…Once upon a time, there were two authors. One was selling thousands of books, the other not so much.
Author two looked at the sales author one was getting and decided to price his book at the same price point.
Allowing this to go on for a while, he noticed that the lowered price now meant that he made no profit on his books.
And yet his competitor was happy to continue to sell his books that way. – Making no money on them.
Now at this point you’re probably thinking why would you do that? Didn’t he care about money?
You’d be wrong.
At first glance it looked that way, but looking behind the curtain, author one had a funnel of products he was selling to the leads the cheap book was generating.
That little story was something, Sean D’souza, brought up in a recent episode from ‘The Three Month Vacation‘ podcast, about the dangers of copying your competition.
Sean says that when you look at what your competition is doing you’re only seeing their actions, you don’t see their end goal.
When you know ‘why’ they’re doing what they’re doing then you can turn your business that way. – That’s if you want to be an out and out copy cat. – And that’s if your competition even knows what they’re doing.
Who knows? They might just be throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks.
So the next time you’re thinking of copying your neighbor, unless you’re a mind reader, or they’re completely open with you, you just might be putting all your money and effort on the wrong horse.
Better to have an goal of your own and take actions that’ll get you there. What everyone else is doing doesn’t matter.
But if you want to see what your customers and reader are looking for, now that’s different story altogether. Give them what they want and you can collect the money on the other side. – Here’s what I use for keyword research.
