Internet Marketing Strategies - Sizing up the Competition

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Now that you’ve found your niche market products of about 5 items, you need to begin looking at the competition for these same products within the market. The easiest way to do this is… you guessed it, via the internet. If your product is the latest ‘web page designer’, then begin doing searches via google, msn and ask.com. I highly recommend that you use several different search engines to give you a good idea of what the top listings are for your products in each of them. You will be surprised that not all products are listed on all the top engines at the same time so it will give you a good mix of competing products. The first thing you should take note of when you do your searches for competing products is, are there companies out there selling your type of product already?
If so, how many? If there seems to be a plethora of products in this niche, then you should probably look at the next product in your list. If there are no competing products out there when you do your searching, this could mean that there is no market at all for your product and you should think about possibly marketing or producing something else. If there isn’t a market, it’s likely people wouldn’t spend the money on such a product and that is the reason why you are not able to find any competing products in this niche.

I know you may be asking yourself, well if there isn’t any competition, doesn’t that mean I could have a real winner? Most likely, no. This is because if there were even a slight demand for a particular product, you would already see people producing at least some of what your product idea is and it would be a rare occasion that you would have a product idea that was completely unique in which there was a high demand for, and not find at least some competition when you did your search via the web. Trust me it’s much better if you find a few competitors during your web search, because it means there is a demand for what you have to offer.

Once you’ve identified these competitors, buy their products. Determine what their strengths are, not only by thoroughly checking out their products, but also by how they are selling their products, offline and online. Take detailed notes of each of these areas and then determine if you think your product can still compete against what is already available or if there are ways that you can improve yours in the areas it’s weak and produce something better than the rest of the products out there. Once you have reached this stage you can begin looking at how you are going to position yourself as an expert online and off for this product niche.

Now the real fun begins and we can start to discuss how to build your online presence…