I recently read the book Rework and one of the best points I got out of it was that you should ignore your competitors.
This is Counter-intuitive
Most people find the idea of ignoring your competitors to be counter-intuitive. I know I did.
It took me a long time to realize by following my competitors was a waste of my time, energy, and resources.
Watching competitors is a distraction
I work full-time as a software engineer and only have an hour or two each day to work on my site and build my business. I used to spend nearly all of that time identifying which sites were my competitors and what they were doing.
I was distracted by my competitors; every hour I spent watching competitors was one less hour that I worked on my site.
It’s overwhelming
For most niches the number of competitors is relatively high. Identifying and keeping track of all of your competitors is often overwhelming.
Being overwhelmed may cause you to give up prematurely before your business has even had a chance.
Find a balance
If you have a strong desire to know what your competitors are up to then at the very least find a balance. Put a limit on the amount of time that you’re going to spend watching them.
Watching competitors is a spectator sport and does nothing to actually build your business. Getting ideas are great but you need time to implement them.
Build quality into your product
Once you stop worrying about your competitors you will be amazed at how much more time you have. Make the most of that time.
For example, once I stopped tracking my competitors I had a lot more time to build a quality blog posts. I had more time to respond to comments and engage with other people. I had time to build products.
Because of all of this my traffic and sales increased dramatically.
Listen to your customers
One of the best things you can do to build quality and get ideas is to listen your customers and visitors to your website. They know better than anyone else what they want and need.
For the last few months I’ve had a blog post where visitors can ask me any traffic question. People have asked over 100 questions and this has given me great insight into the wants and needs of my visitors.
This insight is far more valuable than anything I could have learned by watching my competitors.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
This is good advice. Sometimes people get so involved with what their competitors are doing they end up neglecting their company.
Yep, if you have your own offering then it's better to just concentrate on your own efforts.
I think affiliates can face some competition SEO-wise but, even so, there are so many niches, so much spare capacity in the system that is selling online, that it's not a real barrier to success.
I think looking too much at what your competition is doing makes it difficult to distinguish yourself. Throw your premise on the page and then let your readers tell you what is missing. Pretty soon you will develop a message and following that no one can call derivative.
I just do my own thing to the best of my ability assuming that I either beat the competition or don't. I don't loose sleep over competition since there are so many million related sites to whatever I may be up to at any one time.
p.s. this site is looking wicked with an insane amount of link boxes surrounding the content. But that should make it interesting for visitors to poke around the site.
I would like to see the comment luv plugin restored though since I want to build some keyword links back to my sites in exchange for comments.
Sorry, it's not the point of your post, but you do all this in 2hrs a day?
Yes. On average have 1 to 2 hours each day. Because I have so little time I have to be very disciplined and judicious about how my time is spent.
Great point you've made Nick, I kinda of agree with it to a certain extent, if you dedicate those hours on your own website, and making sure that things on your website are constantly improve, in the long run it will definitely pay off. As always though, in the end I think it's all about a fine balance, from time to time, you might need to peek at your competitors, but really about 98% of it or so should be dedicated to doing your own thing as you suggest.
Till then,
Jean
98% sounds good to me. Even 80% is fine. The problem is when you spend 10% on your own stuff & 90% looking at your competitors.