How to Become Not Only Successful but Dominate Your Competition

It’s very rare for a new business to be introduced and immediately dominate its competitors. Usually that takes years, sometimes even decades to achieve.

Like I said it’s rare, although not unheard of. Take Google for example. When it came online in 1998 it shot to the top as the world’s most popular search engine. Within months of becoming a company PC Magazine reported that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognized them as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.

At the time all the other search engines like Excite and Alta Vista were focused on “stickiness” or getting users to stay on their site for long periods of time. They reasoned that this was the way to get more people to view the ad’s they served up and click on them thus increasing their revenue. This made them focus on growing ad revenue instead of improving search.

What Google did was quite contrarian to that philosophy. Their goal was to return extremely relevant search results as fast as possible, getting users to click away from their site fairly quickly. The founders behind Google thought if they could do their job well, then users would be more likely to return to their site and use it over and over. And they were right. Almost overnight millions of web users abandoned their favorite search engines in favor of using Google exclusively in the late 90’s.

In retrospect it’s not surprising that Google found success not long after launching. They simply used a powerful business technique to dominate their competitors. They did one thing and they did it better than everyone else. By returning results that were more relevant to what the user was searching for Google essentially blew everyone else out of the water.

Google found success by not watering down their “product” like their competitors did. While other search engines did return search results for its users, they didn’t care if those results were anything close to what the user was searching for. And they made their “product” worse by clogging up results pages with too many advertisements that made the pages confusing and hard to read.

Google on the other hand made their display page simple, a white background with black text. It put the most relevant results at the top and centered them while moving everything else to the sides.

By doing it this way they made their business better than all of their competitors. Very quickly users saw them as not just a search engine, but a reliable source for information.

Any business launching today should adopt the same business strategy Google used–do one thing and do it better than everyone else. Figure out what your business can do for people and then work hard to do it better than all of your competitors.

Amazon is another great example of a company that employed this strategy. People forget that when Amazon first launched it only sold books. It didn’t start out the huge online retailer that we know it as today. No. For the first few years it just sold books, but it did it really well. In fact it was the best retailer for books on the planet. Once customers trusted Amazon and loved their brand, the company expanded its operations to include more products. Today Amazon sells thousands of products. But it started out by doing one thing and doing it better than everyone else.

New businesses that implement this same strategy are more likely to beat the odds and become wildly successful, just like Google and Amazon did. In today’s market Google and Amazon are industry leaders; they set the tone for their industry. They also get the pleasure of setting prices, something only the top tier companies get to do.

It’s a benefit to employing this type of business strategy. The other benefit is that they do not have to chase trends.  The people that try to copy Google and Amazon’s businesses try to succeed by offering more than they do and doing it for cheaper. Look at Yahoo. In addition to offering search engine features they also try to be a news aggregate, email provider and shopping consultant. They keep adding more and more features to try and sway web users to their site.

The Yahoo strategy-to offer everything under the sun in an effort to stay competitive, can be tempting to try. But don’t. All it does it water down the message you send to clients. Suddenly customers don’t know what they can trust you to do well. And most likely the company can’t do it all so they end up losing even their loyal customers to companies that do their main feature better. Companies like Yahoo then end up cutting prices in an effort to stay competitive. So now they are working harder than you and making less money. Not a place I want to be in and I’m sure you don’t either.

What’s even worse is that they put themselves in a vicious cycle. Once these companies start trying to be everything to everyone, they have to keep it up. Whenever a new trend appears they have to implement it, and when that one fades away they have to find something to replace it, quickly. Trying to be everything to everyone draws precious resources away from your businesses core strength. Not good.

Likewise, these companies can be pressured into lowering their price when a new competitor arises. They want to maintain their market share so they try to discount prices enough to starve the new competitor out of the field. Always trying to stay competitive via pricing is a scary spot to be in any industry. You want to be the one dictating the price, not reacting to it.

That’s why it’s good to be better than all your competitors. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone and playing catch up each time a competitor adds a new product or lowers their prices, you want to be the one in charge.

Figure out what your company can do better than everyone else in the field and then deliver on that promise. It’s the key to not only achieving success, but dominating your competitors.

Good luck!

Ethan Warrick


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