Are you battling against online competition?

In the previous posts I've started explaining the conceptual preparation of your new online business. Here I will continue on the same path and describe your options carefully analysing the previous findings.

Working with a strategy could make your success

Obviously you are not going to build your business around only 2 phrases but they will do as an example here...

Let's see the competition for these phrases and do a Google search. Don't forget the brackets otherwise you will get results for every word in the phrase (broad match). It could extremely enlarge the number of results and we don't want that, because we need to go through the results one buy one.
Alright, not exactly. If you are using Firefox or IE then you can download SeoQuake that will give you additional information about the sites in the list. The most important is to find out how "strong" these companies or individuals are.

Do your Google search again for the phrase and click on ’request parameters’ (SeoQuake) on the top of the list. The browser slowly starts showing data...

The data from the left to the right as follows:

• Google PageRank
• Indexed pages in Google
• Inbound links
• Date cached
• Yahoo links
• MSN index
• Alexa rank
• Age of the domain
• Delicious Index

Although there are many misconceptions regarding PageRank (that I will not address here) it still gives you an idea about how valuable the website is. Let's say, sites below PR3 are not very hard to beat. Look at how many inbound links and indexed pages they have got in Google then you can pretty much make an estimation where you are going to get and how much work it requires.

I strongly advise you to choose phrases most relevant to your business, because the sooner you will be visible the faster you are able to deal with the big dawgs.

Choosing the best Online Business Strategy

As I mentioned above some websites are not very hard to beat. "Some" is the right word since most of you will not have a revolutionary idea and end up in a competitive market like electronics or books, etc.

Competitive market requires a lot more careful research especially when you compete against well known brands like amazon.com for example. Obviously giants like Amazon cannot be beaten, and you've got to admit that before you blow all your savings on advertisement. If you are smart you consider a partnership with your Goliath and figure out a way adding something to its service that would give you a slice of their cake as an affiliate.

I give you a good example:

Let's say you want to sell plasma televisions. No question it is a super competitive market and you would have to fight your way through a fleet of minted opponents before your product starts selling.

For ’plasma televisions’ Google returns 198.000 pages for the UK. You can most likely find all well known brands in the top 10 and using your SeoQuake toolbar it soon becomes clear that you are very far away from competing with them.

So what you do? - You can go more specific. Typing in ’Philips plasma televisions’ you get only about 9000 results and find many PR 0's and 3's on the first page. Now, all you need is a supplier and a bit of hard work getting to the first page for this term, then you can start selling your televisions.

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