Have you ever thought about why competing restaurants tend to group together on the food court at the shopping mall? Or why so many businesses actually have to fight to pay through the nose for their little bit of mall space?
The answer is simply because that’s where their customers are. Businesses that shy away from such popular spaces as malls and high streets and try to go it alone generally have it harder to attract customers and often need to fork out much more in advertising to keep their boat afloat.
Think about it: you’re much more likely to pick a restaurant in the food court than one that’s on its own. Thing is, being around your competitors is generally good for your business.
And the same applies to the online world. Savvy Internet marketers know how to embrace their competition and contribute to each other’s success. They are not afraid to blog about each other, link to each other, or post comments on each other’s websites. They know that together, they can be stronger than those who try to go it alone.
There are two ways to go about this online: forging explicit alliances, and tacitly embracing your competition and leaving the rest to karma.
I scratch your back…
Your alliance with other online businesses, even competitors, can take any depth you are comfortable with - anything from simply exchanging links on your blog to actually promoting each other’s products on your own website. Yes, you heard right!
You may be familiar with Amazon.com listing used copies of the books they sell at a cheaper price, but British online store Play.com have taken this concept one giant step further.
Take a look at this New & Used listing for a sailing book and see how Play.com offers you the chance to buy it from several of their competitors. One is actually priced cheaper, but Play still get a cut if you buy. Even when many of the alternatives are cheaper, it still benefits Play.com if you buy through them. And besides, this business model lets Play.com list thousands of books that they doesn’t even have in their inventory. Sure, Play.com’s competitors profit too, but where do you think customers are likely to go if they want the best choice and cheapest prices every time?
Remember, even if you are No. 1 in Google for all your search terms (a veritable holy grail), searchers still see nine other competitors of yours and will probably visit many of their sites anyway. So you might as well be benefiting from sending traffic to each other or getting a commission on sales.
Do your own thing - some will follow
If you’re still starting out, it might be that much harder to approach one of your main competitors and hope to strike a deal if you don’t have much to bring to the table. But you can still take the first step and link to them, post your comments and generally do your thing, and hopefully some of that will come around back to you soon enough. Besides, commenting on other blogs often lets you link back to your site, so there’s a great potential immediate benefit in that too.
Also, by linking to other websites, you establish yours as a resource that people will want to refer back to in the future, and some of that traffic will rub onto you in the form of business.
Still, your long term strategy probably ought to be to break the ice with your competition, even by communication though blog comments, and lay the ground for more concrete collaboration in the future. It could very well be the edge you need to prosper in the social Internet of the future.
EDIT: By a small coincidence, Seth Godin just wrote that working with the competition is a good for business and ‘Hoarding attention is a no-win strategy‘.
