This is a continuation of the article, You Don’t Have to Run From the Online Competition, Part 2 where I discussed the Barriers to Entry and You Don’t Have to Run From the Online Competition, Part 2 where I discussed Learning from Industry Leaders and Networking with the Competition.

Develop Your Own Style, Be Unique

As noted above, you should be a unique entry into that niche market. In case you haven’t noticed, there is already a ProBlogger, a Technorati, and an eBay, so why try to copy, or even emulate them closely? Sometimes there is a great need for improving a known business or product. Ask Overstock how that whole eBay competition thing is going? (Of course it doesn’t help for the CEO to be nominated and receive honorable mention in the “Worst executive of the year award” either.) You don’t need to be an exact copy of something that already exists. There may be room for one more, but there might not be room for one more exact copy. Develop your own business style and don’t worry about being an exact copy, that will make things worse. You should know who the competition is, you should know generally how they operate, and then you should do your own thing and not worry about what they do. Over the past 10-15 years I have developed a few new products and brought them from a thought in my head to a manufactured item that our company could sell. Part of product development is working to brand that product. What is the name going to be, the packaging, a logo and so on. Because this particular product was going to be sold at conventions all across the country, it would be seen by attendees walking by a vendor’s booth in a crowded hall of sometimes 500-600 different vendors. So the packaging had to stand out. I took some squares of Astrobright paper (the neon colored papers) in all different colors and with my eyes shut, threw them on the floor. When I opened my eyes I picked the very first color that I saw, a very bright neon yellow, and this became the trademark color buyers looked for when they walked the crowded floor. It stood out among a sea of browns and earth tones and even if a buyer didn’t know what the product was, it caught his or her eye and drew them into the booth. Learn to develop your own style and you will be rewarded by standing out among a crowded field of earth tones.

Stay Focused and Be Positive

It can be very easy to get discouraged when entering a new field or niche market. The competition has been doing this a much longer time, they have developed relationships you don’t have, traffic you can’t generate, and revenue you only wish to achieve. Set some short term and long term goals and try to stick by them. Don’t worry about the fact that you can’t directly compete yet, that takes time. Try to stay as positive as you can and focus on the job at hand. For those of us who are never satisfied with meritocracy, it can be a challenge to stay focused. Whatever short term goal we reach should have been higher and whenever we do reach that goal, we have already looked at why we didn’t reach the one above instead.

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This is a continuation of the article, You Don’t Have to Run From the Online Competition, Part 1 where I discussed the Barriers to Entry.

Learn From the Industry Leaders

The industry leaders got to be the leaders for various reasons, but one might be that they know what they are doing. It is really amazing how much you can learn in any particular niche market by how the leaders of that market run their businesses. Find out who these leaders are and how long they have been involved in the field of interest. By no means should you ever just copy what they are doing and call that your business strategy (see be unique below). That may work for the white-labels in the grocery store but in the world of online business it can quickly make you the target of a more powerful entity, and your reputation will probably be a less favorable one in the long run. Learn, but don’t copy. Make a study of these companies and find out everything you can (legally) about who they are and how they operate. This will give you further information about step number one above and you may find you really can’t compete, or it may reveal a vacancy that needs to be filled. It will also give you some insight on what to prepare for in the coming months. Make a list and do some research. If you don’t do it on a spreadsheet, at least do it in your head. Find the top 10 or 20 companies you believe will be in direct competition with your plans. Write down what you think their strengths and weaknesses are and how you can improve on those weaknesses you find. Do a Google or Yahoo search and find out what you can. Not just the normal rigmarole, find those advanced search features and do as in depth of a search as possible and add to your list. There are many good tools online to help with competition research. Compete is a great resource for comparing the traffic on several different sites at the same time, and Alexa has a similar comparison for traffic. For auction research, Terapeak is a good place to start, and if you want some good basic notices, try Google Alerts to stay up to date with what is going on in the trenches.

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Is your company or business in a competitive industry, is there any way not to be? Are you thinking about moving into a specific niche market that is already saturated? You don’t always have to just move on to something else if the field or topic you are interested in proves to be a very competitive arena. You may have to do things better, be unique, and operate more efficiently than the competition, but you don’t have to automatically make the decision to leave for a less competitive area. Your business may have the talents and skills to run with the competition, survive, and be successful. Usually, at least in the free world markets, you already have competition because you have more than one entity providing the same product or service, so there is probably room for one more. Keep in mind, success in a competitive market may not be the “number one” spot. Many retail businesses are successful and are not Wal-Mart, so be careful how you set your goals and measure your success. In this article we are going to look at a few ways to compete in an already competitive field.

What are the Barriers for Entry

Before you actually enter into a competitive field for the first time you really do need to look at what the barriers to entry might be for your company or website. Do a quick analysis of what it takes to get into a particular niche market, and be honest with yourself or your company about what you find. You might find that you really don’t want to take the time or energy required to be competitive in that market anyway.

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