Leverage Your Competitors To Create High Quality Blog Content

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

There’s two main kinds of competition for your blog on the internet:

1. General competition from the web at large.. There’s lots of channels on this TV!
2. Specific competition from individual web sites… is yours the best?

General competition

Your general competition is 100 million other websites.

How do you feel about that?

Ok, maybe 100 million is a little high… we could call it 1 million instead. Same difference from the worm’s eye view.

Assuming you write excellent content, your job is to choose a topic sufficiently broad to attract a large number of readers, but sufficiently narrow to attract customers. For example, a blog on “acting” will attract a large number of readers, but a blog on improvisational acting will retain motivated readers.

Specific competitors

You may be fortunate enough to be entering a market with no competitors… if not, it pays to keep an eye on what others in your specific market are doing.

Great ideas erupt spontaneously across large populations. No matter what your idea is, the odds are that someone else has thought of it. What matters is execution. If you’re in a popular niche, you may well have direct competitors… posting material essentially identical to your material!

Here’s how it happens…

Once you have been blogging a while, and written a lot of great articles, you find someone wrote a better article than yours. Never mind you couldn’t find that article when searching for information… you have it now, and so does everyone else looking for the same information.

If your article is already published, or you are bent on publishing despite the competition (Website In A Weekend is in a stiffly competitive market), finding closely related articles can benefit you immensely. Here’s how.

Provided your editorial policy allows it (mine does), rework your article to incorporate new information from other articles. Give credit where credit is due and link back for each idea you incorporate. Suppose you have an article, and you found (say) 7 benefits of using WordPress for your website platform. When you run across an article with 2 more benefits you didn’t think of, add those 2 in with a link. When you run across yet another article with even more new benefits, do it again. Add great new material as you go, linking back where appropriate. After a few rounds of improvement, you will find your article will be one of the best available articles on the topic. As you can see from the link above, I do happen to have just such an article on the benefits of using WordPress… which I haven’t yet iterated through this process…

…however…

…This is exactly what I’ve done with “TODO: sorting by Covey’s and Blanchard’s Quadrants.” In truth, the orginal article wasn’t that good, but the current version is better. It’s one of the highest traffic articles on There Is NO Box. I really should respond to reader demand (measured by actual traffic) and update the post… perhaps write another article on Covey or Blanchard methods.

Your turn

Here’s a 3 step task for you:

1. Find your worst article on your website.
2. Search for another article discussing the same topic.
3. Update your article and link back to the other.

That wasn’t difficult, was it… wash, rinse, repeat!

Leave a comment with a link to your article, and I’ll rework this blog post and discuss your updated article.

Tagged as: Competition, Snackable