Should you Do Competitor Analysis for a Blog?

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When you’re starting your first blog, you’re bound to have some foundation inspiration in mind as to your direction. You may have followed someone’s blog for a while and decided that you wanted to replicate it with your own unique spin.

Once your blog gets a little traction, it’s completely understandable that you would want to compare yourself to theirs, in terms of followers, traffic or whatever metric means something to you. But should you?

I think it’s important to state that a ‘blog’ can come in so many forms these days, and that although the diary and personal lifestyle content ones are what the mainstream recognise most, many exist as pure affiliate commission vessels, featuring little more than reviews, ‘best of’ lists and/or clickbait.

As there are so many different kinds of blog, competitor analysis only applies in some instances. However, if you’re making a blog with revenue in mind, you better be doing some competitor analysis.

Before I start a new blog, there are a few things I need to know firstly:

What are the biggest blog in this space?
Can I realistically compete/take some market share?
Can I double-down on a more specific niche in this space?

Once I know these elements, I’ll decide whether it’s worth my while participating or not.

For pretty much all of my blogs, a social media presence makes little-to-no difference as to how well they do. My aim is always to focus on getting traffic from organic search. This being the case, my specific competitor analysis is around Google results and checking to see whether my title tags, content length and other factors are optimised. For other people, Facebook is their #1 traffic source, so you would have to make sure you know what the best blogs are doing right, in order to stand a chance against them.

I’ve mentioned before that I do monthly reports of my own performance with my blogs and other online businesses. I would say it’s overkill to do the same for your competitors that frequently, as you need to focus on what you’re doing first. Every now and again, peep what others are doing and apply it to your needs as and when it’s required.

It’s good practice to perform a competitor analysis annually to check to see where you’re at, where your competitors are at, and see whether there are new people in the space alongside you. You can learn from your peers and even though you may know, respect and communicate with your competitors, there’s money to be made by being the best, so do whatever you need to get to your goal.

Remember, there are loads of reasons to start a blog. Having someone else’s blog as a reference is a great place to use as a foundation to launch yours.