Welcome to Lesson 3 of our starting a business blog course.  If you haven’t already, make sure you get caught up on lesson1 and lesson 2 of the series.

During lesson 1 we defined the purpose of our blog as it relates to the wants and needs of our ideal audience.  Then, as part of lesson 2, we had to work on refining our blog’s unique value proposition.  These two steps guide us as we think of who we’re trying to write for and why in the world they’d ever want to read it anyway.  Good stuff.  Now it’s time to look outside ourselves, to the competition.  The best part is, one of the best tools to help you do the job is probably sitting on your desktop right now.  Enter Google!

So, just who is your competition? Who’s that guy doing exactly what you want to be doing at this moment?  Who do you admire?  Who’s tweets do you look out for, who’s in your RSS reader?

Reading other blogs is only the first step.  You should also be commenting on those blogs and learning why other people like them.  Then make sure you incorporate all those best practices into your own blog.   But you’re still not finished, because so far you’re only as good as your competition, you’re still not better.  To get ahead, you need to figure out how to be better.

The key to being better is to circumvent a head-to-head competition.  Find that one thing where you dominate, exploit the hell out of it, and in the process – blow your competition away.  Maybe you have more insider information, or you’re more entertaining, or you’re funnier… whatever.  Figure out your niche, and a group of readers will think your blog is just plain better.  Why?  Because yours has more of what they like – and so starts the domino effect.

Comb through the blogs of your “idols” and figure out how they could be better — then make those improvements on your own blog.  But be careful, this isn’t about adding features or functionality just for the sake of checking a box.  Invest resources and time in things that actually improve  the experience for your readers.  Think about what would make a potential reader prefer your competition’s blog over yours.  More importantly,  think about what you can do to persuade readers to stick around with you instead of  someone else.

Here are a few ideas to help guide your research.  Keep your audience in mind as you brainstorm about ways to make your blog stickier.

1. If the competition blog doesn’t allow comments, maybe you can offer a forum for your readers and encourage community.
2. Does the topic you cover lend itself to merchandise?  Could you / should you offer merchandise on your blog?
3. Can you incorporate design elements into your blog to make it more appealing to your audience?
4. How about usability, can you make improvements to navigation or your site search engine?
5. If the competition’s blog has a closed format, can you link out to other cool stuff where your competition doesn’t?
6. If your competition relies heavily on external sources, can you increase your blog’s value by beefing up your own writing?

Get the one-up on your competition by increasing the value of your blog in the minds of your readers.  I’d love to add to this list, so if you think of additional questions I can add to help guide others, let me know in the comments.