If you are designing or revitalizing an article marketing plan that will be a part of your overall marketing strategy, make sure that you have considered who your competition is and what they have written when planning your content.
Do you know who the specialists in your niche are, and do you know what your competition writes on the web?
I'm not asking because I want you to obsess about it. I'm asking to teach you an article marketing 101 basic truth -- You can truly penetrate your market if you create content around and on topics that your competition hasn't covered or covered well. And believe me -- there are plenty of questions that your prospects have that your competitors haven't answered via articles.
What this means essentially is that when people search for the keywords in the article that you write, they will find you naturally in the search engines because others in your niche haven't written on that topic or optimized it the way that "real" people are going to search for it on the web.
This will have a big effect on your marketing. You will create more visibility in your market. Prospects and competitors will begin to sit up and take notice and know who you are.
You will create more traffic to your site because you now will have some articles on the web with less competition then maybe more of your "general topic" articles. This traffic will be qualified and will more than likely be more willing to opt-in to your list - then a typical website cruiser.
So this is what you need to do in order to successfully do a little competitor stalking and figure out where you can jump in and fill an information void...
1. Sign up for your competitor's newsletters and whatever other free goodies they may have. Be sure to use an alias -- because there is nothing more annoying than when I see that a competitor has signed up for my info with no intentions of ever doing business with me. Blah!
2. Take a look at your competitor's info in Alexa. While this isn't necessarily an absolute accurate look at stats (only computers with the alexa browser toolbar installed are tracked), it does give you a gage of traffic and importance.
3. Google their name and any variations of it. Or better yet, add their name as one of your "google alerts", and you will be able to see on a daily basis what blogs, sites, etc. have picked up their content and/or have written something about them. This gives you a great idea of just how "good" and "well-distributed" the person's content is.
4. Follow your competitors on Twitter. Watch what kind of content they are twittering about and how often their tweets are "retweeted". This will also give you a great idea of how often they are writing content. Consistent article production on your part and inconsistency on theirs is another way to quickly move past your competition.
Also - by using these techniques you can check on how popular your own content is and the best way to distribute it. I personally was able to see through adding an alert on my name (girlshrink) which national publications were mentioning me, and what article directories I was actually getting traffic from or republished.
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