Who is your competition? Is it a blog with 100k readers?

How can you convince your visitors to read your blog while you cover the same topics as the large blog - that is more established and trustworthy?

I am sorry but your small blog doesn’t stand a chance to compete with a giant blog.

So what do you do? Pack up and find another niche? What if there is another authority blog in your new niche? Do you pack up again?

My answer is: no, you don’t pack up. Keep blogging in your current niche. Instead, stop competing with the giant blog. Yes, you don’t have to directly compete with an established blog to be successful.

If there is already a Techcrunch, you don’t need to start another Techcrunch. You need to start a blog that is different from Techcrunch. So when people come across your blog, they don’t say"Hey.. here is another blog like Techcrunch", rather they exclaim "Hey.. here is another cool technology blog".

To remain alive in the blogosphere, or on the web in general, competition is not much of an option these days.

How to compete with a large blog

Before you can beat your competition, you have to recognize your competition. Google for you main keywords and see what comes up. Chances are you don’t need to do it as you must already know who are the big guns in your niche.

Once you know your competition, do a deep analysis of your competition by understanding their content creation strategy. Do they cover latest industry news? Do they write in a professional journalistic style? Do they write on a daily basis? and so on.

If you go back in their archives and skim through all their posts, you’ll start making sense of some patterns.

Now write down the full report of your analysis in the following format (or create your own):

General topics they cover: _________________

Their blog categories: _________________

Their most successful categories: _________________

Their most successful posts: _________________

Their writing style: _________________

Their average post length and frequency: _________________

And finally, how they could do it all better. Trust me, there is always room for improvement. And no one else can know it better than you do, as you have the practical experience of writing in the same niche.

Read your report and make sure you don’t copy their style. They are original, and when you try to be like them, you become a copycat.

While it’s a good idea to learn from their success, it’s wiser to come back to yourself with fresh perspective, not borrowed ideas.

If they have posts in a particular category that always garner oodles of comments and trackbacks, it gives you an idea of what kinds of topics you should cover on your blog. But you do not mimic their style. You put your own unique spin on every topic.

For example, if your competition is the first to break news, and writes short articles that introduce new technology, you take your time and produce in-depth editorial type articles that look at the pros and cons of new technology. Or you look at it from a consumer’s point of view and write about how it affects the life of the common Joe. Or you offer step-by-step tutorials on how to use the technology effectively.

There are plenty of unique angles you’ll come to know after you spend some time on brainstorming for ideas.

By not building exactly the same site as your competition, you multiply your chances of success. You won’t be offering on a small level what is already being delivered by your competition on a large scale, but you will be giving people something entirely different that they don’t get from anywhere else.

As a result, you and your competition remain in the same niche, have the same audience, yet you are not competing with one another.

It’s not really beating your competition, is it? Of course, it’s not. In this case, you beat the competition by not even trying to wrangle with them, and you beat it by not having it as your competition. It’s a win-win situation for both of you.

Your thoughts?

Who is your competition? and what are you doing differently from your competition to draw attention to yourself?