One of the most important lessons I have learned in life is “Don’t re-invent the wheel.”
The idea is simple: Don’t work really hard figuring something out when you could look at someone else who is really successful at this thing and do what they do.
If you want to play basketball like Michael Jordan then look Michael Jordan and figure out what he has done to be so successful. What does he eat & drink? How much sleep does he get? How do does he workout and how often?
If you want to lose 50 pounds and keep it off, then go find someone who has lost 50 pounds and kept it off and figure out how they did it. What did they eat or not eat? And how much? What about exercise? How long did it take?
Sounds simple enough, right? Let’s apply this to getting traffic.
Traffic from Google AdWords
If you want to write killer ad copy for your Google AdWords ads on Poodle Manicures then go search for Poodle Manicures on Google and see which ads come up top.
A large component of an ad’s placement is how often it is clicked on; more clicks means higher ad placement.
Search for Poodle Manicures everyday for a week. There will be be some changes in placement and yet it won’t take long to notice that some ads will keep showing up somewhere near the top.
Most likely these ads are getting lots of clicks. Pay close attention to what these ads do or don’t do in their ad copy.
YouTube Traffic
If you want to get traffic from YouTube then go to YouTube and search for videos in your niche. Be sure to sort by views so that the ones with the most views show up at the top.
Take a look at the videos with lots of views and carefully examine what they are doing. Watch some of their videos and look at how they direct traffic to their site.
Twitter traffic
If you want to get traffic from twitter then find examples of people that are doing this already. Typically these people how lots of followers and so it’s not hard to discover who these people are.
Follow a few these people and ask yourself a few questions:
- How often they tweet?
- What times of the day do they tweet?
- How often do they get their stuff retweeted?
- How often do they place ads in their tweets?
- How often do they interact with people on Twitter?
Ranking high in Google
If you want to have a top ten rank on Google for the search term Poodle Manicures then search Google for Poodle Manicures and take a close look at the sites that come up in the top ten. These are your competition.
It doesn’t matter that 5 gazillion other sites also come up for that search phrase. These other sites are examples of what not to do, examples of how not to get to the top, examples of failure. Don’t waste your time on them.
What matters are the ones that made it to top ten. They are your case studies.
Ask yourself:
- How many pages do they have?
- How often do they update their content?
- How many incoming links do they have?
- How long do they have their domain registered for?
- How much do they interact with their visitors?
- Do they have an email list?
- How do they use Twitter, Facebook, etc to get traffic?
Figure out exactly what they do and do the same!
Hopefully you get the idea here.
It’s so simple and yet so often overlooked and under utilized.
The gurus of marketing out there will give you all sorts of advice.
Just never forget your (successful) competition and what you can learn from them.
Today’s Quote
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
- Sun-tzu: Chinese general & military strategist (~400 BC)
I would change one word in the quote so it reads:
Keep your friends close, and your competition closer.
But shouldn’t we ignore the competition?
I had previously written a post advising people to ignore their competition. I still believe this is good advice except when you’re first starting out.
Let’s say you want to build a website all about poodle manicures and get lots of traffic to it but you have no idea where to start. In this case it would be good to spend time analyzing your competition to see how they are doing things to get traffic.
Once you have a recipe for getting traffic then you can ignore your competition and focus your time, energy, and focus on building your own site.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
>>These other sites are examples of what not to do, examples of how not to get to the top, examples of failure. Don’t waste your time on them<<
Actually the best advice I have read in a long time.
Would be interesting to check this page for its ranking on 'poodle manicure' which is listed 6 times in your post. Do you already have a site ready for that keyphrase?
OK – you alreaady rank with two other posts as #1 & #2 in google for that keyphrase.
Btw, the dot com is still available
I bet the domain is available. But I have no interest in it at this time. Too few searches and too little money in that niche.
>>Too few searches and too little money in that niche<<
You are right, the phrase "poodle manicure" doesn't show up in the Google KWT.
Better go for something like 'grooming'
toy poodle grooming 90500
standard poodle grooming 60500
poodle grooming 8100
dog grooming poodle 590
poodle grooming styles 590
how to groom a poodle 1300
grooming poodle 8100
Well here in the UK no ads turn up for "Poodle Manicures", but I get the point.
I looked at my competitor's ads somewhile back and really they all look much the same. I tried similar text and the CTR was awful. Maybe another plan might well be to be bold and try something rather different.
If you try it let us know what your results are.
Ops, forgot my question:
Must be real trivial, but how do you check "How long do they have their domain registered for"?
Here is my video reply: http://nickstraffictricks.com/3791_video-how-to-f…