A couple of days ago, I was listening to an interview with comedian Anthony Jeselnik – AKA the “Dark Prince of Comedy.”

Asked what advice he’d give young comedians, he said, “Find someone you want to be … then beat them.”

And that’s basically the same advice I’ve been giving to website owners: Find out who is winning in your market, reverse engineer their business, then do it better.

If you do those three things, you’ll probably succeed. And, even if you don’t trump that competitor, you’ll still end up with a profitable business.

But if you don’t do these things – if you try to figure it out everything for yourself … well, you’re signing up for years of frustration … and probable failure.

What about if you’ve already got a business?

Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t still go through the three steps. You’re bound to learn something.

I remember doing this with a client of mine. The marker leader in his niche was a household name that ran TV ads. We didn’t have the funding to match that model. But we did discover one thing they were doing – which we COULD copy.

That one change to our order page increased our average profit per order by 37%.

So, how do you identify your dominant competitor? And how do you reverse engineer their business?

Well … you hire me.

Look forward to hearing from you,

Steve Gibson

Categories: Marketing