In the internet marketing world, and the business world in general, there are often times you will be just several competitors shy of being put out of business.
For example:
Myspace was a great social media platform until Facebook came along and cherry-picked their best features, putting them out of business.
Whenever you are building a company you need to take into consideration that the competition will be ruthless. Wherever money is being made people will swarm like vultures feasting on a carcass, poaching your ideas attempting to replicate your success.
You would be naive to think that you don’t have any competition. In order to stay alive in a cut-throat environment, you need to strategically build your business to limit competitors from being able to copy you easily.
You need to think of your business like a castle. A good castle needs to have fortified walls, and most importantly, a deep moat to ward off unwanted intruders. What is stopping your competition from directly copying your business model and stealing your customers?
Here are some examples of what I might consider a moat used in business. Let us say you have a website that sells expensive furniture made out of rare fabrics only found in the Himalayas. Your moat in this instance could be an exclusive supplier who does not serve a broad amount of customers, only producing fabric for your company.
How can a competitor replicate your business model if they can’t easily source the required supplies, or find a supplier for the special type of fabric?
Let’s also imagine that, on your website, people can subscribe to your email list – allowing you to retarget and follow up with them, offering special promos that increase the profit margin of your business by 20%.
It is easy for a competitor to go to your website to see what you are selling, but it is difficult for a competitor to find your entire email follow up sequences and copy it themselves.
These are just a few examples, but the point of this article is to get you to think about what your competitive advantage is. If you are running a business right now with very limited competitive advantages over your competitors, it is very likely that you will go out of business or face hardships & downturns in the future.
Keep innovating and find new ways to build an even stronger moat for your business. If you neglect this you will be in for a rude awakening when invaders breach your walls and storm your castle.
Do you set up moats to protect your business? Or do you find that your competition keeps encroaching on your camp?
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