Researching your competition can help you discover so much about your own business and your audience. Studying the competition takes you out of your comfort zone and puts you into their territory. This will help you learn many things that can help you in your business to improve your profits and products.

1. Keywords to Use – When you find your competition, figure out what keywords they rank high for. Then determine whether or not these are keywords you want to compete directly on, or if you can identify better keywords to use to attract the same audience.

2. How to Engage with Your Audience – Watching how your competition engages with their audience can teach you ways in which to improve your own engagement. Identify mistakes and successes in your competition to ensure that you’re covering all bases.

3. Ways in Which to Differentiate Yourself – By seeing how you and your competition are the same, you can identify more ways to make your business stand out. The more ways that you can differentiate your business from theirs, the better and the higher your profit will be.

4. Weak Points to Exploit – By completely studying all that your competition has to offer, you can identify gaps in products for your audience in which you can fill. This is yet another way to make your business stand out over theirs.

5. The Best Topics That Elicit Engagement – When watching your competition, which topics of discussion on social media and blog posts get the most engagement from the audience? Is the engagement productive or counter-productive?

6. Identify Important Niche Influencers – Do they promote affiliates and others within your niche that you can promote too? Will it help if you start offering these products and promoting the same gurus? If so, how; if not, why not?

7. How Much They Charge for Their Products – Knowing what your competition charges, and how they process the payments as well as deliver the products and/or services they offer, can go a long way to making good decisions for your own business.

8. Identify Your Own Product Gaps – Line up what you offer product for product with what your competition offers and see if you have gaps in your coverage. If you do, fill them with your own complementary products and/or service.

9. What Software Works Best – When you try out your competitions’ products or services you can find out what software they use to process orders. Does it work well, do you like it, or does it have issues that can be fixed using a better service?

Using your competition to learn how to run your own profitable business is simple. If you are already part of a niche, or already have a particular audience, find out where your audience goes to get their information and actually order from your competition. Don’t steal or plagiarize but do get ideas on how to make your products better than theirs.