Why Aren’t You Subscribing to Your Competitors’ Blogs?
However you decide to get paid online, you are likely to come across competition. This can actually be a tremendous help to you. That seems kind of crazy doesn't it? But hear me out.
If you new to this online business stuff, or even if you've been at it for some time but haven't been able to make it gel, seek out the top competitors in your niche and see what it is they are doing that has put them to the top.
What To Look For?
There are many ways to seek out top competitors but one great way to do it is by using a service that will readily give you that information. It's called Topsy.com. Here are the instructions:
Step 1
When at Topsy.com, choose the Influencers tab.
Step 2
Type it the niche that you want to check on. For this example, I'll choose photography.
Step 3
Click on some of the top mentions and take a look at what is being said.
Step 4
The mentions often are to the person's website. Try going to the website and see what it's all about.
Step 5
Look for pages where you can subscribe to their email list.
Great Way to Keep Informed
Since these people are very active online, you can expect to receive a fair amount of emails. My suggestion would be to grab a free GMail account from Google and use that so that you can discard it later if you don't want to get inundated with those subscriptions. Of course, you can always unsubscribe whenever you want.
The emails that you do receive can be looked upon as a sort of intel into what your competition is actively working on. You can use this as inspiration but don't copy. You just want to gather ideas and then synthesize that into your own work.
Another Way To Make Use of These Top People
Here is a great way to connect with people and can actually help you get more traffic to your website. Create a post that is a round up of some posts that these top people have recently published. The round up can be short little snippets with a link out to the published piece or it can be lengthier if you feel the need. It's up to you.
Then after you've compile about 10 of these, publish it on your blog. Try to find the contact emails of each of these 10 people and let them know that you have featured them on your website with a link back to their site. One way I would structure this email is to ask them if it is okay to do this. Most will have no problems but occasionally you'll get someone who doesn't want to be profiled for one reason or another. That's okay just replace him or her with another top person.
Finding the email is easy if you are a subscriber because most autoresponder packages allow people to reply to the emails that are sent from the mailing list. So if you have one of your top people send you an email, just use that email address to contact them.
