If you haven’t assessed how your home-based business stacks up against your competition it’s time you faced that challenge. It’s critical to first find your competition (you can probably do that pretty easily). A slightly more difficult, yet equally important task is knowing what to look for when you do find your competitors. Identifying and targeting ways to beat your competition using the information you’ve gathered can be challenging, so take it slow and be methodical. These steps are often overlooked or even skipped step when writing a business plan or when assigning short-term and long-term goals for your new home-based business. You should set aside at least an hour a week to refine the business plan you’ve written by doing consistent research on your competition to aid your growth.

Getting Started
Start with a thorough search using Google or other search engines. You can check their website rankings against your own, you can also visit their web site to see how their navigation is set up along with the services and products they provide along with related costs. You can also look locally, as many home-based businesses that are run from the home get out in your local area to reach their customers face to face. From local farmers markets to craft fairs to trade shows – all are a good way to find your competition and even strike up a conversation.

What To Look For
You should look at your competitor’s website navigation and the written copy on both their home and interior pages. You can also look at related sales information if they offer PDF’s for download. You might even bump into their customer service techniques and media kits while studying their websites. Your competitive analysis process presents an opportunity to describe your major competitors in terms of the factors that most influence revenues. This may include your competitor’s:

• organization size
• market share
• comparative product quality
• growth
• available capital and resources
• image
• marketing strategy
• target markets

How To Beat Your Competition
One way to beat your home-based business competition online is to have a higher search engine ranking than they do. To do this you will need to perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work that you could do yourself or hire a SEO firm to do for you. Pricing could be something to consider. How you price your product or service can give you an edge over the competition by offering the same product or service at a lower cost or even offer better service for the same price.

Do your homework because staying ahead of your competition is a multi-faceted and on-going task. Making an analysis of your competition can potentially spark news ideas to give you an edge so get started today.

Carpe Diem My Friends!