Treat Your Competitors As Partners

Online competition is a strange thing. On the one hand, you want your website to be the best in your field. Whenever someone is looking to learn something about your topic, you want them to come straight to you. And while they’re there, they should click on some ads too.

But online publishing isn’t like print publishing. If someone reads the New York Times, they’re not going to read the Washington Post as well. If someone reads a blog on your topic written by someone else, there’s a good chance they’ll still read your blog.

Even though you want to produce the best content you can — and content that’s better that anyone else’s — you should still be thinking of other people writing about the same topic as potential partners, rather than competitors.

These are people who can give you links, traffic, advertising and joint venture opportunities.

One way to make the most of those potential partners is to interview them for your website.

If you write a blog about photography, for example, and you know that someone else is running a site about Nikon cameras, drop them an email and ask if they’d like to appear on your blog. You’d send them a list of questions by email, they’d send you the answers and you’d edit them and put them up.

You get an original piece of content and your new friend gets a link and an appearance on your site.

And of course, when he tells his readers all about the interview, you’ll get a link back.

About Joel Comm

Joel is an Internet entrepreneur who has been online for over twenty years. In 1995, he launched WorldVillage.com, a family-friendly portal to the web which enjoys thousands of visitors each day. He is the co-creator of ClassicGames.com, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 1997, and is now known as Yahoo! Games. Joel has launched dozens of web sites, including the popular bargain-hunting shopping site, DealofDay.com, SafetySurf.com and FamilyFirst.com. Joel is the Internet Revenue Expert, speaking and writing on topics that help people make money online. He is the author of the New York Times Best Seller, “The AdSense Code”, and Host & Executive Producer of “The Next Internet Millionaire”, the world’s first competitive Internet reality show.

You can find Joel on Twitter: @joelcomm.