Work Better, Not Harder

Whether it’s for your small business blog or newsletter, researching what your competition is writing about will benefit you in two important ways: You will have something with which to compare your own content strategy and your execution of it. It’ll trigger new content ideas and topics to write about. After you've assembled a list of blogs to inspect, these are the things to pay attention to: layout and design (look and feel) ease of reading and interaction keywords and topics covered writing style and formatting frequency and consistency the value offered Now consider: How does your content measure up? What holes do you need to fill? What can you do to improve? Make a plan. You don't have any competition, you say? OK follow this same process and research others in your industry or servicing the same target market. You'll get the same benefits. Click to Tweet this Article

If you've been doing a newsletter for more than a year, it's a good idea to examine your strategy, look at your stats, and implement some positive change. You don't want your email campaign to get stale. Doing that, of course, means generating ideas. One way to do that is to look at what your competition is doing. Are they doing something well that you can expand on? Are they missing an opportunity that you can take advantage of? Is there a chance to collaborate? Take a few minutes to sign up for your competitors' newsletters. Pay attention to the sign-up process, too. photo by HowardLake / Flickr Click to Tweet this Article