Beating Your Competitors in business is actually one of the easiest things you can do. Most people get fearful of who they are up against when starting a new business, and quite often will pivot and dilute their offering. This is a huge mistake as competition is actually a great thing, especially when operating online. You see most of these people who are out there doing what you want to do have solved a lot of the issues already. They have gone through the daily grind and trial and error phase to find out what works. So in this episode we take a look at hacking the competition and beating your competitors by putting your own spin onto what is already working. Ready? Well lets start. Step One: Start Looking At What Your Competitors Are Doing There are a million questions that you should be asking when building your business and most of them have been answered already. Start Googling your business idea, and start jotting down the url of your competitors that keep on appearing whenever you search. Take a look at the colour schemes, their images, their menu bar, their offerings, and make detailed notes on everything. Do they deal with customers directly? Are their systems automated with chatbots and autoresponders? What are their downloads that they offer? Do they get you onto an email marketing system? How are they going out of their way to make their offer clear and precise and easy to find on their site. Beating Your Competitors is about doing what they do better than they do it themselves so take detailed notes and then try to improve on them all. Step Two: Make A List Of How Long They Have Been In Business By Domain Checking One of the things that we like to do when working out a way of beating your competitors is find out the long players. What we mean by this is do some digging around to see which of the businesses that you are up against have been around for the longest You can zip over to https://websiteseochecker.com/and place in the URL of the company that you are checking and find instantly a ton of very useful information. For example if you placed Join Up Dots into the URL checker, you will see the age listed, the domain authority, the backlinks...everything you need in one simple search. So why do we do this when working on finding ways to start beating your competitors? Quite simply, if someone has been in business for a long time, they should be making money, in profit and being efficient with customer acquisition. Otherwise why go to the expense to keep things up online. We always want to get a list of companies five years and older to really start digging around for the gold. Step Three: Beating Your Competitors Means Understanding Your Customers It is always amazing to us when we ask our clients "Who are your ideal customers"? and we get a loose answer of "Men, over 40, with a steady job" How can this really tell us anything that can be useful for our business? Remember, your business is going all out to start beating your customers so the more intelligence that we can have in regard to who is buying the better. Remember the list of well established businesses that we have written the URL of on our list? Well if you haven't then its time to go back and do the work again, but if you have we now want to take those URLS and start mining Google for the good stuff it will tell us. We need to go over to Google Trends and start clicking around to see what type of traffic our competitors are getting. We can find out what sex, where they live, what age they are, what are their interests, almost everything we need to start building a detailed profile. The same can be said for joining FaceBook Groups, and seeing what questions are being asked by people and clicking through onto their profiles to see details about them. Are there consistent questions and similar profiles asking those questions? Yeah, we are sure there will be and you will want to make as many notes about these people as you can. That is how you start beat