Step 1 - Competitive Analysis
1.1 Identify The Players
The first thing to do is figure out who the players are in a given market space. In the web world, there are several resources at your disposal for finding competitive sites.
- Alexa - Alexa provides traffic information for sites. The traffic information is not entirely accurate and is better for some subjects than others. Regardless, it does provide a subject matter directory modeled on the ODP project and lists some of the more popular sites within a given niche. It's not a be all end all tool, but it does provide a decent starting point.
- Yahoo Directory - the Yahoo directory is uniquely authoritative since it has human reviews for each directory entry. The Yahoo directory gets successfully gamed much less than other major directory projects, and it is quite extensive across all major niches. While it has seen a reduction in actual end user usage, the content of the directory is still very high quality and for the most part is up to date.
- Word Tracker - Word Tracker provides solid keyword information, along with competitive analysis regarding a given set of keywords. This can help you gain an understanding of which keywords are valuable for your particular market, and in combination with some research on the various search engines can help you gain an understanding of who the real players are in the search engine marketing space. This is a paid utility, but for occasional use, you can use Shawn Hogan's Keyword Suggestion Tool at Digital Point. Shawn's tool combines Word Tracker results with Overture results and that's helpful for a variety of reasons.
- Your Own Experience - your own experience and input in a market space is infinitely valuable. General use tools like the ones mentioned above are great in certain niches, especially where there is an established history on the web for a particular market, but it's impossible for those guys to get it right all the time across all market arenas. While search engine marketing is certainly effective, there are plenty of sites that have great reach and established authority that have paid little attention to the search engine marketing arena and as a result won't show up as major players in traditional web analysis tools.
- Tertiary nerd zones - The world wide web wasn't always the world wide web. Newsgroups, IRC Channels, Mailing Lists and the like aren't typical starting points for internet newbies, but they are still heavily trafficked and in those areas where they've died out, the archives provide great information about market niches.
1.2 How do they do it?
For every major player that you find, you want to figure out how it is that they've gained market share and how they maintain it. For web sites, that generally means - where do there visitors come from and why do they keep coming back? This really is a game of cat and mouse. You can look for adwords campaigns, affiliate marketing campaigns, and the like, but there is no single resource that can give away the complete marketing plan. With rotating and geographically targetted ads, there is little chance that you'll really see the whole picture. Instead, focus on what you can figure out.From a search engine perspective, take a look at what keywords they are targetting and how they are going about it. Look at their inbound links - are they paid? Are they keyword rich? If they are natural, you are identifying sites that might link to you for free with a little bit of targetted effort. If they are paid, you can attack that problem in any number of ways - from spam reports to purchasing your own links and everywhere in between.
From a visitor retention perspective, see if you can't identify what subjects are more popular with the visitors along with structural content that may not be as interaction-inspiring, but serves to feed the mind enough that a visitor is likely to come back for the next installment. Analyze utilities, tools, and other freebies. Can you offer the same thing? Can you offer something better?
Take a look at the social networking / social bookmarking arena's as well. How are these sites treated and how much attention are they paying to sites like stumbleupon, digg, netscape, del.icio.us, and the like?
Step 2 - Structural Planning and Implimentation
Now that you've analyzed the niche, you have an idea of the content you are going to need, the tools you are likely to offer, and a general structural layout for your own site. Everything doesn't need to be finished all at once, but before you officially release your project, you want to at least have a good idea as to where you are going and a rough idea about how you are going to get there.
Focus initially on your visitor retention techniques. You don't want to waste time, money, and hard work getting visitors to come to your site if they aren't going to come back looking for more at some point in the future. Certainly frequently updated content is a powerful retention technique, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. Free and useful utilities, community interaction, quality product reviews, and links to external authoritative resources are all ways to get people to come back. Brainstorm a variety of your own unique methods for visitor retention and borrow ideas from your competitors.
Just a few thoughts... I'll follow up with a few more soon.
Attacking a Market Interaction
