thought process later. The initial thinking you do when you visit a site for the first time is crucial to how the visitors to your site will be thinking. If you find something that really draws your attention you will want to incorporate something like that on your site or a similar idea. If something really turns you off, then you want to make sure you don't do the same thing or make sure you do the opposite.
This process is invaluable in helping you analyze what the competition is doing but also to learn from it and expedite your site creation process.
Please leave any comments or thoughts below.
