Excessive Worry About Competition

Excessive Worrying = Missed Opportunities Do you worry too much about who you are competing against? Do you feel competitive research leads to many more “move on please” rather than “let’s go!” types of outcomes? Believe it or not, it may be a good sign. Competition is usually a good thing , it means something is worth fighting for. A lot of hucksters try to push ways to “Uncover hidden markets that nobody else knows about, that you can make millions from with little effort, and that is yours for just $47.” Here is the problem with lots of opportunity and 0 competition: businesses follow the money and shorten the supply chain. If an ad market is ripe it means that some of those advertisers are also going to be publishers in the same darn market, targeting the same darn keywords. So if there is big money there will be competition. It is unavoidable. It isn’t so much that specific niches are glossed over, but more to do with the fact that the bigger a site gets and the more keywords it targets the less time it has to focus on optimization at a granular level. These kinds of sites leave the door open for you to come in and attack some of their profitable keywords by creating niche sites around those topics. Consider that our competitive research tool shows a site like ehow.com coming in with 2,948,950 organic keywords they are ranking for in the top 20 (our tool is powered by SEM Rush). Lots of opportunity there! However, if you are interested in your public-facing status then chasing the long tail of a large site may not be the sexiest thing in the world to you. If you are more interested in profiting from your efforts versus tooting your own horn then what should matter is how you can maximize profits while keeping expenses low. Certainly I’m not advocating that you only focus on niche keywords. If you have the resources then you can go after just about anything you want. In either scenario, long-tail plays or broad keyword plays, there should be less worry about who your competition is and more focus on what their weaknesses are, and how you can beat them. There is an intimidation factor that is at play in just about every situation where competition exists: Business Sports Personal Relationships Much of that intimidation is perceived by the underdog or the new competitor. The following points are worth keeping in mind: The best team is not unbeatable The biggest site is not strongly optimized for all their keywords The girl or guy you are quite fond of is actually approachable Many of the competitors at the top of the heap are there for a reason, they’re good. However, it doesn’t mean they are invincible or beyond reproach. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Some of the upper echelon sites in your market likely have become lazy or so big that can no longer reasonably go all out on all their profitable keywords. There are no shortage of tools out there that can help you find potential keywords for your sites by looking at profitable keywords of a competitor’s site. You can’t win every battle you fight but if you win more than you lose then you are on the right track. Competing, in and of itself, is not going to mortally wound you if you lose . Look at is as a learning lesson. What could you have done better? Where could you have pushed harder? Do you need to rethink how you view potential opportunities? The great thing about SEO is that (providing you don’t torch the site) there is no 4th quarter, final set, TKO, or bottom of the ninth. Your timing for failing is based on when you think it’s a good time to pullout and move on to another site or use a new approach. The effective holding cost for a paused project is ~ $0. And who knows, maybe a future algorithmic update or another search engine will take a liking to your site. As long as you have analytics installed you are passively collecting market data – not a bad deal. Google can be the referee that makes a horrible call which ends the game but more often than not you get to be the decider of when to push and when to pull. So rather than worrying about your competition you are better off tracking your competition and figuring out where they are outperforming you. I like to keep a running log of ideas and processes that my competitors are implementing along with notes on where I think they are weak and how they could do what they are doing more efficiently. Armed with that information, along with your findings with free tools like SEO For Firefox , you can start in on a thorough review of your competition and the feasibility of competing against them. Some core items you’ll want to consider are: Number of backlinks from unique domains (don’t be *wowed* by the total link count) Anchor text distribution of external links Domain age, relative to when the site went live (with a few links) Presence of the site in some of the better directories like Yahoo! and Business.Com .Edu Links .Gov Links Is the exact match ranking? Is it all big brands? Are there lots of interior pages ranking? The on-page optimization of the site/page PageRank and so on… There are a number of tools available which can help you find weak spots in areas where your competition is possibly profitable and where potential opportunities exist for you. We did a review of the following spy tools : SEM Rush Compete Keyword Spy SpyFu iSpionage Alexa We outlined a competitive intelligence strategy recently in addition to having quite a bit of killer tips and posts in the competitive research threads inside the forums. So while you shouldn’t ignore the competition completely you shouldn’t be consumed by it, particularly if it’s just a few metrics that you find daunting. There are enough tools out there where you can try and clone most of their best strategies but at some point you will have to go beyond what they are doing. Studying a competitor’s on and off page strategies, then finding ways to exploit weaknesses and build on strengths, will produce a better ROI for your business rather than searching for “The Fountain of No Competition” promised by that really nice internet marketing fellow you got that email from . And SEO is just one phase of your analysis. Does everyone have the same business model? Are there other options? Do they all have similar site structures? Are they so inspired by one another that they are missing huge market segments?

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Excessive Worry About Competition

Linkscape Update, New Stats and an API Dashboard

Posted by Nick Gerner Update : Why did my Domain Authority change? In this index update we re-calibrated our Domain Authority metric to better reflect the relationships between all domains on the Internet. This means that many websites’ Domain Authority (DA) changed. Not to worry ! If your domain authority went down, so did all of the other domains that had similar link profiles before the index update. (Don’t think about it like something bad happened to your site, think about it like we changed how we view the entire Internet) You can read more about why we did this in the section below . The good news is, we have an index update for you!

UnitedParents To Provide Early Warning Against Online Predators, Cyberbullies

Stealth Israeli startup UnitedParents is stepping closer to the bright lights today by announcing a $900K seed round , and the beta availability of its online child safety product, aimed at alerting parents whenever their children become involved in a potentially dangerous relationship with online predators and / or cyber-bullying. UnitedParents’ consumer product is a downloadable piece of software (Windows only for now) that monitors children’s online activity. The product will initially latch onto the more popular Instant Messaging apps such as those by ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo, but will expand to include online chat modules such as that of Facebook’s. Further down the road, the product will also monitor email and public chat rooms. UnitedParents’ software keeps track of the child’s online activity, monitoring over thirty parameters along his or her path. Using analysis, the technology is able to create profiles of the persons the child has engaged with and of the relationships themselves. Once a predator or bully is identified, UnitedParents creates a sort of fingerprint that it propagates across its network. Doing so allows it to track this person and alert potential next cases very early on, theoretically before any harm is done to the next child in line. Parents will be alerted by way of email and in more urgent cases, via SMS. The alerts will provide parents with information on why the alert was sent (e.g. when their 14-year old daughter has been chatting with someone UnitedParents has assessed to be in his 30’s and that is attempting to have her send him photos although she does not really want to). The company also intends to offer their solution to social networks and online communities that operate chat environments for children. The consumer product which will be marketed to parents of children ages 9 to 17 will be priced at under $100 when it officially ships in a few months. In the meantime you can sign-up for the beta by emailing beta@unitedparents.com CrunchBase Information UnitedParents Information provided by CrunchBase

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UnitedParents To Provide Early Warning Against Online Predators, Cyberbullies