Dealing with Competition
With the launch of every site, you always run into competition, and sometimes, learning to deal with the ever competitive web is a difficult task to understand. This guide will attempt to help you along when launching a new site in a field filled with similars.
Welcome to the Fast Track
When you first start up a new site, almost 90% of the time, the idea from the site was spawned from other sites like it. Take graphic design forums. Truly, could there be enough of them? A few years ago, if you wanted to start a site, your first bet would be to create a design community – but there was one problem. There were simply too many of them.
Soon after the let’s-start-a-design-community craze began to slow down, the communities that weren’t as popular and weren’t one of the first few vanished, allowing others to flourish and expand into very large communities.
You’ll find that with most popular design / development / hosting forums, users are registered on every single one of them, because if they’ve managed to remain up and running with a large user database, users want to stay there. These sites have been able to keep up with each other, in a field that is excessively filled with forums all discussing the same topics.
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I have a web development blog, mostly covering JavaScript, web standards and other web professional topics. And there are a LOT of sites out there like mine.
It’s been tough to gain readers in the first year. It’s an ongoing process of trying out new things and seeing what works, writing about topics that others aren’t, and just trying to consistently write good and useful content. Hopefully after some time more people will take notice.
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I’m just trying to get off my feet by doing some freelance work. Does my site have anything to do with me getting the work? Not really. When it comes to competition I would bet that the person that has the best recommendations and connections is the one that will come out on top. Someone could be the best designer in the world that has a great site, but if they don’t have any good recommendations or connections and haven’t been networking, what are there chances? Probably not good. Word of mouth can be one of the best marketing tools, espically getting started.