BUILDING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN A CROWDED ONLINE WORLD

How do I build competitive advantage and barriers to entry in a crowded online world?

As we have discussed in PLM Online Business Framework, that there really are four key assets in an online business, i.e. your brand, your product, volume of organic traffic coming in from a diversified set of channels and your ability to create and market awesome content. No amount of branding and product based differentiation are worth anything without traffic and SEO savvy content marketing is how that happens.

Let me breakdown the topic of competitive differentiation in two words, it is Differentiate or Die. The only sustainable differentiation in today’s world is the pace and priorities of your level of innovation.

We live in a world where customer is the new power broker, where you want to own the demand as opposed to supply so you need to define your business who you serve and focus on buying as opposed to selling. You can see how supply side leaders such as Taxi, GM, Blockbuster or brick and mortar stores, are doing as opposed to ones who own demand e.g. Uber, Tesla, NetFlix, Amazon. I’d go as far as saying that owning supply side is a liability today.

With online business, your #1 goal is to find a niche market and build a brand and set of products that help you deliver enormous value and carry on your narrative directly with your target customers. Let me show you the power of the brand. I bet when you think of Tesla, these things come to your mind:

• Fast cars
• Fancy design
• Autopilot (or semi-autonomous driving)
• Happy customers
• Elon Musk

I am sure when you think of GM or Ford, none of those attributes come to mind! As Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said: your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. In the world of supply, product-based differentiation isn’t enough, you need to differentiate yourself on the basis of your brand.

Last but not least, is content marketing. In online business, your time as a business owner, is better spent doing two activities – creating products and content. Why? Content marketing, combined with SEO strategy, is the most effective way to build long-term organic traffic from various channels. You can use content to rank for your topics and keywords on Google SERPs as well as create awareness and buzz on social media.

Let me summarize. There are four key assets in an online business.

1. Your brand
2. Your product(s)
3. Traffic
4. Your ability to perform SEO savvy content marketing

Last but not least, subject matter discussed in this post, as well as others, is covered thoroughly in various online courses offered by Private Label Mastery. Please feel free to share your questions or comments, I will be answering them over the next few days.