What Is Your Philosophy On Competition?

Competition almost always means the market is great. You can easily overcome all competition by adding your own twist to the product or service being offered.

Personally, if there is little competition, I avoid it and look for something to promote that has a lot of competition. There are exceptions, but that's the general road to profit.

I'm with Gene on this one. My mentor's always taught me to go where the competition is. It doesn't matter if it's in Google or NYC; if there's competition, there's a market.

-- j

Second that!

For initiative people, fighting with strong competitors is exciting and encouraging, it just makes you learn more, try more, test more and find whatever ways to beat them (while appreciating them)

Competition actually lights a fire beneath my butt.

I love it.

There are a lot of different types of competitors out there. But it's 3 basic categories:

1.) Leaders, these guys are always coming up with new things or revamping their existing product or service. These guys are tough to take market share away from since they're never complacent.

2.) Followers, these guys just copy systems that already exist and put their own lipstick on them. Typically they don't last because they don't know how to innovate since they don't really understand their customers at all. They spend more time spying and copying competitors then being creative with their own unique offerings. That means they're typically last to market and have to compete on price alone.

3.) Failures, these guys half ass it and are flashes in the pan. They never last and you can tell by the lack of quality of their product or service that they're just not going to be around for long.

The other good part about competition is it means the end user gets a better product or service versus a niche that has none.

I agree with Gene and Jary on this - but competition isn't the only indicator for potentially lucrative market. The other important thing (and I think it's even more important indicator than competition) is the volume of exisiting traffic.

Ideally, you want to hit low competition & high traffic niches, but no matter what the competition is, existing traffic must be high for me to go for that.

Competition means you work hard on your own product to sustain quality.

for the quality production Competition is necessary. if thesame thing is provided by different producers then customer will move towards the quality producers.

I look at it this way.

1. Presence of competition is awesome...it means there are hungry buyers

2. Competition tells you what the underlying challenge, desire or transformation people want in their lives enough that they will pay for it...again, this is invaluable information

3. Competition will tell you how THEY have targeted that unmet desire and they are never perfect...so your job is to find the gap that will allow you to target the same underlying demand/desire in a compelling, new way.

In a sense, you are targeting the same or similar desire but using your competitive research to understand a new way into the minds of your market...does that help?

Jeff

Compeition is a very good thing , if there will be no competition te quality will be disappear.

Competition is great..that means, if it's working for others, then there's a chance for anybody else too!

I think it also depends on your mindset. If you're aware (yet NOT focused) on your competition, you can definitely leverage this but some people can get so wrapped up in what their competitor is doing, it slows down their action and worse yet, just turns them right off.

That's why I think it's important to know what's happening out in the market, but to keep focused on your own goals--there's more than enough for everybody!

I fear competition, and head for the hills whenever I see it.

Not really, competition is a great driving force for improvement. It works especially well if you can find that one guy/girl to absolutely loathe; your rival. Just make sure that disdain stays in the business sense, not personal.