My first thought was to title this, “Research Your Competition”, but I decided that sounded all wrong. If you recall, back in Part 5 of the How To Make A Living In Your Pajamas series, I said:

The only thing missing now is an actual web site. In the old days, that would have meant hiring a designer and spending lots of money and time developing a nice-looking site. Those days, luckily, are gone. You can have a site up and running very quickly. You’re going to do this by installing a free WordPress blog.

Just in case you didn’t get the significance of that, it means you became a blogger when you installed WordPress. And just in case that doesn’t mean anything to you, it means that you don’t think in terms of competition. Bloggers do things just a little differently than old-school webmasters. As a webmaster, I was always thinking of my competitors as adversaries. As a blogger, I think of others sharing the same niche space as I do as “fellow bloggers”. There’s a huge distinction to be made there, as the mindset governs actions in completely different ways.

• As a webmaster, researching competitors puts your focus on an adversarial level, in which you concentrate on how to outmaneuver and beat the opponent.
• As a blogger, researching others in your space put your focus on collaboration, in which you concentrate on ways that you and your fellow bloggers can work together to collectively create wins for each other.

While either of those methods can work for any site, the very nature and history of blogging makes collaboration with fellow bloggers a piece of cake. All you have to do is participate.

We’ll be discussing the many methods of participation in several future posts, but we’ll take one thing at a time. First things first…find out who else is in your space. Back in Part Two of the series, you focused on “The What”, in which you decided upon “what it is you know best, or what it is you do best, or what it is that you have the most interest in.” Now that you know what your niche space is, start reading the blogs of others who also have that same interest. What? You thought you were the only one? Well, maybe. If your niche is the mating habits of the Tibetan microscopic beetle, then perhaps you are alone. But if your interest lies in almost anything else, then it’s a safe bet that there are others blogging about it. That’s ok. In fact, that’s great! That means that you have an instant team of people with which you can collaborate. Again, we’ll talk more about that later.

For now:

• Find your new niche teammates.
• Read their blogs.
• Make a list of the 20-30 most popular.
• Then determine of those, which are your personal favorites? Which make the most sense to you? Which bloggers’ personalities mesh best with your own?
• Rearrange the list in the order of your favorites. Sometimes that will bring some of the more obscure blogs up to the top of the list.

How do you find the bloggers in your space? Do an advanced search on Technorati, scroll down to the bottom of the advanced search page, and type in your subject matter into the Find Blogs About field. (see screenshot below)

Read the blogs that you discover for the next few weeks. Subscribe to a few of them in your feedreader. Don’t have a feedreader? I prefer GreatNews, but Google Reader or Bloglines are two other very popular choices. If you aren’t sure what to do with feedreaders, we can discuss that in the future as well. For now, if all you can do is manually visit the blogs on a daily basis, do so. Once you learn how to consume feeds via feed readers, the task of reading blog posts will become easier. But any method of reading the blogs in your space is fine at this stage of research.

To sum up, find bloggers in your niche space, read their posts for a few weeks, and list them in order of your favorites. Over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss ways that you can begin to participate and become a part of a collaborative team effort of blogging.

(from Smash Mouth. "AllStar" Astro Lounge. Interscope Records, 1999.)

Posted on September 30th, 2007 by DazzlinDonna
Filed under: Making Money Online